Hi Rebecca,
I guess that a lot of people get the idea that you can start thinking about color when you are in post production and to some degree it's true. But actually it's very important to start thinking about color in preproduction so you can lay the groundwork there.

Depending on your color choices every team can work towards achieving them, be it the art direction or the location scouts or the lighting department. Everything what you want about color should be happening on set. If there is not the color information there to begin with, you won't be able to fix it in grading. (To some degree it's possible, but its very time consuming.)

The RAW material with most modern digital film cameras look very washed out, flat, grey, whatever you want to call it. But this doesn't mean that this was what it looked like on set. This a technique to preserve the most color and light intensity information as possible. It's only due some computer codec maths ends up looking so flat. You end up with a lot information that you can manipulate more easily in grading.

I hope that makes it somewhat clear :)
Cheers,
Petr

The way I understand is that he only leaves the cables coiled up at the base of the lamp while they are not plugged in. He only wants to make every lamp ready to grab (with stand, sand bag and extension) so he can take any lamp he needs in the scene and plug it in there of course with the cables not coiled up any more.

I assume, that he is shooting everything a little bit wider than the wants the final frame to be. This way you can work on the exact framing in post, zoom in and stabilize without making the frame smaller than you really wanted it to be while shooting. Hope that makes sense. :)