Bringing out eye colour

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I have a test day coming up soon for a specialist makeup effect. My principal concern is the result we get from some special effects contact lenses, which are designed to tint the iris colour to red (it's an alien.) The problem is that the subject naturally has hazel eyes - not dark brown, but enough to make me and the contact lens people concerned that the effect won't read. I'd be interested in hearing about any ideas anyone has to enhance the visibility of the effect. The backstory for the character includes references to the fact that the eyes are "softly glowing," so it's OK if the result looks slightly wierd and hypnotic.

 

My first thought is that this is going to have to be a large (in comparison to the eyeball) soft source, since if I simply fire hard light into her eyes all I'll get is a specular reflection which won't be coloured, and may even hilight the presence of the lenses. In order to read as red, the light has to make it into the eye through the lens, bounce off the iris and then come back out again, rather than just reflect off the surface. I guess lighting from the side might help, since specular reflections, even off the curved surface of the lens, should be limited to the near edge. Otherwise all I can think of is the "Blade Runner" effect with the semisilvered mirror to encourage retroreflectivity in the eyeball, but that's subtle enough at the best of times. It might be appropriate to the soft glow that's described, and I'll probably try it.

 

Does anyone have any other ideas, or experience in the area? I'm going to shoot tests on video, 35mm film stills and vaguely possibly some 7218.

 

Phil

[Mitch Gross]

Use a huge soft source, like a 20'x20'. If you can see the effect with your own eyes then it should read to camera, so it shouldn't be a big deal to test. Prepare to drape the camera and yourself in white fabric so that you are not reflected in the eye too much.

[Michael Nash]

But then there's a danger that all you'll see is a big white reflection in the eye, obliterating all color.

 

Remember the principle of "specular transparency" used when shooting reflective objects with soft sources. Put simply, incident light falls off with distance but the brightness of a reflection does not (only its size does). So you control the balance or ratio of incident light to reflection by moving the light source closer or farther away. With a big source up close, you've got maximum incident light to expose to and minimum brightness of the reflection. With a distant big source, the reflection becomes bright relative to your incident exposure.

[Nate Downes]

A friend of mine Cecilia had to handle similar things with her work. IIRC, her trick was a hard-contact color-key'd to the chroma-color which then could be edited after the fact to the right color combination.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I'd really rather avoid electronics post-processing. Often the eye is such a small item in frame that it just doesn't key well, and if it isn't red enough to look decent anyway, it likely won't be red enough to key.

 

The large soft screen idea is attractive to me for several other reasons - I'd like to take some fashion-photog style shots of this makeup as well, and this seems to be the world of huge soft sources. However this is liable to be the one thing I can't do, as I don't own any such gigantic diffusion and I've never been able to rent it. I've asked for it on more or less every studio shoot I've ever done, but it's never actually arrived. I have no idea who'd have it - it seems to be one of those things you can only get as part of a huge truckfull of gear.

 

Phil

[J. Lamar King IMPOSTOR]

Try using something like a Pepper or small Arri as an obie with a 1 foot square diffusion frame in front. Use the thickest diffusion you can get. Maybe rig it as two small softboxes side by side with eggcrates, then put them on dimmers. This will definitely bring out the eyes but you'll have to figure a way to build some contrast and balance into it. If it's supposed to be an allien maybe rig the lights below the lens, just keep them very close to the lens axis.

[Felipe Perez-Burchard]

Wow,

 

Great post... learned a lot; curious about this though:

 

"Blade Runner effect with the semisilvered mirror to encourage retroreflectivity in the eyeball"

 

Could you tell me a little about semi silvered mirrors, how they are used and when were they used in blade runner ?

 

Thank you very much.

 

Regards,

 

-felipe

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

What they were aiming to do was create the same effect you get when a small animal is caught in car headlights, and its eyes reflect brightly. The same principle - that of a transparent sphere reflecting light back to its souce - is behind reflective roadsigns, lane markings, and the reflective-bluescreen coating used with LED ring lights.

 

It is very difficult to make human eyes do this, because of a slight physiological difference between our eyes and those of other mammals. The effect in Blade Runner is subtle, except on the "replicant" owl, since the owl's eyes are naturally more retroreflective.

 

The effect is more apparent when the incident light is at the same or almost the same angle as the line of sight of the viewer or camera. This is why road signs appear brightly-lit to people sitting in a car, but not so much to people standing by the side of the road - they're more off-axis from the beam of light. The effect is most often seen in humans as "red-eye" in flash photographs where the flash is mounted close to the lens. A similar effect is sometimes visible when operating a theatrical followspot if a member of cast looks up at the light.

