green with kino floo

[Matias Nicolas]

hi ! Im shooting a short with a P2 with Letus . Were are going to shoot in a train station at night . I want to light the place with kino floo, and I want to have a green image ... Should I put green in the lights , or its better to do it in post?

[Jed Shepherd]

Post. Incase green ends up not being the color tint your wanting. Also you would need a fair few/really powerfull kino's to get reasonable light coverage outdoors.

[JD Hartman]

What lighting already exists at the station? Are you lighting the platform or inside the station building, or both? Unless you have a large budget, best to augment the existing lighting to achieve the look/exposure you need, instead of trying to overwhelm the existing lighting. If the station lights are floros, you might want to use similar bubs in the Kino, so they match color temp and spectrum.

[David Mullen ASC]

Also, if you want green, then pick a location with Cool White flourescents and metal halide / mercury vapor lighting, then just use Cool White tubes in the Kinos to augment.

[Brian Drysdale]

Video cameras tend to be a bit green blind compared to film.

[Matias Nicolas]

thank you all !

we don't have the station yet, but I hope wet get one with fluorescent lights ! A friend of mine told me to make white balance with a minus green / magenta filter, so the image will get green ... what do you think?

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, Minus-Green (i.e. magenta) will help for the white balance -- if you are shooting under Cool Whites, I'd white balance under a tungsten light to get the natural blue + green color of the flos, then you could use a magenta filter if you want to white balance again, even further towards the green. If you white balance under the greenish flos, you'd be correcting them to white, so then using the magenta filter would just get you back to the green they already had in the first place. You want to white balance under a non-green light, preferably tungsten.

[Matias Nicolas]

ok ! , just one question, if I balance under a 3200 light to get white so that i get all the blue from the kinos, then , from 3200 camera balance I redo the balance using a magenta filter so I get more green ... what do you thin happens with the red? cause, i have a lady waiting in the train station with a red jumper ...

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

I would get out to the location to find out what available lighting is already there and augment your lights to match that color temp. On the day of shooting, and if you so choose to go with the green look in camera, I would shoot a gray card just in case you decide to go back to a more balanced color temp in post.

 

On a more creative note. If you're going for an overall green "The Matrix" type look, white balancing to make the image green is fine. However, in situations like at a train station where there are typically diverse light sources, you may want to mix color temps. Give your talent a cool/greenish backlight with a warm or cool key (or vice versa), for example. Find out if there is anything already built into the location to motivate such lighting. Or just ignore any motivation and make things interesting :)

[David Mullen ASC]

ok ! , just one question, if I balance under a 3200 light to get white so that i get all the blue from the kinos, then , from 3200 camera balance I redo the balance using a magenta filter so I get more green ... what do you thin happens with the red? cause, i have a lady waiting in the train station with a red jumper ...

 

Subtracting magenta / adding green will pull some of the color saturation from a red jacket, but generally deep, pure saturated objects like that retain most of the color far longer than pastel colors do. I mean, just take a photo and push it around in Photoshop and you'll see what happens to the red jacket.

 

Not to mention, you could always select and isolate the red jacket in post and adjust its hue and chroma separately.

 

Also you don't have to white balance twice, just white balance under the 3200K light with the magenta filter to get green boost to the already green-blue Cool White flos and metal halides.

 

Simplest thing would be to scout these train stations with a digital still camera using the 3200K preset color balance to see the color rendition of the sources relative to 3200K. Now maybe you don't want cyanish cool green, maybe you want sickly yellowish orange-green, in which case shoot under sodium vapor lamps and add more green with the white balance. In that case, you either want a 3200K base or a 5600K base, depending on how much orange-yellow you want overall.

[Matias Nicolas]

ok ... ! I 'll wait for the scoouting , and will post the photo when I have it ...! and work out that with you guys...

Edited November 29, 2010 by Matias Nicolas

[John Sprung]

One little thing to watch out for with minus green or plus green -- If you have non-technical types on set, producers, execs, actors, etc., they may freak out at the look of the light from those gels. ;-)

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Matias Nicolas]

Well! we are making the papers to get this station :

 

http://matiasnicolasarg.blogspot.com/

 

the first image is the station . the photo was taken at... 1 pm aprox... I worked it out in cs4 , and got this result, which is the one, the directors want's... asi Im an amature in DP .. I wan't to ask : to light the station light in the image, should i use the kino floos flathead image 80 ( 10 fluos ) or, can I use a smaller source? or what do you think I can use to produce that soft light effect?

[Matias Nicolas]

this is how finally I decided to work the station ... using the fluos of the station , I only turned off one to give some imperfection to the scene.. and lit the gilr with a 1200 hmi cuting the light with flags just to her ... and a 2.5 hmi to the rails ... we set the camera to 5500 K and add a little of green , but not to much ...