David Mullen ASC

Great discovery -- how did you track that down? Google search of the phrase?

I don't think a pola would be enough since you are also underexposing for DFN, it's hard enough to see them in the daytime when you can overexpose a bit. You'd probably need to have a light on the hood for fill, which means towing the vehicle.

John Alcott

Consult.

B&W stock is 1/3 faster in daylight balance but the truth is that if your negative is denser than normal, that could easily be due to processing, not the sensitivity of the stock. Especially if the b&w stock was processed with a formula optimized for a different b&w stock. Or you overexposed by accident. Or the scanner was misadjusted. That's the issue with film, there are so many steps where something could be done wrong, from manufacturing to exposing to processing to printing to scanning, etc., before you see the image.

Yes... a booklight is a method of filling a large diffusion frame more evenly by bouncing the light first. If you had a Litemat of equal size as your booklight then you wouldn't need to use a booklight probably since by the nature of an LED panel, the light is evenly distributed edge to edge. Of course, some would argue that the color and warmth of a powerful tungsten light and a muslin booklight set-up is more attractive on a face -- but at the cost of a lot of power used and heat generated.

If you’re saying that anamorphic lenses are sharper than spherical lenses just because they are on a digital camera rather than a film camera, then I’d have to disagree with you.

Since there are car headlights involved, you’d be better off shooting dusk for night (magic hour). If you get lucky and it’s overcast, you could do your tighter coverage in daytime where light sources are not in the frame; or silk everything in the coverage to match the soft light of the wide dusk shots. Maybe you could get away with DFN if the car is only pointed right into the lens and the lights go out the moment the car stops, and then the bright headlamp glow could be added in post and hopefully no one will notice that the ground in front of the car isn’t being lit by the headlamps. But any other angle and you’d expect the car headlamps to sweep objects in reality as it pulls up. And in DFN, the real headlamps aren’t going to be strong enough to light anything. DFN works best when the only light source in the scene would be the moon.

Mainly for shooting French overs.

What most cinematographers do would be considered commercial art rather than personal art, so we are often asked to execute the artist vision of the director. Of course our personal aesthetics factor in but rarely are we asked to be far outside the norm. For style to be organic, I don’t think it should be too self-conscious, it emerges from who you are at that moment in time. If you have strong visual tastes and impulses, you should pursue them but I don’t think you should try to be different simply for the sake of being different. However, I think it is just as wrong to follow everyone else by route rather than by passion or inclination.

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