Stephen Baldassarre

Just remember that red stuff will appear slightly darker under the daylight balanced light, blue stuff looks slightly darker under tungsten balanced light etc. But yeah, I wouldn't worry too much.

This was from a 16mm shoot, many many years ago. I think the stock was 7205, 24fps, T2, no filters or artificial lighting. The first movie I directed had a fireplace scene, indoors. I shot it on 200 ISO at F2 as well, though it was a smaller fire and the subject was closer to it. I'm afraid I don't have a screen shot at the moment. You can put silver reflectors nearby to add some fill.

Just a quick note on the poor rendition of red on film. Blue is the first layer, followed by green, then red. Not only is red slightly farther away from the focal point of the lens, the light has scattered through the other emulsion & filter layers. That's one of the reasons photochemical composite shots were traditionally done with blue screen. Skin tone also contains very little blue but that's beyond this topic. I also suspect that red is more susceptible to light reflecting off of the antihalation coating. It's dark, but not 100% absorptive, and any light bouncing off of said coating has to pass through the color filters a second time to get to their respective emulsion layers. The red layer essentially has direct line of sight with the back of the film. This is a good look into the structure of film. http://www2.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr10/shu-wei/ Mr. Mullen, those screen shots look fantastic! They give the impression of red, but pure red doesn't exactly exist here. Even deep red gels still allow a much broader spectrum than red LEDs. You also have splashes of full color, which gives a reference point for the eye to maintain its own white balance. It's a stark contrast from many modern movies where entire scenes are digitally tinted orange, blue etc. Newer movies feel very "alien" by comparison, mostly because a lot of graders seem to screw with the color without reason. I say this immediately after throwing out a LUT given to me alongside some raw video, shot with fairly heavily saturated red & magenta colored lights, in favor of a simple log conversion with a slight manual tweak done on my end. The guy shot some amazing stuff but his grade made it look just plain weird.

Sure thing. Like I said, not exactly what I wanted but close enough for this project. https://www.hobbylobby.com/Art-Supplies/Painting-Canvas-Art-Surfaces/Art-Paper-Boards/Blacktop-Black-Core-Matboard---32"-x-40"/p/107562

I'm familiar with the blackened foil. It IS good stuff, though a bit dangerous to handle. I wound up going back to Hobby Lobby again and this time, found something close enough for my purposes. Thanks!

Don't be afraid to look on the used market for some 1K Fresnels. I'm sure you can get them super cheap or free. I'd offer you some of mine but the shipping cost would probably be more than the fixtures are worth. :D

When shooting indoors, I try to always shoot around F4, unless I'm going for a special look. I usually don't have the budget to do much reinforcement of lighting outdoors but with a good ND filter, can generally get between F4 and F8. I seem to remember reading that Josh Becker generally lights everything to F5.6. It's not as hard as it sounds unless you're doing available light shooting.

The main problem with most LED fixtures, even fairly high-dollar video lights, is there's very little energy between deep blue and green, virtually no cyan and little in the deep red range. What I usually do is use LEDs for my fill lights and then add in a tungsten key, works pretty well.

Hello, it's been a while since I've been here but I have a very specific material need I can't find anywhere. When I worked in television, years ago, we had large sheets of what's basically like VERY heavy, stiff, construction paper. This stuff would stay flat but if you intentionally bent it, it would stay in place and held up to high temps from being clipped to barn doors on 2K & 5K Fresnels. If you tore it, you can see that it's black through and through, not just on the surface like normal construction paper. I really need some of this stuff and none of the lighting/photography places have any clue about it, nor do the craft stores. Does anybody know where I can get something like that? I have to replace a projection screen in an auditorium. Ambient spill light is bad enough on the current screen but they want the new screen to be hung lower. I measured a full-stop more ambient light where the new bottom of the screen is going and need to extend the barn doors substantially in order to get the hard-cut line needed to light people on the stage without washing out the screen. I made some extensions, turning 6" barn doors into 16", out of 30AWG sheet metal and high-temp paint. That worked perfectly for the ECT barn doors, as I could just tighten the bolts to hold them in place. The DeSisti barn doors won't hold the weight and regular construction paper just plain DID NOT WORK. :D I can't use regular flags and C-stand parts due to the construction of the ceiling. Really, that stuff we used in television would be perfect. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

