Marc Story. It’s an accurate name for someone who makes a living telling stories on behalf of his company, Firstline Creative & Media and its many clients. Firstline is a full-service broadcast, media relations, video production, and creative services company based in Atlanta.
Over the last ten years, the company has carved out a niche creating content for medical and pharmaceutical companies all over the world. That often means traveling and productions where a “one-man band,” would be the norm.
To help tell his stories, Marc always packs the three light Practilite 602 LED Fresnel kit from Kinotehnik. “Many times these shoots are at a doctor’s office or a patient’s house,” says Marc. “It’s a confined area, and in a medical office setting, you don’t want a light that’s going to generate heat and set off the sprinkler system.”
The Practilite 602 LED Fresnel from Kinotehnik is a small, lightweight light source that offers variable color temperature from 3000 to 6000K and is color-true with a CRI of 96. The LEDs don’t generate heat. Each Practilite 602 weighs approximately two pounds. “One person can easily manage to get all of the equipment off a plane and into a rental car,” says Marc.
“I am a shooter and an editor at, and I’m always on the lookout for things that will upgrade the quality of our productions and keep us on the cutting edge of what we’re doing,” says Marc.
“There are a lot of LEDs on the market, but they were just these flat panel LEDs with a bunch of little LEDs in it but with no way to control where the light goes or how intense it is,” says Marc. Being able to shape the light was something Marc didn’t want to give up, and other Fresnel LEDs were too large and prohibitively expensive.
The search for an LED package led Marc to a trade show in Charlotte, North Carolina where the Practilite 602s were mounted on track lights. “I got to play with them a little bit and began thinking the 602s would be a really good investment for us to make,” says Marc.
The Practilite 602 has a 3.2" borosilicate Fresnel glass lens capable of an impressive spot-to-flood spec of 15-75 degrees for variable field coverage.
So getting to a shoot is now much easier and the lightweight cylindrical construction allows for a quick set-up easily managed by one person. The Practilite 602 is compatible with almost any other modifier a creative shooter might wish to add.
But where the Practilite 602s really shine for a one-man band or two-person crew is the ability to control the lights using a smartphone interface. Except for the spot-to-flood knob, the intensity and color temperature levels of up to six Practilites are smartphone-enabled. That kind of control is absolutely essential in a one-man band situation.
“Really the Bluetooth was just the cherry on top,” says Marc. “It wasn’t something I wasn’t even looking for and when I saw what it could do at the trade show, there was nothing out there that was doing something like that.” Now, it’s a function that Marc uses all the time.
The intensity of the 602s is also up to the task in the kind of personal interview shooting Marc does all the time. “Camera sensors have improved and they don’t require as much light as they used to and for the purposes of the interviews that we do, it works out great,” says Marc.
The Practilite 602 LED Fresnel from Kinotehnik is proving to be an important part of the stories Marc is illuminating for the patients and medical professionals served by Firstline Creative & Media.
Manios Digital is the exclusive US distributor of Kinotehnik Bluetooth-enabled LED lights.
