David Mullen ASC

There are many degrees of backlight, both in softness and in intensity. I tend to reserve a very strong hard backlight for situations where it is motivated, like from sunlight. Here are three examples from work I did last year, from dailies. First is a hard backlight from a 1K tungsten parcan, motivated by the high window on the set (though the backlight was rigged inside the room), the second is a soft backlight motivated by a chandelier, using a Litemat LED, the third is from a 20K outside the set window.

Yes that would work. Some singers have a hard time lip-syncing to sped-up playback however.

You’re mixing up the concept of exposing the raw print stock with light versus passing light through the developed print. In the unexposed print stock, there are emulsion layers sensitive to colors that when processed form yellow, cyan, and magenta dyes. In the processed print, there can be areas with no dye, allowing white to be on the screen, or just one dye, or two dyes over each other, or all three dyes over each other. Unexposed film stock is opaque — processed film is semi-transparent. When the white projector light passes through yellow dye, you get yellow on the screen, when it passes through cyan, you get cyan, when it passes through magenta, you get magenta. But when you have two dyes over each other: yellow + magenta = red yellow + cyan = green cyan + magenta = blue and yellow + magenta + cyan = black This is a subtractive process, the dye in the print is filtering out certain color wavelengths.

The trick isn’t so much to overexpose the b&w stock overall but to light the scene so that have a good tonal range with some hotter highlights, otherwise the image can look muddy. When Janusz Kaminiski did “Schindler’s List” he discovered that he sometimes had to expose faces to a lighter tone to create stronger highlights, so he wasn’t so much overexposing the stock as he was overexposing parts of the frame.

https://www.kodak.com/uploadedfiles/motion/2383_ti2397.pdf see page 6

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtractive_color Actually the color dyes in a print are yellow, cyan, and magenta in order to create all the colors.

The max Helium sensor size is 8192 x 4320 / 29.9mm x 15.77mm, which is a 1.89 : 1 aspect ratio. If you are shooting in standard-squeeze 2X anamorphic for a 2.40 : 1 finish, that means the actual area used, whether film or digital, is 1.20 : 1, nearly square. Most digital cameras have a wider sensor than that, so the limitation with anamorphic in terms of sensor size is usually the vertical dimensions since you will not be using the full width of the sensor (otherwise your 1.89 : 1 sensor would yield a 3.78 : 1 image once unsqueezed.) Since anamorphic lenses were mainly designed for the 4-perf 35mm standard format where the contact print made off of the negative used a 21mm x 17.5mm projector mask, if you want to maintain the same field of view when shooting digitally, you'd need to use a camera with a sensor that is at least 17.5mm tall. Trouble is that the Helium sensor is 15.77mm tall. So if you record 8K 6:5, you are recording 5184 x 4320 pixels with a sensor area of 18.92mm x 15.77mm, a bit smaller than the 4-perf 35mm area (about a 1.11X crop factor, not major) so your anamorphic lens image will be a little cropped on a Helium compared to on a 4-perf 35mm camera.

Are you asking if a given anamorphic lens on the Helium at 8K 6:5 gives you the same field of view as it does on a 4-perf 35mm camera, which is about a 21mm x 17.5mm area for standard anamorphic?

Yes, the sensor isn’t 6:5 (1.20 : 1) it’s more like 1.9 : 1 so if you record 6:5, you’re cropping the sensor.

Congrats!

I think everyone is being far too critical. For one thing, this is a real location and not a set, unlike many of those Disney Channel shows. Second, it’s a cliche that comedy has to be lit brighter and flatter. Third, it’s not easy to make a real fluorescent-lit high school look interesting. Having a bigger lighting package doesn’t solve the problem that if you see the ceiling in the background then the background is mainly going to have to be lit by those ceiling fixtures and all you can do is play with the foreground.

6/5=1.2 1.2x2=2.40

"Film Technology in Post Production" by Dominic Case.

Good to know!

Gordon Willis would sometimes short-side his coverage, like in "Manhattan". Sometimes when you have a restaurant scene and behind the actors' backs are windows but next to them is a wall, it's a choice between seeing depth and light beside their heads versus a blank wall. Or in this case in "Manhattan" below, short-siding allows the dramatic contrast of other diners in the restaurant versus the unhappy couple... as opposed to framing conventionally but getting more sidewalk traffic in the shot: The other time short-siding is common is when two people are sitting side-by-side with their backs against a wall and are shot in raking profile shots with the extra space in front of their faces... but when they turn to look at each other, they are looking at the short side of the frame.