Illuminations: Get Creative with Cookies!

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When you light a set or location, you're not just cranking out lumens to get a good f-stop. You're painting the scene with light, and a powerful painting tool in your kit is the cookie. Cookies are big cards with patterns carved out of them and placed in front of lights to throw shadows on walls and other surfaces. (If you care where the odd name "cookie" comes from, consult the adjacent sidebar -- though it won't help very much.) Cookies are easy to make and use, and they're more fun than a barrel of people, so let's see what they can do for you.

Cookies are large (at least 24" square) cards or boards -- sort of like big lighting flags with patterns cut out of them. By placing them between a spotlight and its target, you can throw distinct silhouettes like leaves or window blinds. You can create tinted patterns by fronting any cookie with a colored gel. Cookies are typically made of metal, cardboard, or, as we'll recommend, thin plywood or foamcore board. As we'll also see, we can often use some dimensional objects as cookies.

What Cookies Do At their simplest, cookies can spruce up a dull surface by varying the light washed across it. This is useful for the background walls often visible during interviews with talking heads. It can also add snap to a plain gray curtain backing a stu…