Sex Education for Litepanels

DP Jamie Cairney and director Ben Taylor wanted to pay homage to iconic films like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused in Sex Education.

“Ben was keen to make the show feel like it was timeless and not set anywhere particular,” explains Cairney, “If you look at the show, it’s not specific and makes no reference to the fact people are driving around in old cars, the costumes are retro and seated in the 1980s. We had a lot of fun removing things that would disturb this ambience.

“The lighting makes the show feel sunny, saturated, positive, and natural. We used a lot of smoke, so when you’re inside you catch the rays of light beaming through the window and it always feels sunny.”

On season one, Cairney says he couldn’t find an LED that was good enough to use with the Venice (“the skin tones didn’t look natural”) so he mainly used tungsten and HMI fixtures.

“For season two we wanted to push forward with LED, so I tested every LED light available from Panalux together with the Venice before selecting Litepanels Gemini 2×1 Soft RGBWW LED panel.

“It was the fixture that had the most faithful colour reproduction of any lamps I was testing,” he explains.

With many sets shooting simultaneously, season two of Sex Education used 80 Gemini 2×1 fixtures, replacing many of the tungsten and fluorescent fixtures used on season one.

“On season one we used fluorescent type fixtures for space lighting in the school hall. The transition to Gemini was a huge boost for me creatively as it meant I could rapidly adjust colour temperature and brightness (not possible with the fluorescent fixtures). The Geminis were operated remotely using a tablet via wi-fi. I could zone the lighting, so if I wanted a little less lighting in one corner then we could adjust this in seconds.”

He adds: “The Venice has a dual ISO sensor allowing you to rate it at 500 or 2500 ISO with no obvious increase in noise. When working at a high ISO, you may find yourself dimming lights lower than usual and this is when the Gemini performs really well, compared to other LED fixtures. You can work at dimming levels right down to 0.1% with Gemini and there is no trade-off, you won’t experience any shift in colour or flicker.”