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Shooting a short graduation film


Guest RichardNcine

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Guest RichardNcine

Hi there,

i'm a third year cinematography specialist from the UCA in Farnham; shooting out graduation film in a week or so, in Leeds and Guildford.

Shooting on S16mm Arri SR3, predominantly Fuji Tungsten stock.

We've done test shoots on 500T Eterna and got some interesting results.

 

With regards to the use of 85 and 80A filters, with shooting a lit studio INT, we had a kino (balanced to daylight, and x2 300w and 600w fresnels one with a half diff and chocolate gel) shot with a wratten 85 filter to naturally balance the daylight and also bring out the skin tones.

 

My question however is with shooting daylight on tungsten stock, a wratten 85 must be used. But for testing tungsten lights on Daylight stock, the 80A must be used?

 

Also, for a lit DAY INT - were shooting in an artists workshop in Guildford, he naturally has daylight balanced bulbs, but also small tungsten lamps for the mixed lighting. therefore what should I balance/light for?

 

 

 

Thanks,

 

Richard

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You don't "have to" use an 85 of an 80a; it's just there to correct. If you leave off the 85 filter on a T stock under D conditions everything goes blue. And, if you're shooting on a D stock under T lighting without an 80a everything goes orange.

Now; sometimes these variations can be wonderful and add a richness to the images. If you don't want that you add on the filter. But, don't forget, you can add a filter to more than just the camera. You can use CTO and CTB gels on lighting instruments to get them all to be the same color temperature. This if often the most logical thing to do.

So in a situation such as yours, where you're on a T stock in a mixed lighting environment I always find it best to but CTO on any daylight fixtures. The main reason for this is stop loss. Full CTO will only knock down the intensity of the light about 2/3rds of a stop, whereas full CTB will knock down about 2 stops of light (same as the 85 and 80a respectively). So you'd just want to throw CTO on the daylight fixtures in this work-shop and now you have lighting which is all around 3200K and you can shoot w/o the 85 on your camera. Hope that helps.

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why spend time and money in post on it when it's such a quick fix in camera?

Also, when you have mixed lighting in the same scene you can run into having to do a lot of power windows which eat up time in the suite. It's a matter of philosophy, of course, but the more I shoot the less I want to leave towards post.

Also, imagine a scenario where you have talent moving through these mixed colors in the shot; and now you need to worry about what your power windows are going to do to skin-tones, and perhaps key-framing them as s/he moves 'round.

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