This is sort of off-topic to cinema but related. I was hired to set up a church with a video streaming system. Since they were in a hurry to get up and running, I set up temporary lighting on their balcony going purely by instinct (and a light meter of course). I have the entire stage lit within 1/2 stop using six Fresnels and it looks good on camera. I want to be a bit more "scientific" for the final version, where the lighting will be mounted to the ceiling and there will be eight fixtures total. I did an experiment where I replicated my temp lighting in EASE Focus, which is speaker coverage software. I chose a speaker model that radiated (in the high frequencies) similarly to a Fesnel and adjusted the virtual test frequency till I found the one that most closely matches the lights' beams. See attached. The results are consistent with my practical observations with measurements taken at eye-level. The map is set to cover a 1-stop range where bright red (none showing) is the equivalent of +1/2-stop, deep blue (none showing) is -1/2-stop with green/yellow being on target. The 2nd pic is a quickie experiment for a possible lighting scenario; much better than the current temp lighting with everything within 1/4-stop (but probably can't fully trust it). Sound does not behave the same way as light, as similar as it may be in some respects. Is there software out there that is DESIGNED for lighting? I feel like that would be a lot easier to do than speaker placement software for certain. Choose a fixture type, beam-width, power etc. place it in the room, adjust the angles and barn doors, done. BTW, the grid is 5' spacing. It's a pretty big stage. The 2nd "zone" in the 2nd pic accounts for the difference in floor elevation as they sometimes have people talk in front of the stage. Thank you!

I look forward to seeing some shots! Music videos have always been my favorite projects to shoot because you can get away with just about anything you want. If you can pull off some effect, great! If it doesn't work, it's part of the art form, so no big deal. It's like when I shot a music vid and luma-keyed in some ethereal junk in the background just because it was a plain black background otherwise. The luma key ate into some of the foreground but that just made it cooler!

That looks cool! I love practical effects. One of my favorites for a music video was a shot that waved and distorted. Nobody believed I didn't use some computer plugin (and this was in the 90s), I just shot downward through a Pyrex pan with water in it.

I found this explanation on a site that's largely dedicated to matte paintings https://nzpetesmatteshot.blogspot.com/2016/01/mattes-maketh-musical.html "any color that had more green than blue could not be reproduced. Green and yellow, for example, were missing in action. Yellow turned white, green turned blue-green (cyan). That's because, by definition, green and yellow have more green content than blue. (Yellow = green plus red.) Excess blue was poisoning those colors. Vlahos realized that if he could add just a little density to the green separation in those areas only when it was being used as a replacement for the blue separation, he could get those colors back. He needed a film record of the difference between blue and green, thus the Color Difference System's name. In a pencil-and-paper thought experiment, Vlahos tried every combination of the color separations, the original negative, and colored light to see if he could achieve that difference. The magic combination was the original negative sandwiched with the green separation, printed with blue light onto a third film. The positive and negative grey scales cancelled out, but where there was yellow in the foreground (for example) the negative was blue and the green separation was clear. The blue light passed through both films without being absorbed and exposed the third film where there was yellow in the original scene. The same logic produced a density in green and in all colors where there was more green than blue. This was the Color Difference Mask, which in combination with the green separation, became the Synthetic Blue Separation." I've learned so much about Hollywood effects from that site over the years. It's really worth a look if you haven't seen it already. It actually inspired me to do background (oil) paintings for a recent series of promos I shot instead of finding real backgrounds or making them with CGI. They weren't exactly 100% realistic but the cartoonish action of the video made the paintings work well in this case. Plus, it gave a unique look to the final product.

It sounds like you have the ideal rig already. It may take some experimentation but you might try making a frame that can bolt to a tripod with a high grade front-side reflective mirror (so you can get away with a much smaller, thinner mirror) to put it almost right up to the camera.

Why not do a foreground painting? Put a sheet of glass between the camera and shore, then paint what you want onto the glass. If you paint them so some real elements show through gaps in some cookies, it will have more "life" to it. There doesn't need to be a ton of detail so you can get it done very quickly. You could probably comp in a second pass of the painting with a little bit of motion, for the cookies right at the water line, bobbing with the current.