Hey Guys,
For one of my classes I had to select a scene out of a movie I like and try to match the lighting and camera style of the selected clip. A couple of movies later I settled down for Delicatessen, shot by Darius Khondji, specifically this scene here:
Now, I know that a lot of the look in delicatessen is achieved with art direction and production design. Nevertheless I wanna match the lighting and the look of the film as close as possible, without paying too much attention to the color of the furniture in the background. So I started to do some research on this forum and via google:
What it finally comes down to is that the film was shot on an emulsion that is no longer available. As David Mullen, ASC noted in a post, a lot of Khondji's approach is to take a low-contrast filmstock and then pushing it and applying the ENR process to the print. So I was surfing on Kodaks website a bit and settled on a similar filmstock (100T) 7212 (as I am going to be shooting 16), which has very fine grain and a very wide latitude. I am probably going to do a telecine transfer and nailing down the final look in Apple's Color because my school doesn't pay for an expensive ENR process. Should I attempt to push process to strech the contrast a bit before doing a telecine or should I all nail it down in post? I am probably going to be using Zeiss superspeeds lenses that open up to a T1.4. Depth of field in this scene isn't that great so they maybe settled for a 2 or 2.8.
Obviously this scene has a very warm look to it so I was thinking about using a 1/4 CTO on all the lights I am going to use in this scene and also apply camera filtration in form of an LLD or chocolate filter. As for the lighting in this scene the main lightsource seems to be coming from the windows which appears to be some sort of diffusion material (maybe bleach muslin) with a hard light source shining through it. As for her fill I was thinking of setting up a white card on a stand, which I can move in and out until I arrive at the right contrast ratio. For the guy is was thinking of employing a kino flo unit (tungsten) gelled with 1/4 cto - The ratio on his face seems to be lower than on her in this scene. As for the close-ups I am just gonna move in the bounce card and kino flo and I am maybe going to use a mini-flo on camera to give them a nice little eyelight. Now as I noticed on the table and the tea bowl, there are obviously some cores of lightsources that mirror. The might have employed another light on her instead of filling in with a white card. The tea bowl obviously has 2 shadows, one coming from the light through the window and one coming from off-screen camera left pretty much dead on.
Do you guys have any recommendations and thoughts about that scene and about my approach. Am I heading the right direction ...
thanks in advance for your help.
markus