From gaffer to president of Kino Flo, Frieder Hochheim is a classic film biz success story. Based in Sun Valley, California, the Winnipeg native was at Toronto’s Inn on the Park March 17 showcasing his company’s newest fluorescent movie lights, at a presentation sponsored by film equipment distributor Cinequip.

Hochheim, who graduated with a major in Motion Picture Studies from Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic in 1977, worked around town as a freelance gaffer until government-implemented tax reforms sent American productions back to Hollywood in 1982/83, and he followed suit. A half-decade later, he would revolutionize the way films are lit.

It was a Hollywood director of photography with whom he was working who inspired Hochheim’s experiments with fluorescents. ‘He said, `I’d love to be able to just tape a fluorescent lamp up to the ceiling, and I don’t want the ballast with it,’ ‘ Hochheim recalls. ‘So I went to the hardware store, got all the bits and pieces together, put the extension wire on it, threw it up – and nothing worked.’

It was while researching a later project that the gaffer happened upon an engineer developing high-frequency electronics. Like a fluorescent bulb going on over his head, Hochheim figured a high-frequency lamp would not flicker, one of the major knocks against fluorescents up until then. The previous ballast he had used was the standard magnetic type, which would not run remote nor in cold temperatures, but the engineering group’s high-frequency ballast, running at 28 kHz, could operate a lamp 75 feet away.

The engineers assured Hochheim he could run the fluorescent lamps twice as bright as normal without blowing them up, and when this proved successful, they collaborated on building some ballasts, and the business was up and running.

Hochheim remembers the lighting units’ initial design as ‘very simple – I took a foam block, carved it out, shoved some lamps into it, double-stuck it to the ceiling, and lo and behold it worked.’

While the team developed a more durable plastic casing for the fixture, Hochheim got a u.s. patent, and, sensing a great deal of interest, quit his day job. Working out of a small machine shop, the Kino Flo team (‘Kino’ is German for cinema, and ‘Flo’ is short for fluorescent) provided illumination for the feature Barfly, shot by Robby Muller in 1987.

Hochheim, who estimates 85% of the film was lit with Kino Flos, recollects, ‘In the first set we were in, a small bar, we had as many as 26 fluorescents, all tucked away – lamps anything from nine inches long to 18 inches and four feet – but hidden in such a way you could be shooting with a wide-angle lens and include the ceiling, floor and walls, and not see any of the fluorescents – yet the place was lit.’

Many cinematographers visited the set, and, impressed by what they saw – or didn’t see, in the case of the unobtrusive lamps – asked Hochheim if he could supply lights for their shows. Kino Flo began renting the lighting units, whose popularity snowballed by word of mouth.

‘For the first five years I just kept pouring the money back into the company,’ Hochheim explains, ‘and we refined the product and got it to the point where we could actually start manufacturing and selling it.’

Hochheim and his engineers developed the lamps, paying close attention to how their spectrum best related to the spectral sensitivity of film, and in so doing found they related well also to video.

According to Hochheim, traditionally one of the main drawbacks of fluorescents was ‘their green element, especially on skin tones, which caused them to go gray and just sucked the life out of them. But now, having lamps that were full spectrum, [the lamps] could deliver a nice, clean color quality.’

The lightweight, noiseless tubes, which provide the look of Quartz or daylight sources while remaining cool and casting little shadow, have since become a staple of movie sets, being used in blockbuster films such as Men In Black, Mission Impossible and Batman Forever.

In 1995, Hochheim received an Academy Award for technical achievement, and Kino Flo now boasts offices in London, Eng. and has international distribution.

Hochheim is as surprised as anybody by all this success. ‘I always dreamed it would be like eight guys in a tiny bicycle shop with stuff stacked to the ceilings,’ he muses. ‘But when I walk through the office now and realize I’m responsible for 75 employees, it’s beyond my expectations. I guess the timing was right, and putting the time and effort into the lamp technology makes a big difference.’

He attributes the lion’s share of Kino Flo’s prosperity to his beginnings on film sets, concluding, ‘Coming from the industry and understanding what works and what doesn’t is an important element – it’s not just an engineer sitting at a drafting board.’