Award for Airbox! Light Breakup, milk crate management

The news:  Airbox Inflatable Softboxes has been getting some great press lately, most notably getting the DV excellence award from DV Magazine and creativeplanet.com.  I've put it all in one place on Pinterest.

What else has been happening?

Ok brain teaser:  What the heck is going on here?

An impromptu and odd rig I came up with at the behest of DP Dave Scardino.

It's some scraps of opal diff hanging in front of a light acting as a breakup, but to give it a little bit of life he was asking around for a fan.  The only fan I could find was the internal cooling fan in the 1200 ballast.  So ok, let's get that ballast up in the air and aim its exhaust vent at those scraps of diffusion!

Whatever works, right?





Here's another notably useful technique I've observed for managing large numbers of milkcrates. Make a furniture dolly by putting casters on the bottom of a piece of 3/4" plywood, with holes drilled out in the middles of two opposing sides.  Hook a ratchet or motorcycle strap into the two holes and strap it down over the top of the stack of crates.

The problem that it solves is a common one- lots and lots of milkcrates full of expendables or hardware and  needing them to be portable but still quick and easy to stage up or get into. You can easily load and transport them en masse, or you can break out the crates of just the materials you need.

Custom-made steel carts are great, but they don't subdivide and organize the way this system does, nor do they hold as many crates usually, plus they're quite expensive. Ari Boles, the LD on Top Chef and other Bravo shows, came up with this technique to organize the huge amount of expendables, bulbs, kino parts, hardware and other small parts that are essential to reality show lighting installations.

Links to dealers for Airbox inflatable softboxes