Among the many obstacles of shooting on location, mobility and power are constants. Chief lighting technician Justin Dickson regularly works with cinematographer Michael Bauman and director Paul Thomas Anderson, most recently on Licorice Pizza (2021). He would face those constant obstacles at scale once again on the Andersons’ One Battle After Another.

Inspired by the naturalistic look and feel of classics such as The French Connection (1971), the epic screwball adventure featured several setpieces, including a wide-ranging night exterior shoot in downtown El Paso, Texas. Anderson and Bauman chose to film on 35mm film using VistaVision cameras, a widescreen format that would put even more of the environment into the frame.

Dickson would need to stay agile–he needed powerful fixtures able to move quickly from one location on a city block to the next. Not only would his fixtures need to be capable of lighting up the face of a building, they’d need to be powered by a mobile power source that can travel with the fixture and be operated by minimal crew.

The obvious solution was LED point source lighting, which has higher output, is easier to move, and draws far less power than previous lighting technologies. Dickson and his team used a variety of fixtures, including the tunable color Electro Storm CS15. Each lamp head was mounted on a combo stand with castor wheels and paired with a battery bank like a Voltstack. Dickson says, “The reason why we opted for the [Electro Storm CS15] as opposed to a tungsten light is because it’s house powered, [has] a lot of punch, and [has] a lot of reach…we did not have all the cable in the world, all the manpower in the world, all the generators in the world. We were shooting VistaVision, so we saw a lot, so a lot of our lighting we had to do from the ground. The [Electro Storm CS15] was able to light 2 buildings at a time, 3 buildings at a time.”

CS15s were also used in sets to light rows of buildings in different shades of white, sodium vapor, or even color hues, and lamps were transported to rooftops to create fill light at street level. Because the lights could be moved by small teams and powered anywhere, the shoot could move fast and make sweeping changes to the look that would have been impossible before.

One Battle After Another released wide on September 26, 2025, to critical acclaim and praise for its vibrant look. Justin and his lighting crew were both proud of what they achieved and relieved at how much easier mobile, battery-powered lighting made the night shoot.

Dickson says, “Everything that Paul does is outstanding because I see the mental approach to things. It’s the challenges [that] we had on set doing those things that, for me, make it so grand–that he was able to tie this whole thing together to make it look like 13 different cities and made it feel like one city.”