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eye lights


Jon Erwin

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The strong backlight is from an HMI. The underexposed soft side key on Nolte's face is from the Kino. In the other scene I posted earlier of the boy lying in bed with the eyelight (Dedolight), the softer, dimmer backlight on the bed is from a Kino.

 

Iron Chef is this wacky cooking show from Japan that was bought by TV Food Network here, although I watched it more when it was on the international cable TV channel years earlier, subtitled. On TV Food Network, it is mostly dubbed, which sucks.

 

Two chefs have one hour to make a bunch of gourmet dishes based on a theme ingredient unveiled by a dramatic actor dressed like Liberace, who whips this sheet off of the secret ingredient, which rises from the floor amid a bunch of dry ice smoke (as do the Iron Chefs who arrive for battle.)

 

What's interesting to me are the backstories of the challenger, shot in video (as is the whole show) of them at work in their own restaurant, combined with b&w stills of their history. It's all cut-up (with whip snaps on the audio) into the montage with heavy-handed music lifted from "Backdraft", often with fast dolly moves through restaurants, blown-out windows and practicals with net diffusion on the lens, etc. Sometimes it is fairly impressive how much they are willing to clip the highlights to create a stylized image. The cooking itself is covered like a sporting event, with handheld cameras, remote jib shots, etc.

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Those Northfolk images finally loaded for me-

 

David it comes as no suprise that your portraiture is excellent! The low fill stuff is TERRIBLY exciting and your overexposed rimlights wonderfully refreshing! Interesting how the Northfolk shots upstage that Potter capture...

 

As for Iron Chef- I have not seen the show but know of it's use of Zimmer's Backdraft score- btw, clipping seems to be a very fine line, one I'm having trouble coming to grips with. I've been reading alot about illegal amounts of IRE for broadcast (110+%?) and the term "whiter than white". I realise in video you can't print down like you can with film because the image is clipped and once white it is white, but what are these other headscratching taboos? And surely so long as it's tastefully done, bright whites once brought down to an acceptable IRE in post can be used artistically and effectively? Have I misread? I think I have...

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Hi,

 

The whole once it's white it's white thing has to be used with knowledge of the format. If it's a video format, it has no ability to record levels outside broadcast legal; if you shoot something to digital betacam, the deck will never output illegal stuff from the untouched camera tapes. Start to grade it, and start to involve less-than-professional equipment, and you can be all over the place. My tiny miniDV walkman will certainly output illegaly-high video levels if you give it 100% input presumably because it expects the codec in the NLE to fix it. An even more insidious issue is with recording high white and low black levels to digital tape from a digital source; for example, in almost all flavours of DV, blacks below code value 16 and whites above 235 are reserved for special functions. Find a deck naive enough to record these levels to tape and you can have all kinds of fun and games, from frames suddenly ending at a certain scanline to the deck outright refusing to play it.

 

On analogue formats the problem is more insidious, especially with older analogue cameras. Modern DSP cameras will generally obey the rules, but even on a BVW-D600, especially if it's misaligned at all, it's possible to end up with hot whites. It's certainly very easy to create overhot whites with caption generators and the like and basic analogue tape formats will tend to preserve them. The ability of VHS to record very hot whites is part of how Macrovision works (by confusing the head AGC of a potential record deck).

 

However you end up with them, though, hot whites and dark blacks should never make it to broadcast; whether they get hard planed off (bad) or compressed into range preserving hilight detail (good but more expensive; really a grading decision) it should never make it to a transmitter, cable encoder (really the same thing) or DVB codec. Any and all of these may be upset by out of range signals, particularly terrestrial broadcast and cable where the combined signal may suffer from buzz on the audio and ringing in picture from out-of-bandwidth edges in the hot or dark areas. I say this should never happen, but it's painfully clear that a lot of networks, particularly low-rent cable outfits in the US, couldn't give a rat's rear end.

 

Phil

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The basic issue, since nothing brighter or darker than what is "legal" will be broadcast anyway, is just the aesthetic issue of whites lacking detail unnaturally and whether that's visually distracting or interesting. If a car hardlamp hits the lens and gets clipped -- i.e. I can't see the filament in the lamp! -- who cares? No one expects to see detail there. But if someone is wearing a white suit and it's completely clipped so much that you can't see the separation between the lapels, the buttons, the seams, etc. then that looks unnatural (and more video-ish since film has less of a problem handling this.) So if you are going have large areas of the frame clipped, you have to think twice because it will look a little strange.

 

On the other hand, movies that have skip-bleached the negative have a similar "clipped highlights" look, like "Minority Report" did.

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This whole thread is amusing to me as I'm sitting here with my sore feet propped up, after shooting two full days of hand-held with a D600 (one more big day to go this week; reality TV). I've been shooting in the harsh California sun in the late afternoon, where it's all I can do to find a decent exposure between the hot sun and the dark shade. Needless to say, there is stuff that is clipped at 100+ IRE, and stuff that goes way dark...

 

I've always been of the mind that clipped highlights are not a bad thing, as long as you can reasonably be assured that the engineering in post/broadcast can handle the signal. I mean, if I'm a painter are you going to tell me I can't include white paint in my images?

 

Regarding the "forehead chopper" mentioned earlier, a particularly bad example is the comedy Next Best Thing with Madonna. Now Elliot Davis is one of my favorites, but for this film he realized he couldn't do his trademark lighting from below and went for a classic glamour approach for the Material Girl. There are a few scenes in there with the forehead chop that seem COMPLETELY out of place, like Madonna laying on diving board by a swimming pool in the noonday sun -- and there's a completely unmotivated solid cutting her forehead. In another courtroom scene she stands up in an MCU and you can tell it's a grip "Hollywooding" a flag on her forehead.

