Credits include Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Black Panther, Fast & Furious (F8–F9), Ford v Ferrari, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Kong: Skull Island, and Captain Marvel. One of the few gaffers specializing in action unit work at the highest level.

Michael Ambrose — gaffer and action unit specialist with 25+ years on major franchise films.

Michael Ambrose — gaffer and action unit specialist with 25+ years on major franchise films.

What Is an Action Unit?

Most people outside the industry don't know this exists. On major franchise films — Marvel, Fast & Furious, any tentpole with significant stunt work — there's a completely separate production unit dedicated to action sequences. It's not second unit in the traditional sense. It's its own entity with its own assistant director, producers, line producers, and production office.

On Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Ambrose's first action unit job, there were 10 to 11 cameras running simultaneously. The call sheets for the action unit often had more crew than the main unit. On some Fast & Furious films, the action unit production office opened before the main unit's office.

For a gaffer, this means lighting at a scale and speed that first unit rarely demands. You're covering massive areas, coordinating with stunt teams and special effects crews, and solving problems in real time while high-speed vehicles are flipping through the air.

Lighting High-Speed Action Scenes

Ambrose on location in Los Angeles during production of Fast & Furious 9.

When you're shooting cars at speed, you can't light the way you'd light a dialogue scene. The vehicles are moving through half a mile or more of road, and every foot of it needs to read on camera. You can't rely on a single large source.

Ambrose's approach: use many smaller fixtures spread across a larger area instead of one or two big units blasting the whole scene. On Fast & Furious 9, shooting flashback sequences in Los Angeles, the team wanted to recreate the look of 1990s urban night lighting — the warm, high-pressure sodium glow that's been largely replaced by LEDs in modern cities. They used pools of light from multiple smaller sources to build that environment naturally, rather than washing everything with a single 18K.

The result is more texture, more realism, and a look that feels like the world the characters inhabit rather than a lit film set.

Night Lighting Without the Big Condor Backlight

The traditional approach to night exteriors is well-known: put a condor in the air, mount an 18K on top, backlight everything, add some headlights, and call it done. It works. Producers love it because it's simple. But it's also been done thousands of times, and it reads as generic.

Ambrose and cinematographer Igor Meglic (his frequent collaborator on action unit work) take a different approach. Instead of one dominant backlight, they build a layered lighting environment with multiple sources at different distances and intensities. This creates depth, texture, and a sense of a real place rather than a single-source "night look."

On Ford v Ferrari, lighting the Le Mans night racing sequences, the team studied reference footage from the actual 1966 race. The backsides of the track had no artificial light. It was dark. So they kept it dark — letting headlights be the primary source and adding only enough environmental light to make the image read cinematically without breaking the period authenticity.

For the racetrack itself, Ambrose spaced condors 500 yards apart, each rigged with three ARRI M40s through large chimeras. At that distance, each creates a soft pool of light rather than a hard spot. The pools overlap gently, working with the rain, smoke, and atmosphere to build the moody, textured look that made the film's night sequences so effective.

Using Moving Lights in Film Production

One of the innovations Ambrose has adopted is LED moving lights on every condor rig. These are Solar Frame moving lights — LED-based fixtures that can be controlled remotely via DMX from a console programmer on the ground.

Even when Ambrose doesn't know exactly what a moving light's role will be at a given location, he puts them up anyway. The versatility is worth it: you can point the light, rotate a gobo, change color, adjust intensity, zoom in or out, and soften the focus — all from the console, in seconds.

Need to add texture to a dark building? Done in minutes from the remote, versus sending a crew with a ladder to drag a light across a rooftop. The time savings alone justify the fixture, and the creative flexibility is a bonus on top.

Ambrose credits console programmer Benoit Richard as essential to his workflow on Ghostbusters and other effects-heavy productions. The shorthand between gaffer and programmer allows for rapid adjustments — flash effects, flicker, interactive lighting for VFX — that would be impossible to execute manually at the speed productions demand.

The Bridge Lighting Setup (Black Panther)

One of the most impressive practical setups Ambrose describes is from Black Panther. The production shot night exterior car chase scenes on a famous suspension bridge in Busan, South Korea — about a mile long, lit from the outside for pedestrian viewing but relatively dark on the roadway itself.

Igor Meglic wanted more specular highlights and visual motion cues to sell the speed of the chase. The solution: eight-foot Quasar tube lights, zip-tied to the bridge railings on both sides, every 50 feet, for the entire run of the bridge.

