James Friend is a veteran cinematographer and frequent collaborator with director Edward Berger on projects like All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), for which he won an Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Cinematography, and the series Your Honor (2020).

Friend was approached to collaborate again on Ballad of a Small Player, the Colin Farrell-led dark crime comedy set in and around the casinos of Macau. He and Berger immersed themselves in the city, to draw inspiration. Friend says, “ The only way you can actually start to picture the way this film's gonna look is by going there and experiencing it yourself. Not just seeing it, but experiencing it. It's almost like a Disneyland for gambling. I started off by going there, soaking it all in. We stayed there for about two weeks.”

The neon-soaked venues offered many opportunities, but also introduced numerous unusual obstacles. “These casinos are highly, highly, highly regulated,” Friend says. “Working in the big open floors was extremely challenging. We couldn’t control the sound, for example, couldn’t control the light.” The crew was even forbidden from obstructing security cameras, so many traditional techniques for lighting talent wouldn’t be feasible due to their relatively large footprints.

The production was also set to shoot in locations where they had more control, but access and power were concerns. A scene in Dao Ming’s (Fala Chen) apartment looks out on a building of other apartment units, but to add lighting would mean individually seeking permission from each occupant, then placing dozens of fixtures before start of production each evening. Even then, the team would need a way of powering the fixtures without cables and dialing in lighting remotely.

Friend and his lighting team came to rely on several LED lighting tools from their primarily Aputure-based kit. To get around the strict rules of the casino environments, they made frequent use of the INFINIMAT 20x20, which could be easily set up and moved to provide intense walls of soft light, or broken down into INFINIMAT 8x8s as needed.

For one lobby scene, the script called for daylight, but the only times the location was available were at night, and then only for an hour at a time. “The [INFINIMAT 20x20] enabled us to shoot in the dead of night. We turned it to 5,600K, daylight color temperature, and side-lit the entire set,” Friend says. “The output from that lamp is quite striking. It had to be a source that we could very quickly wheel out of the way and then wheel back again in seconds. Really, the INFINIMAT enabled us to actually shoot that scene.”

The INFINIMAT also came in handy for lighting talent, like Tilda Swinton’s Blithe. “The INFINIMAT is a perfect source to be able to get nice and close next to the camera and deliver a frontal sort of beauty light. One of the challenges was, she was wearing these quite large glasses. If you didn’t have the light at the right angle and the right level of softness, you would end up with an uncosmetic shadow around her eyes. But with the INFINIMAT, she’s got this big, beautiful, bold, round eye light, which brings her eyes out, and it feels like you’re really connecting with her.” Friend adds, “I can’t actually see the source reflected in her glasses, which is unusual.”

Friend also found INFINIMATs useful for the necessary virtual production shoot. “ We decided to film the wides on the actual casino floor, and then shoot visual effects element plates and do the scenes in a virtual production environment.” The INFINIMAT 20x20 provided the intense wash of overhead lighting, while INFINIMAT 8x8s provided soft key lighting on talent.

The INFINIMAT even came in handy on a scene set in a food court with an unexpectedly drab background. Friend placed an INFINIMAT 8x8 in the background, out of focus. “The lighting console operator put this color chase through it. It was just an out-of-focus, beautiful highlight, and it worked fantastically.”

For the scene between Fala Chen’s Dao Ming and Farrell’s Lord Doyle in the apartment, the crew used INFINIBARs. The lighting team dialed in the look across all the windows with wireless CRMX control in Sidus Link Pro. Friend says, “We weren't actually allowed to leave any of these lights up when we weren't filming, and they needed to be charged as well. The only way to facilitate something like that is with a lightweight unit that's battery-operated. Every morning…I had to have a rigging team go in with the freshly charged fixtures, and they would have to cable tie [the INFINIBARs] in exactly the same place as we had them before.”

Ballad of a Small Player debuted on Netflix on October 29, 2025, with praise for its performances, opulent presentation, and “decadent” depiction of Macau.

For Friend, the collaborative environment was the biggest reward. He says, “ The most secure filmmakers are the ones who would listen to the best idea in the room. Any collaboration needs to be a two-way street. There's no point in me saying, ‘Put this lamp there and this is exactly what it's gonna do. And that there, that there, that there.’ You have to listen to the people around you. A good head of department will surround themselves with people that they trust. That's the great thing about working with an excellent crew.”

Friend adds, “Without a shadow of a doubt, Aputure lighting enabled me to have the flexibility and the creative control to shoot Ballad in the way that Edward and I wanted to photograph the film.”