Albert Smith

If you want low contrast light it low contrast so the ratios between shadow and highlight are really mellow. Lots of soft fill light. If your exterior shoot on an overcast day and use negative fill to shape the light. as said costume design, production design also all factors....the look seems to come from slightly over exposed backgrounds and the shadows filled way in. I would suggest not using filters, but to each there own....flaring the lens with a soft light I have never seen...it might work on really long lenses...but if your at all wide it's unlikely to work and will probably slip into frame. if you want some flare you could try putting some lights into the lens though. I have seen interesting effects with people messing with light leaking in behind the lens too, maybe a bit stylized for your purposes Test, Test, Test. if your shooting dslr use the technicolor picture style thats pretty close to the flat picture a red puts out. Do not use picture style settings to shape your picture, shoot flat work on it in post, the canon presets are all awful. btw, what is this....they made "this is england" into a tv series. geeze.

Thanks for the replies! Our cam op's father actually works in industrial lighting so I can probably grab a bunch of real fixtures and run some tests at the rental house next to some tungsten sources gelled up, that seems like a great idea. if anyone has any experience specific to the MX that would really insightful as well.

But this one I'd like to just focus on peoples different approach to color. how "real" do you go. I have seen people go as far as matching sodium vapor and on the other extreme just keeping it tungsten. I am shooting a film that that has quite a few wide...often static night exteriors on suburban street lights and we are not doing any "moon light". so I am going toward realism, but I also don't want an entire film that is orange or with a ton of mixed color temp, I'm thinking I'm going to kinda half way it as of now maybe do some strong color on background stuff that is a stop or two under and give my faces 1/4 or 1/2 CTO on tungsten...or maybe some other color....I still have yet to really decide on the color palette for the film and I also dont have too much experience with all the subtle variations of color gels that exist. anyways what colors do people like? anyone have any favorite examples? We are also shooting on an MX I donno how much that should factor into decisions, any use in doing offset white balances lower then 3200k with warmer light to get a little less color info like you do get under a sodium vapor? thanks!

Haha, it is very interesting to shoot that long. At the same time some things needs a huge move to be right, a panning of the camera over 1" might solve a problem too.

Thanks for the recommendation! otto nemenz has one that is a 5.6 150-600 that is pretty close to what I need. It is night work though so I was hoping to at least be at a 4 If there are any other suggestions it would be very helpful thanks! EDIT*** otto seems to have a whole list of converted lenses, Primes too that look really good. This will probably work out, thanks!

I am shooting a film on a PL mount camera which will require some very long shots. I have done some test work with a canon 70-200 with a 1.5X converter on a 1.6x crop camera and even that wasn't quiet where we needed to be. Anyone know any good solutions that can get longer then an Optimo that I'd be able to track down in chicago? thanks

Its pretty simple, but i've always loved the B/W work in the bob dylan documentary Dont Look Back, some great frames. I recently saw the film "Last Train Home", shot very well for how hard it most of been to shoot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N6vDotVNDo "Lake of Fire" is another good one.

a couple things could be cut that are redundant, but its always tough to cut down. I really like your work.

yea smaller field...thats not that frame your looking for is it? you gotta think an open field at night there is really nothing to get an exposure on your pretty much just shooting people walking around on a grass floor in a blacked out studio. or if you want an exposure on stuff in the distance or the sky you could just do late dusk for night that works sometimes getting just enough ambient for an exposure and maybe add in a subtle rim with one of those 6ks really far away, but height is yea an issue. Depending how wide your shots are I'd say you gotta atleast get the lights 15ft in the air...depends how far away too if your trying to use a 6k sounds like you'd need a condor for sure.

Q. Wow - I've seen it on the Alien quadrilogy documentary. It had to withstand a great deal of heat from lights, as far as I understand? A. Well that goes back to the DP; he had this idea that he was going to do this 'negative fill'. Usually you bounce light onto the subject with anything from white cards, grey cards, fillers, whatever. He was bouncing 18ks into black wrap. I don't know what he was trying to do, but he claims it was a 'negative fill'. It was so hot on stage that the model was literally melting! The heat was making the oil leech from the resin. When Ian and I were interviewed for the quadrilogy, we mentioned something about the heat, that was sort of the politically-correct way of saying, yeah, this is ridiculous [laughs]. [The Auriga] was not designed to resist that kind of heat. It was to a point, but it got so absurd that the model was literally melting because it had so much heat on it. It was un-necessary. There was no reason to have that much light on it. haha wow, he was not happy about it. but 18k into blackwrap....haha At-least its a confidence boost to know other people do some weird stuff that probably doesn't work or could be achieved easier, sometimes just in the heat of the moment on set you don't take the straightest path toward what you want i think and you wind up with something like that, but heck it might look great!