 

In "Blade Runner," a semi-reflective mirror was used in a similar way to a teleprompter, at 45 degrees in front of the camera lens to reflect a reasonably powerful light into the cast's eyes at exactly the same angle as the line of sight of the camera. This maximises the effect, but it's still flaky and difficult to do. It works best when the cast are looking directly into the camera, which is naturally the one place they never look in a drama.

 

If I can make it work, I'll use it in the test, but I have no conviction that I will be able to.

 

Phil

[Michael Nash]

However this is liable to be the one thing I can't do, as I don't own any such gigantic diffusion and I've never been able to rent it. I've asked for it on more or less every studio shoot I've ever done, but it's never actually arrived. I have no idea who'd have it - it seems to be one of those things you can only get as part of a huge truckfull of gear.

20'x20' frames are great for this sort of thing, but often times that size is just to big and unwieldy for your purposes anyway. For one thing, you have to have a huge studio or outdoor space free of obstructions, then you have to tie it off on both sides for safety, limiting your shooting space even more. When you need a frame that big you need it; but if you don't need it it's just too big a beast.

 

You can more easily deal with frames like 12'x12' and 8'x8'. 12'x12' is still pretty big and soft but a little easier to move around and fit into different spaces.

 

Pretty much any decent grip house should have these frames and rags for rent, a la cart. Maybe the situation is different there in England, but even private owners of grip packages usually rent out such items exclusive of the rest of the package. Just ask for a 12x frame set, which will include the frame, ears and corners, two stands (hi-rollers or combos with lollipops), a few sandbags and hemp to tie it off. Then for rags ask for something like half gridcloth, but even polysilk or bleached muslin will work also. If they don't have diffusion you can turn the frame into a bounce instead with either griffolyn or ultrabounce. Get a few extra 4'x floppy's, stands, and bags to side-off the spill.

 

But it's not hard to make a large soft source out of common materials. One of the quickest is to simply stand two 4'x8' sheets of foamcore vertically on either side of the camera and bounce a couple big hard lights into it (2-5K's). Add more foamcore to increase the size. You can also "goalpost" or hang a piece of speedrail or even lumber, and simply drape white fabric or white visquine from it. Visquine is great as it's cheap and you can rip a hole in it for the lens. Weight it down at the bottom with sandbags or another piece of lumber and you're good to go.

[John Pytlak RIP]

When you are trying to use retroreflection to get deliberate "red eye", keep the light levels low (fast film) so the eye's iris opens up.

 

Was this technique used in the prologue of "2001 A Space Odyssey", where some of the predator's eyes "glowed"?

[Kim Sargenius]

Pretty much any decent grip house should have these frames and rags for rent, a la cart. Maybe the situation is different there in England, but even private owners of grip packages usually rent out such items exclusive of the rest of the package. Just ask for a 12x frame set, which will include the frame, ears and corners, two stands (hi-rollers or combos with lollipops), a few sandbags and hemp to tie it off. Then for rags ask for something like half gridcloth, but even polysilk or bleached muslin will work also.

Make them yourself - I don't know about the UK but here in Australia I made one 12x12, one 8x8, one 8x4 and one 4x4 out of 25mm hollow aluminium extrusion and plastic corner joiners from a local aluminium supplier. Add to that some polysilk and some silver/white polyester material (very similar to the Photoflex or Lastolite material) -- all for the grand total of AU$136. Granted, the rags aren't exactly Gridcloth or Soft Frost or anything like that but on a budget...

 

A note of warning though -- this sort of 12x12 is not advisable for even a moderatly breezy day outside, way too much flex...

 

 

 

cheers,

 

Kim Sargenius

 

cinematographer

sydney

[Michael Nash]

A note of warning though -- this sort of 12x12 is not advisable for even a moderatly breezy day outside, way too much flex...

That's because you used too narrow a pipe. 25mm (1") is only half the diameter of typical 2" speedrail. You can get away with 1" for 6x frames, but 8x and 12x frames actually usually use 2" square extruded aluminum.

 

Gridcloth is really just the same thing as ripstop nylon, which you can get from fabric stores. And of course plain old white bed sheets can be sewn togther to make any size "light mus" you want.

[J. Lamar King IMPOSTOR]

A note of warning though -- this sort of 12x12 is not advisable for even a moderatly breezy day outside, way too much flex...

You can fill the pipe in with spray foam insulation. It dries up pretty rigid inside of the tubing. Alternately you can hammer a suitable sized wood dowl into the tubing.

[Kim Sargenius]

You can fill the pipe in with spray foam insulation. It dries up pretty rigid inside of the tubing. Alternately you can hammer a suitable sized wood dowl into the tubing.

 

 

Yeah, I was thinking of doing something like that. Any particular type to recommend?

 

However, for anything 'critical' I'll rent some proper frames -- these are the ones I keep 'out the back' for those absolutely-no-budget shoots...

 

 

cheers,

 

Kim Sargenius

cinematographer

sydney