Color Temperature

What this is about

The gaffer's whole day runs on color temperature. Tungsten units sit near 3200 K, HMI and daylight near 5600 K, and mixing them inside one frame produces a split the audience notices immediately. Matching happens with gels: CTB pushes a tungsten unit toward daylight, CTO drags an HMI or a window down toward lamp warmth. Deliberate mismatch is a legitimate style — the cool exterior seen through a warm interior is a standard grammar — but it has to be a decision, not a leftover.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Tungsten sits around 3200 K and nominal daylight around 5600 K; these two numbers organise most lighting packages.
• Daylight itself drifts through the day, from warm low sun to very cool open shade under a blue sky.
• Bicolour LED units dial the temperature electronically, which removes gel work but not the decision behind it.

With TillyGen

TillyGen's equipment list holds lamps and gels as one package, so a mixed-temperature set arrives with the CTO and CTB it will need.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.