Tomas Gomez

Hey everyone! I'm gonna be shooting a student short film in a few days and I wanted some tips on how to achieve the all-red look of the attached image. We only have a couple of Tungtsen 1000w and 650w lights, and no extra money to buy gels, so I was wondering if it's a good idea to shoot it under just the tungsten lights and give it a heavy red color grade, also to avoid having  the output of the lights reduced and focusing problems that I've heard shooting under red gels could give. I have also read on forums that someone recommended shooting under magenta gels (I have 3) and then adjusting it to red in color grade, but I dont really get why they recommend the magenta gels instead of just no gels? 

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Hi everyone! So I am kind of a beginner in this world of color grading and i'm going to make a quick color grade for a project that's going to be shown on a local tv news channel. I am wondering if for this I have to bear in mind something specific for the workflow or is there something different that's normally done for a standard, web workflow? Thanks in advance!

On 8/1/2020 at 1:04 AM, Satsuki Murashige said:

I think it's doable, though this kind of look is highly dependent on finding the right locations and art direction. You don't need much light to shoot shots like that, as long as everything in front of the camera looks good to begin with. It's important to find locations with large rooms, high ceilings and dark wood walls and dark wallpaper. It can also help to have a camera with high dynamic range so you can expose for the interiors and not blow out the bright windows. Take lots of location scout photos to plan ahead with your lighting team.

Wide shots will be the most tricky to frame up, but can sometimes be simple to light. For example, I shot this scene in a historic house with just existing light for the wide shot. There would be no way to fill these huge windows with movie lights on a student budget.

I intentionally let the windows blow out here to hide the non-period correct house next door - it would have looked a lot better if we shot on an Alexa or film that clips highlights more gently, but it was necessary to get this shot. For the rest of the coverage, I just used a 4x4 Kino Flo for a key light, a bounce board, and a few 150w tungsten Dedolights for accent lights.

In general, I would consider approaching the tighter coverage by picking the backgrounds you want and bringing in a key light to shape and augment the existing light. Or bringing in a diffusion frame to soften the window light if the actor is in the light.

For lighting units, I would see if you can get a hold of daylight sources like: 

- 4' 4Bank Kino Flo with 5600K tubes for Key Light

- Litepanel Astra 1x1 LED for Key Light

- LED Dedolights for accent lights

- Joker 800 HMI for Sunlight effects

- Joker 400 HMI (or Joleko) for Sunlight effects

Not sure how common these lights are in your area, but they shouldn't be too expensive to rent and you should be able to plug them into a normal household wall outlet. Your tungsten lights could work, but you would have to gel them with Blue gel to convert them to daylight color, which lowers the light output by 2 stops. For scenes where you don't see the windows, you can set the camera to 3200K white balance and take the gel off of your tungsten sources. 

 

 

 

 

Hey thank you for the detailed response! So a few things about this: 

-Are the dark wood walls to prevent light bouncing?

-I will be using a Sony F5

-Yes so even though I have never used them I also thought about the Hmi and Kino but you know, I study in a public college in a third world country so our budget is really, really low. However I will try to get at least 1 kino maybe with my own money, to have at least 1 good strong key, since the ctbs and the diffusion will reduce greatly the output from the tungstens.

-I also thought about playing with the camera´s white balance to avoid having to gel the tungstens, but wouldn´t that be a problem since I would be mixing 2 different color temperatures (tungsten from the lights and daylight in the ambience)? So I would end up with 2 different color temperatures?

-Is there any type of cheap diffusion material you recommend? All I see in my faculty are paper-like diffusers hanging in front of the lights with tweezers but I don´t really like the difussion produced by those..

Hey there everyone! I am a colombian film student and wannabe cinematographer and I am looking for some advise for an upcoming short film me and some classmates are preparing. So I am going to be the DP for this short and in terms of lightning I am looking to have an aesthetic close to the images I attached below for the interior daylight scenes. Logic tells me that to achieve this I should have some strong key lights motivated from the windows on the characters and expose to those bright areas of the face, so everything else will be darker to achieve that high contrast ratio. We´ll probably have like 2 or 3 arri 1000 and maybe like 6 arri 650, it really depends on what the faculty will have available at the time and the budget that production will give us (which will be very, very low). So really I want to have a realistic view of our lightning capabilities with such few lights, can I achieve this look with the lights that are available? If so, what tips can you guys give me to achieve it on an extremely low budget? One of our likely sets is a house with really big windows, so one of the strategies I came up with is partially blocking some windows to control and limit the entrance of light (because it may be too much and spreading everywhere). Am I thinking about this the right way or am I completely off? Thanks in advance!