Gray Tone

[Aaron Rabin]

Hi Everyone,

 

I'm trying to achieve an overall gray tone with some exterior shots. Are there any filters people know of to help in this situation, or is this a post-production issue with the DVX? To reference our resident question god as an example, David Mullen's Northfork has a beautiful gray/silver quality to it, but I imagine must of that was done in processing. How can a similar, if not equal look be achieved with the DVX?

 

Thanks for your time,

Aaron

[nchopp]

Hi Everyone,

 

    I'm trying to achieve an overall gray tone with some exterior shots. Are there any filters people know of to help in this situation, or is this a post-production issue with the DVX? To reference our resident question god as an example, David Mullen's Northfork has a beautiful gray/silver quality to it, but I imagine must of that was done in processing. How can a similar, if not equal look be achieved with the DVX?

 

Thanks for your time,

Aaron

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Not sure about the clip you're referecing, but do you mean you're looking for low-contrast shots? If so, LOTS of flat lighting. 2ks with soxboxes, etc. Overcast days are great for flat lighting. In post, you'll pull up the blacks, push down the whites (hopefully you were very careful of highlights while shooting) and punch the midtones.

Edited April 19, 2005 by nchopp

[David Mullen ASC]

A lot of that was art direction and using things like smoke on the set, plus ProMist filters.

 

As for the skip-bleach look, that can easily be simulated in post using basic color-correcting tools. Take some of your DVX footage and try just pulling down the color (chroma) levels, plus adding more contrast and crushing your blacks. Most basic editing software will do this.

 

We sort of lit with more fill light (plus flashed the color negative) to compensate for the darker shadows that comes from using a skip bleach process to the prints. But for the home video transfer, we used an ordinary interpositive, so we had to create that skip bleach look digitally in color-correction, basically doing what I described: lowering the color saturation, increasing the contrast, crushing the blacks to lose some shadow detail.

But it really helps to be shooting subjects that are naturally like that look -- like black cars driving across a winter landscape!

 

I don't know the menu of the DVX that well, but you can probably do some of this in-camera if you can adjust the settings for chroma and black levels.