Sleepy Hollow filters

[Simon Robinson]

Can anyone tell me whta filters were used in Sleepy Hollow to desaturate the image, I know that it was partially due to the smoke and print process, but in an interview they said that the colour filters turned all the red to black. So they had to use bright orange blood or replace the colour in post.

 

Any advice anyone could give would be great, as I'm currently a still photographer doing similar work and wanting to recreate the look

 

Thank you

Simon Robinson (student, Falmouth college of Art, UK)

[Annie Wengenroth]

I looked into it a little bit further on google by searching and found some articles about Philipe Rousselot, the DP for Tim Burton's remake of "Planet of the Apes" and also "Big Fish". Rousellot did not DP "Sleepy Hollow", but in an article about "POTA" he was talking about how he used Varicolor filters. From your description, it sounds like Emannuel Lubezki may have used Varicolor as well, although this might not have changed the saturation of the image, just the colors. :shrug:

[David Mullen ASC]

No, "Sleepy Hollow" did not use camera filters as far as I know -- it was shot clean. The desaturation was due to smoke and the CCE process in the prints, plus a desaturated production design. They made the fake blood more orangey because the CCE process made the red blood look too black in the prints.

[Boone Hudgins]

IMDb claims the blood color issue was from a blue filter, which seemed weird to me, because none of it seemed to be all that blue.

 

I knew that the CCE required a lot of the colors to be changed, though. The CCE process is a full bleach bypass, right? ACE is selective, like ENR?

[David Mullen ASC]

No, there was no blue filters used on the camera. There weren't even blue gels on the lights -- he lit the sets with tungsten spacelights and timed the scenes warm for day and blue for night. That's why the shot of the torches going out looks odd because the orange of the torchlight is missing since the scene was timed blue in post.

 

It's true that red blood in blue moonlight, whether timed blue or gelled blue or filtered blue, looks less red even with normal processing and printing.

 

CCE isn't skip-bleach but nearly so, heavier than the heaviest level of ACE / ENR possible in terms of silver retention.