A crew of 15 to 20 people spent a week installing them. Power came from small putt-putt generators staged on the upper deck. Seven to eight hundred tubes total.

The result is visible in the final film — as cars race across the bridge, you see those rhythmic flashes of specular light streaking by. The tubes were bright enough to register on actors inside the vehicles. Light became part of the action, reinforcing the sensation of speed in a way that no single overhead source could achieve.

Lighting for Cars: Interior Work

Car interiors are one of the hardest environments to light. Space is tight, power is limited, and if you're on a process car moving at speed, generators become unreliable — fuel sloshes, carburetors starve, and lights cut out in the middle of takes.

Ambrose uses CreamSource Adapios and CreamSource Minis for driving scenes. They're compact, rugged, reliable, and low-power enough to run on car rigs without a generator. The LED output is strong enough to balance with daylight for natural-looking results on the actor's face.

The low power draw is the key advantage. Because LEDs pull so little current, you can rig them on moving vehicles without the weight and vibration problems of traditional fixtures. Faster to rig, faster to move between setups, and no risk of a generator stall killing your shot while Matt Damon is in the car and first unit needs him back in 90 minutes.

Battery Lighting for Film Sets

Ambrose's team developed what they call "the crash pack" — a custom battery rig built into milk crates. Two 12-volt marine batteries wired in series, connected to an inverter with a charger attached. The pack stays topped off during setup, then you pull the stinger right before cameras roll. The inverter delivers clean, constant power to the LED fixtures.

Why marine batteries in milk crates instead of off-the-shelf cinema battery packs? Reliability and cost. Marine batteries are inexpensive, widely available, and tough enough to handle the rough-and-tumble of action photography. Running them in series to 24 volts and converting through an inverter gives you consistent power for hours without the voltage fluctuation issues that come from trying to match different DC fixtures (12V, 48V, etc.) to different battery systems.

Another fixture Ambrose relies on for battery work: the DMG Lumiere — a two-foot soft fixture with handles, punchy enough for close work but light enough to walk-and-talk with a camera battery on the back. At night, you're barely using any of its output potential, sometimes dialing down to 0.5. The camera battery lasts for hours.

Lighting Philosophy at the Highest Level

Ambrose's philosophy echoes a principle shared by the best gaffers in the business: "If you didn't notice me, I did my job." He describes himself as the unsung hero — not the person in front of the camera, but the one making sure everything behind it works.

That mindset extends to how he approaches every setup. The lighting supports the story. It doesn't show off. On Ghostbusters: Afterlife, working with cinematographer Eric Steelberg for the first time, there were extensive interactive lighting effects — proton pack blasts, ghost effects, flicker and flash sequences that Ambrose calls "rock and roll days." Every cue had to coordinate with VFX, match the director's vision, and stay consistent across multiple takes.

None of it works if the gaffer is trying to make the lighting the star. The job is execution under pressure, with intention.

Mixing LED and Traditional Lighting

Ambrose doesn't pick sides in the LED-versus-traditional debate. He uses both, and the choice depends on the job.

ARRI M40s are his go-to for night exterior work on condors — versatile, punchier than you'd expect through chimeras, and effective at the long distances action unit demands. Solar Frame moving lights go on every condor for remote flexibility. Consumer-grade LED PAR 38s in small cans get deployed by the hundreds for subtle environmental accents — on baby stands a mile from camera, pointed toward the track, reading as distant specks of civilization.

The hybrid approach is the point. LEDs give you speed and flexibility. HMIs give you punch. The best results come from knowing which tool fits which problem, not from committing to one technology.

The Real Job of a Gaffer

At the level Ambrose operates, gaffing isn't just about knowing where to put lights. It's logistics, safety coordination, crew management, problem-solving under time pressure, and the ability to execute complex setups while high-speed automobiles are crashing into each other and catching fire.

Every day on an action unit is a new problem. Camera rigs attached to cars, to ships, to descender rigs. Safety is paramount — the stunt team, special effects team, and grip team all have to coordinate to keep everyone safe while delivering the shots. Ambrose is proud of his team's safety record, and he should be.

His advice to young filmmakers: stay accessible, stay curious, and be willing to take on the challenges that other people avoid. That's how careers at this level get built.

Mac McDonald and Michael Ambrose with the CreamSource Vortex — compact, reliable LED for car rigs and action unit work.

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