Alexander H Davis

Are you talking about input or output IRE? Log or 709? 2020? What Camera? Sony has a 33% grey whereas most others are around 18-22%. Every camera is different and opinions vary on this subject. IMO if you expose your skintones (fair, white skin) for 709 they will generally look bright and overexposed (if viewed on an LCD, LED, or other display that is beaming light at you from powered diodes) if at 70% IRE and generally speaking for beauty, commercial and other advertising formats, this is what is expected of your white skintones. (This is why, in my opinion, when viewing cinematography as an artform, it must be done in a projection house, as your eyes will be more comfortable, and you will see the work as intended.) As for darker skintones, you can expect to deal with a lot more reflected light than with white skin, which is generally not too reflective unless coated with oil or sweat. This brings into question what type of color are you looking for when talking about skintone, and generally varies from application to application. With darker skin, more care needs to be taken to stray light hitting your actors skin, and tungsten lamps are generally employed here to gain a fuller spectrum of true light. If you use low cost LEDs from China, the chances they will have a lot of green in them is very high, and even if the luminance of the skin is at 70%, this will still not be a true "skintone" as it will be reflecting a lot more green light back at the camera, which actually has twice as many green pixels as red or blue, so you will get a lot of green contamination in the skin you were not aware was present on the day. As David says, in dramatic fiction, professional cinematographers tend not to worry as much about "technical skintones" and worry more about the general mood of the scene, which often times helps the audience to understand the reality of the situation they are looking at. This is where a good understanding of how to control your contrast ratio effectively and efficiently is a great skill to have. If you are shooting a comedy, you might want to push those skintones a bit higher and keep them there in a lot of scenarios with more front light to make sure you get the expression and the comedy of the action well lit, but in dramatic narrative, you have more of a responsibility to the audiences suspension of disbelief. You have to trick the viewer into thinking this is how the scene looks to the naked eye, not some camera tech that I employed to make sure you as the audience know I know what I'm doing with a camera and the latest tech. When lighting for skin, I generally look for who my character is rather than adhering to a technical set of guidelines and work with direction and contrast more than worrying about what is at 70%. This will help you create dynamic lighting scenarios and allow your actor to move in the space freely, creating more and more suspension of disbelief, and your audience will appreciate that because the performances will be better. Another great way to do this on a low budget is to shoot a safe negative at all times. Only light your scene for 7-9 stops of range as 709 is only 5-6 stops of output. This will allow you a lot of room to move around in the grade and help reduce your noise because you are keeping the signal within the middle of the signal to noise ratio. Keep doin what you love!

Looks great! I'm sure collimnated light is hard to come by across the atlantic but it sure does add a lot of depth here!

Blast away! What do I need to take out, what's strong, what do you like, what don't you? Take no prisoners. Feel no shame. This is just my art, it doesn't define me as a person. alexdavisdp.com alexdavisdp.com/reel Cameras used: RED Weapon, RED Dragon, RED Scarlet, Sony F5, Arri Alexa, A7sii (some, kinda not really. lol) Lenses used: Zeiss ZF.2, Zeiss CP.2, Zeiss Standard Speed Mkiii, Zeiss Super Speed Mkii, Angeniuex 25-250 t3.9

Please excuse my honesty here, some of this may come off as somewhat harsh, but I think there is some good stuff here if you edit the piece down. The film is graded well, the mood is very cinematic and there are only a few instances where the shots look over cooked or have too much contrast to fit with the rest of the film. The edit pacing is way too slow, and I feel like a lot of what you are communicating here could be done in a more stylized approach in the middle, smash cutting to the next day. Check out the way they achieved this in the middle of "Edge of Tomorrow" - very similar in terms of a repeating day with small differences, but since you have already established it once through, you can respect the audiences time and keep it short, give them the info they need and then deliver the final scene where the meat and potatoes lie. Cinematography is pretty good, you get the feeling of claustrophobia at points and the loneliness is pretty obvious but overall I think it takes too long to get through and it could very well be 5 minutes long and not 13. There are several compositions I feel could have been better and the sizes chosen start to get a bit repetitive. I can understand the idea of repetition to show monotony, but the way the edit stands currently is just too long and drawn out for me to care about the character. There are no scenes where I feel connection to this loner, who I don't understand until the end. I feel like if you cut out the middle, and got to the downward spiral a bit quicker, you would have something powerful to those who have gone through this. Another thing is that I think the choices made by the actor are inconsistent. Sometimes, he is so small that it is nuanced and professional, but then at other points you can clearly tell he's trying to act. This has a lot to do with the choice of compositions in several shots where the actor is forced to do something that is un-natural, and since we are close to him, we see the expressions even more exaggerated than they need to be. Try going wider as this will make your character feel small, you can trap them in a box and watch them like a rat. These are the feelings you want to think of when composing with a single actor who needs to carry the film. Don't give them too much responsibility to communicate to the audience with big gestures or laughs, as this adds a lot of the forced nature to it and I'm sure he felt he had to be that way because the camera is trained on his face, so he's having a hard time deciding how to act naturally, whereas the profile shots and off eyeline compositions allow the actor to move freely through the frame instead of feeling like they have a camera trained on them at all points. But overall, GREAT JOB, YOU MADE A FREAKING MOVIE AND NOT MANY PEOPLE CAN SAY THEY DID THAT!!!! ?

Looks great, did you use any sort of filtration or did you just shoot it clean? I would have gone heavier if you did use filtration, probably like a 1/2 hollywood black magic or a full white BPM to soften out the skin and give the highlights a little more bloom, making them a bit easier on the eyes, or I would have opted for an Angeniuex lens to make those beauty shots really pop. Obviously, the skin tone for the African-american girl is not right, too much green, but as you said, you didn't have control over that aspect. I still think it may have been avoided with the proper choice of lighting. May I ask - did you use LEDs or Tungsten for her keylight? If you used LED I would definitely think that may have something to do with it as darker skin has a tendency to reflect green a lot and when using LEDs, they tend to shift a little more towards the human working visible spectrum, which is green heavy. (The lower quality brands tend to shift even more in this direction.) Whereas a tungsten lamp, being full spectrum, will reflect the skin accurately, and especially with darker skin tones. If you did use tungsten, did you have any negative fill to block stray light from other sources of bounce, like perhaps a green screen on the other side of the studio or a setwall that may have had stray light on it, as these will sometimes reflect enough onto darker skin that it will reflect on the spectral highlights of their skin. The short with the Asian girl is great, her lighting and light direction really compliment her facial structure and makes her hair look really nice. Overall great job! Just being picky haha