Ackerman has been using Soft Egg Crates® on his recent projects and feels that a new era of film making is unfolding. "You can put up one lamp as a backlight for a whole set now. You just pan and tilt it until it works the way you want it to, and there it is. Before we would have had no fewer than two or three pieces of grippery up there; all subject to wilting and drooping, and all of the horrendous things that can happen to pieces held up with clothes pins and bits of baling wire."

Since starting to use Soft Egg Crates®, Thomas is finding that he has more creative time for each scene. "Now I don't have to put in that huge, Draconian effort to keep that soft source off the wall. I can think about more about refinements, like maybe putting a little bit more light into the set. Something else it gives one is the peace of mind and the opportunity to try things that you previously wouldn't have attempted."

Ackerman is anxious to point out that although Soft Egg Crates® have been used on smaller softlights for some time, the advent of large diffusion frames with Soft Egg Crates® is a very different phenomenon. "When you walk towards a very large diffusion screen fitted with a Soft Egg Crate®, progressively more of the cells of the grid are occluded, reducing your exposure to the light source. Strangely enough, what you now have is a tool that enables you to walk people towards the source without a big change in exposure. In effect, a light source that no longer obeys the Inverse Square Law. This is a whole different way of thinking about the way light is distributed.”