Its a literal as thinking, where is the sun in real life and what kinda of light is it and then replicating that. Same for any night setup with a motivated source. in the morning the sun is lower and warmer in color temp, sometimes there is a morning haze of sorts so it is softer. Its a big source really far away....you generally don't want to have to use more then one light to replicate what its doing, but sometimes setups require that. ...speaking toward generalities here I'd say usually we find a window in our set or location we like alot in relation to the camera positions and take a larger or sometimes not so large HMI light with a little CTO or something on it and shoot it into the location. Sometimes you don't need to light with direct sunlight either, but now we are getting more complex. A lot of typical morning light through the window scenes also utilize a hazer to soften the room and to show the beams of lights.

Had same problems all the time with the knock off's I don't think I have ever used the real "litepanels" I would assume they are accurate or hope so. just get those 1/8 +- ready....but sometimes its hard to pinpoint.

you might want to check out frame discreet in Toronto it may not meet your time frame but the price/quality ratio is very impressive.

for the wide at 1:37 My guess would be - space lights overhead - backlight source from the grid overhead slightly to the left giving a hard white edge mainly on Tarantino - a big source frame left through diffusion and maybe 1/4 orange of some sort...likely to be a maxi through some diff I'd guesss could be something frame right filling it in a little too, but I dont think so.

I really liked the field/country stuff. very natural....I think some would say you could use more of an edge on people or it was a little flat but I thought it was great. the city stuff didn't mesh or look as great to me....but that goes to direction/production design more than anything. The end scene with the light bulbs looked alright, yea I would have tried to separate the band a little more and get a bit more of a range in the exposure as it was all kinda even and a little flat because of it. I think the grading definitely could have used work overall though, looked pretty Raw Redish

Red MX

I suspect your shooting red with 800ISO plan. I have shot some explosions (exterior day) and the exposure was pretty good with being exposed for day light outside, I can't remember the stop from that shoot but I did also shoot alot of fire recently (like interior walls burning stuff like that) and we were shooting like F8-F11 and you still lose some detail in the flames for sure, but we couldn't really justify lighting to anything above an 11 and at a certain point I would assume the flames will just start looking almost surreal, because it is fire, it's gotta be somewhat overexposed, but I suppose it depends on what you are going for.

I've used google sketch up a bit. very useful and a bit easier then the graphic design software

Do you like the script? aside from the creative, my biggest advice if your just looking for experience is make sure they no what they are doing. If they arn't paying crew that is not a good sign....and the fact they expect you to use an arri light kit... Do they have a good producer, an experienced AD? ...stuff like that. If they are professional and know how to get the shots they want in a reasonable time frame with reasonable days It's never that bad. In my experience on no-budget stuff if anyone gets paid its the crew first since they have the least to gain from the project and are going to be physically actually putting in the most labor.

I recently co-produced and shot a project. 4 day shoot, 45k...big crew, bunch of production design, large cast. Seems to work pretty well. Alot of the work I did as a "producer" was through scripting stages and then early on I handled locations since we couldn't really afford to hire on a LM that early....which is awesome because I worked alot with the production designer in talking about the look of the film really early on....and all 1st floor locations. As we got close to production I slowly passed the torch off to the other producer, it got a little overwhelming ....I think its really key to kinda put in place who and what you will be passing off as you get closer to production dates because I had to scramble a bit when we were about 2 weeks out to do that. by a week out I was completely done with the producing tasks.

http://vimeo.com/23391827 password (lowercase): real 720P h264 file here: Rubbishisgold.com/jakezalutsky/JakeZalutsky_CinematographyReel_2011.mov

good work, definitely did a really good job using what you had. Crazy what budgets are like, looks like the director has done some stuff for m83 and telepopmusik...you'd think there'd have to be a bit of money there wow. good stuff though

thanks for all the posting, very helpful.

would you mind noting the iso the above tire scene was shot at, what wattage where the practicals? Camera seems pretty impressive, open up some new creative avenues for sure.

sounds like a decent start. For beams I would say a Par light would be better to work with as it would give a sharper beam of light. your 1k Fresnel also may be an issue as the HMI will be 4-6x more output then the baby, its a bit hard to understand what you mean by a background light...is the 1k lighting a background element or hitting a subject and if so why do you need 2 lights from different angles through your windows....there is only one sun. also keep in mind if you are gelling those omnis full ctb you will be losing a lot of output. they will be like 150-300W lights....and you are bouncing them. If you are going for a really strong ratio though and have a camera with good latitude you maybe ok though. often for day interiors like this I will put one set of windows off camera and key through them and then use smaller sources hitting curtains from the outside to simulate a day ambiance. In the past on a really tight budget I have used 1k Molepars through windows instead of hmi's. Maybe something to consider as it doesn't sound like you need that much power out of your lights and if your stuck with only the omnis for fill it will make it a bit easier to match exposure on the fill side. and then you can shoot everything tungsten balance. (if your not already aware btw that 2k hmi will NOT run on house power)