Extreme Red Shift on 35mm 200T in One Scene / Possible Light Spectrum Issue?

[Wera Englot]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a small case study from a recent shoot and ask for your thoughts.

Recently I shot a music video on 35mm 200T negative. The stock was fresh, coming from a reliable source, and everything else in the workflow was pretty standard. However, I encountered a situation that I hadn’t seen before and I’m curious if anyone with more experience has run into something similar.

In one particular scene I suspect that the lamp used by the gaffer might have had almost no blue channel in its spectrum. In both the telecine and later the 4K scan, the scenes lit with that specific lamp turned extremely red — much more than what we saw on set. In reality the light looked like a warm, slightly yellow-orange tone, something similar to warm streetlight. But in the scan it looked almost as if the entire image had been shot through a strong red filter.

We managed to correct it fairly quickly in color grading, so technically it wasn’t a disaster. But because the red channel was so dominant, once we started pulling it down we ended up getting magenta creeping into the shadows, which was difficult to fully avoid. Thankfully it was 35mm, so the image held up relatively well.

For context:

• I exposed the 200T without any filters, even in daylight (which I often prefer).

• Everything else in the shoot looked exactly as intended.

• The issue appeared only in the scene lit with that particular lamp.

My suspicion is that it might have been a low-quality fixture with a very poor spectral distribution, possibly cutting most of the blue wavelengths, which created a strong red peak on the negative.

What’s interesting is that I’ve shot on the exact same 35mm 200T stock with another gaffer and different lighting gear, and I never experienced anything like this — everything scanned completely normally.

So I’m curious:

• Have any of you experienced something similar on tungsten-balanced film stocks?

• Could a fixture with a very uneven spectrum or missing blue channel cause this kind of extreme red shift on negative?

• Are there particular types of lights or LEDs to avoid when shooting tungsten film?

For reference, the film was processed normally (standard process) with no push or pull.

Would love to hear your thoughts or experiences. Thanks!