Stygian gloom is the new black

[Phil Rhodes]

Consider this (click to embiggen)

Top image is from Dune; bottom image is corrected for a more normal exposure appearance. It's a fairly straightforward toplight with what you might call a kicker on camera right, a sort of setup that seems to be very in favour at the moment. Not particularly unconventional and as so often, most of the work to emphasise the face is done by the otherwise muted production design and what looks like a fairly pronounced post production vignette.

But it's so dark. It occupies barely more than the bottom eighth of the sRGB brightness range. It's justified in context, perhaps, as the scene takes place during a disastrous defeat in which the building is being overrun by enemy forces. Traditionally this sort of thing would have had a cheesy blue-green moon backlight, which, okay, has long since been something of a cliche, but it does prevent the image turning into this puddle of ill-defined gloom that almost looks soft, it's so poorly-defined. Maybe the kicker could have been two or three whole stops hotter, so that at least the highlight in his eye was sort of visible. All kinds of things could be motivated.

I remember having the same concern about Chernobyl, of which I posted examples here in a thread Karim started to discuss this very issue. Both it and Dune look great, of course, but there's a certain commonality in using what I'd refer to as extreme underexposure on a scene that's otherwise fairly pedestrian in appearance.

 

[Malcolm Ian Vu]

2 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Traditionally this sort of thing would have had a cheesy blue-green moon backlight...

What? 

That's what Dune is supposed to look like.