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Yeah, as a big Madonna fan myself I can tell you that Elliot Davis' lighting of Madge In The Next Best Thing is always criticised if the film is even mentioned. "She looked terrible in that movie" is the quote you'll ALWAYS here at her fan forums. Who shot the Beautiful Stranger promo? She had the same stylist on that one clearly yet she was lit a million times better.

 

As for clipping- is it something that you should light around and have looming over you throughout the shoot, or if it looks good on the monitor is that all you need to know? You all seem to have varying feelings on it...

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You can see clipping on the monitor, in the eyepiece, and if you set your zebras to appear at 100 IRE, so it's not hard to catch by any means. It's just a bright white area with no detail. If you're fine with that, then you don't worry about it. If a white collar on a shirt is clipped, I might not care... but if the entire shirt is clipped, it generally looks bad. Sometimes you adjust the iris until you reach the point where you aren't clipping areas you don't want to be clipped. Sort of like shooting reversal and exposing for the highlights, not the shadows.

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Sweet jesus Mr. Mullen,

I love that shot of Nick Nolte bending over the bed and holding the little

boy's hand! The fill on the face is awesome sir! Actually the right side of

his face as he faces the camera. Am a right? He's facing his key light? I

love the way the light subtlely falls off in to darkness. I like the accent on

the shade of the practical and the texture and white of the boy's shirt. I do

this in the camera room sometimes with just a soft box light with even light

from center to edges. This is a beautiful scene sir!. Here in Harrisburg and

Camp Hill people are just waking up to Northfork. Its been well liked,enjoyed

by people that I have talked to.

 

Greg

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Here's a quote from Sven nykvist,

 

Cinematography Screencraft(Focal Press)page 41:

 

"I like to see reflections in the eyes, which irritates some directors,but

is true to life. Capturing these reflections helps to give the impression

of a human thinking. Its very important to me to light so that you can

sense what lies behind a character's eyes. I always aim to catch the

light in the eyes,because I feel they are the mirror of the soul. Truth is

in the actor's eyes and very small changes in expression can reveal

more than a thousand words."

 

Sven nykvist

 

 

 

 

Greg

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Thanks for that David,

 

it's just getting use to this whole shooting it muddy so it can then be tweaked in post- hard to adapt to! My heart still wants to overexpose and print down ;)

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I don't think with HD you should be shooting it muddy either; HD, like any lower-then-35mm-resolution formats, needs a certain amount of snap (contrast) in order to look sharp on the big screen. It's just that there are no benefits from overexposing and printing down. There are other ways of achieving that look, like slightly crushing the black level, lighting for more contrast, etc. You still need bright highlights too in HD (a rich image tends to contain a good black and a good white reference in the frame), you just want to control how much they get clipped.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I tend to shoot dance pieces and was thinking about adding a slide viewer somewhere around the mattbox as a gentle eyelight

 

8020-01.jpg

 

or else turning the transvideo around to create a tiny eyelight

 

Camera is always moving..

 

what do you think?

 

thanks

 

Rolfe Klement

www.creativesunshine.com

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I've heard of the slide viewer trick. The DP used them as a stick-up in confined areas. There was a choice of tungsten and daylight bulbs as well. I remember there were a couple of size options too. It became somewhat popular and a cine rental place in Denver started stocking the things.

 

Thanks for reminding me!

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The slide viewer is a great idea! Doh! Why didn't I think of that?

 

I'll use it tonight for a lighting test with the Canon XL-2 (400ASA at 0dB.) I have a narrative short with approximately 15 pages in a high-rise stairwell. I'll be taking advantage of the flouro practicals and adding a little eye/face light. I have to have a very lightweight setup and a skeleton crew so we can clear the stairwell in the event of an emergency. I don't even feel comfortable having c-stands in there so lighting and grip will be handheld or clamped to stair railings.

 

I'm also trying:

 

LED flashlights

MR-16's w/various diffusion

etc.

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I know that during the production of 'The Lord of the Rings' DP Andrew Lesnie rigged up christmas fairy lights behind camera when he was shooting a close up of Cate Blanchett's character to give her an otherworldly quality in her eyes.

 

I worked as a trainee on a 35mm short back in march and the DP liked to use this technique to bring out the actor's eyes in low lit situations. I basically borrowed a flag off the sparks and taped a whole line of christmas tree lights too it then held it to the side of the lens.

Another DP I know uses christmas tree lights (not cloured flashing ones!) wrapped around the lens in music videos which brings out this amazing cluster of lights in the eyes.

Great thread btw. I am fairly new to all this but this forum is proving to be an incredible resource of information.

 

Cheers, Noos

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I worked as a trainee on a 35mm short back in march and the DP liked to use this technique to bring out the actor's eyes in low lit situations. I basically borrowed a flag off the sparks and taped a whole line of christmas tree lights too it then held it to the side of the lens.

Another DP I know uses christmas tree lights (not cloured flashing ones!) wrapped around the lens in music videos which brings out this amazing cluster of lights in the eyes.

Great thread btw. I am fairly new to all this but this forum is proving to be an incredible resource of information.

 

Cheers, Noos

 

 

Xmas lights wrapped around the lens! Now thats something I want to try :D

I recently started having a grip rig a 4ft, 1 bank kino to the top of the camera with gaffer tape to control the spill on the face...it works perfect.

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Nearly anything can be rigged as an "obie" (On Board) camera light. Better rigs have some kind of shutter for dimming so that brightness can be dialed in without affecting color tempertaure.

 

Kino's are handy for this as they're lightweight and don't get too warm (making them less objectionable on the camera). Single tubes can sometimes cause the reflection to look to like a line instead of a spot, which can look wierd in some cases. 9" car-kinos or Miniflos with some diffusion on the reflector can also work. These units usually have dimmable ballasts with no CT change.

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