Shooting saturated colored lighting on film

[Simon Meesters]

Hi all,

I'm shooting a short film on 16mm (mostly 500T) next week and a few scenes require heavily saturated lighting (heavy reds/blues etc). 

I always struggle with measuring and correctly exposing heavily saturated colors on film. Does anyone have tips on how to correctly translate those deeper colors onto the negative? I want to make sure they don't come out too washed out, which is what I find happens if you expose them as normal with an incident light meter.

Cheers!

[David Mullen ASC]

My general rule is to underexpose one-stop for an object lit with a deep color, using an incident meter. Or use a spot meter and figure that the tonality of most deep colors would be near 18% grey in b&w (except maybe yellow, which can be lighter, and a deep Congo Blue could be darker than one-stop under).  One-stop under actually isn't always quite enough for the final look but you don't want to underexpose color negative too much.

And shoot a grey card or scale under "white" light normally exposed for your chosen ASA rating at the head of the roll before the colored lighting shots begin.

[Simon Meesters]

Thanks, David. That's really helpful!