Skip Bleach Look

[Guest Christopher Wedding]

So I'm gearing up to shoot a feature on an F900 and I've begun to think a skip bleach look would be great for certain parts of the film. How easy is this to achieve in post?

 

More importantly, what considerations should I take during the shooting process in order to achieve this look...for example I've never shot a skip bleach on film either, so I'm wondering what sort of colors I should be using in the wardrobe and what not.

 

Thanks for any suggestions/tips.

 

Chris

[Chris Keth]

So I'm gearing up to shoot a feature on an F900 and I've begun to think a skip bleach look would be great for certain parts of the film. How easy is this to achieve in post?

 

More importantly, what considerations should I take during the shooting process in order to achieve this look...for example I've never shot a skip bleach on film either, so I'm wondering what sort of colors I should be using in the wardrobe and what not.

 

Thanks for any suggestions/tips.

 

Chris

 

Do you mean to make it look like a bleach bypass on the negative or on the print?

[JONATHANEDWARDS]

There is post called " Bleach bypass for HD"

 

http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/index.php?showtopic=3080&hl=Bleach+bypass ://http://www.cinematography.com/forum...=Bleach+bypass ://http://www.cinematography.com/forum...=Bleach+bypass ://http://www.cinematography.com/forum...=Bleach+bypass ://http://www.cinematography.com/forum...=Bleach+bypass

[Michael Nash]

So I'm gearing up to shoot a feature on an F900 and I've begun to think a skip bleach look would be great for certain parts of the film. How easy is this to achieve in post?

 

More importantly, what considerations should I take during the shooting process in order to achieve this look...for example I've never shot a skip bleach on film either, so I'm wondering what sort of colors I should be using in the wardrobe and what not.

 

Thanks for any suggestions/tips.

 

Chris

 

The advantage of creating the look in-camera is that you can see what you're getting on set, and make lighting adjustments to accommodate the darker look. The DISadvantage is that you can't recover what you've crushed later. The advantage of doing it in post is that you can fine-tune the look shot-by-shot.

 

I maintain that on the set is NOT the place to do fine color correction; there's just too much going on and viewing conditons are never perfect. Your eyes simply cannot make the transition from lighting with the gaffer to coloring with a DIT (or by yourself) all at the same time. Instead I prefer to get the look maybe 80% of the way there in camera (for strong effects like this), then rely on post to provide the final polish. Same for video, same for film (going through a digital finish).

 

I did a project with the SDX-900 recently where portions of the show were to have a bleach bypass look, so I got "80% of the way there" by shooting with a relatively normal gamma curve but uncorrected under fluorescent light. In post we simply lowered the master black level a bit (dialed it in by eye), brought the mids back up some to compensate, and reduced chroma saturation a bit as well. A simple, fast tweak in Final Cut Pro HD. This approach made for the fastest work both on set AND in color-correction, while still giving us the control we needed to polish the look for the story. It's possible to get the look either in camera or in post exclusively, but a hybrid approach offers you the best of both worlds with the fewest problems of either.

 

Regarding color, chose carefully. Desaturated production and wardrobe design will help you get the look you want most "organically," with the fewest digital-looking artifacts. I don't know about you, but I buy into the "world" on screen much more if it appears real, and overt digital-looking correction just takes me out of the story by putting an artificial veil over things. But in any case, colors that you want to appear normally-saturated have to be oversaturated a bit, such as blood.

 

As always, shoot tests.

Edited November 15, 2005 by Michael Nash

[Elhanan Matos]

There are plenty of advantages and disadvantages to color correcting in camera in the F900, the greatest being that you're working at a higher bit depth, I forget if it's 10 or 12 bits, as apposed to 8 bits in post.

 

But anyways I would recommend to make a scene file with the look you want to have in post during your prep and shoot some tests. Then when you're on set you can pop in your scene file see what it looks like and then just go back to the normal scene file and record.