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White cyc question


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Been away a while.

 

Happy new year!

 

Looking for advice

 

Have a white cyc again

need to film moody piece against wall of white cyc

but it needs to look almost totally rim light with almost no spill onto cyc wall

 

imagine this 93791436_6132a97d07_m.jpg but with a tiny spill onto the back wall - the spill needs to read grey

 

I told the producer that we need a seperate shot on a grey or black backdrop onblack floor - but the shot is a one shot wide reveal using dimmers to bring up the whole room (a deep artsistic reveal if you must know)

 

I wanted to move the person off the wall cause then I could use a dedo and black the floor but nope they need the wall

 

I haven't got budget to test - but my best idea is matt the floor and wall as best as I can with DULL SPRAY - then use a dedo at really low levels. I was also considering pushing the 5218 stock to force me off the curve

 

kind of stuck and looking for any ideas

 

thanks

 

Rolfe

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The hair halo light would be from putting the lamp behind the person, but you may need to edge/backlight them as well for the bits of the face that don't glow from having a light hidden behind it.

 

In terms of the glow on the wall, a white wall will be near impossible to drop off. You could not light it at all and probably the bounceback from the backlighting will fill in the white wall! You may even want to create a soft vignette, either in post using Power Windows or a circular ND grad filter, to knock down the white wall on the edges of the frame.

 

Yes, you need to boost contrast a lot -- that photo almost looks like hi-con b&w.

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thanks David - do you know what the most parallel spot light is after a laser and Xenon :-)

 

I assume a dedo on max spot is better than an open face PAR? - I am trying to get the lamp head in the 3 cm space between the talent and the wall - but hanging above the talent off a truss - I am trying to keep as much spill off the wall as possible...

 

BTW: I saw your trailer for Astronaut Farmer - looks great - I love the interior scenes in the capsule -congrats!

 

thanks

 

Rolfe

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Don't you need more space between the subject and the background? This is what will

give you shape and 3-D type effect instead of a flat look. I sometimes use edgelight to

each side of a small group of people(4,5) when doing a group shot. Same principle should

apply here but you'll only have one subject. Quality,intensity and direction of light will be

crucial to a good outcome.

 

Greg Gross

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do you know what the most parallel spot light is after a laser and Xenon :-)

Rolfe

Sounds like a Source Four ellipsoidal job - the new version with the improved projection optics (sharper shutter cutoff) might be just the ticket. You could skim S4's in from the side and top and never touch the cyc.

You could shutter them for a tall rectangular pattern and only light the area of the actor that the camera would see, keeping spill down on the back of the head and therefore spill on the cyc.

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Hey,

 

I've shot in a white cyc room before and I can tell you that keeping spill off the white is going to be insanely tough in the first place, especially if you use the 500T '18 stock.

 

If you want contrast, PLEASE DO NOT USE THE '18 stock. If you want to shoot black and white, use a Print stock, which has an ISO of "4", yes, 4! 3,000 watts of light at 3 feet should do the trick. Use fast lenses.

 

With color stocks, I'd use 50D, and under expose by atleast a stop, and make sure the rim light is atleast 2+ stops over.

 

If this person needs to be touching the white cyc, that seems wierd to me since you can't get that close to a cyc wall because of the curve and you aren't allowed to walk on it.

 

I'd hang a decent sized black solid in the background. That white wall is going to spill more than you think.

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Hal - by the S4's are you talking about something like the 5' ETC light - a stage light?

Yes, but I'm not certain if the 5 and 10 degree lenses would be good enough for an extremely tightly focused pattern. The standard and improved optics versions come in the glass lens barrels (50,36,26,19 degree). The 5 and 10 degree S4's use large, plastic fresnel lenses. All the newer S4's will take either HPL575 or HPL750 lamps which are 3200K.

If you need daylight, there are HMI substitute socket assemblies available for the S4 ellipsoidals. There was a post not too far back where someone mentioned there's an LA rental house that has adapters available to plug Jokers into S4's. To assure you that S4's will work for film/video, David Mullen mentioned that Bill Wages uses quite a few S4's on "Big Love".

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thanks for the replies- this is weird but I now have permission to go either white cyc or black cyc

 

the girl is white which is fine but the male lead is African American - is it going to be hard to seperate him from black background.

 

I might have to edge light him all the time...

 

Any advice

 

thanks

 

Rolfe

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  • 4 months later...
Hey,

 

I've shot in a white cyc room before and I can tell you that keeping spill off the white is going to be insanely tough in the first place, especially if you use the 500T '18 stock.

 

If you want contrast, PLEASE DO NOT USE THE '18 stock. If you want to shoot black and white, use a Print stock, which has an ISO of "4", yes, 4! 3,000 watts of light at 3 feet should do the trick. Use fast lenses.

 

With color stocks, I'd use 50D, and under expose by atleast a stop, and make sure the rim light is atleast 2+ stops over.

 

If this person needs to be touching the white cyc, that seems wierd to me since you can't get that close to a cyc wall because of the curve and you aren't allowed to walk on it.

 

I'd hang a decent sized black solid in the background. That white wall is going to spill more than you think.

 

I'm trying to create a similar shot to this but in front of black velvet curtains and trying for full body or as close as possible.

 

Two probably stupid questions:

 

how do I meter the rim light?

and

what kind of light should I be using hard or soft light (I'm guessing hard.)

 

(I'll be shooting 100T 16mm at as low a fps as possible)

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I'm trying to create a similar shot to this

 

how do I meter the rim light?

and

what kind of light should I be using hard or soft light (I'm guessing hard.)

 

 

Hard light is the way to go. For this kind of hi-con look, incident meter the backlight from the subject position with the dome facing the lamp (not the camera), and then open up 3 stops from your reading. Make sure there is nothing bouncing back the backlight from the camera side of your subject in order to keep the shadows dark.

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Hard light is the way to go. For this kind of hi-con look, incident meter the backlight from the subject position with the dome facing the lamp (not the camera), and then open up 3 stops from your reading. Make sure there is nothing bouncing back the backlight from the camera side of your subject in order to keep the shadows dark.

 

Thanks!

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Thanks!

 

 

So let me get this staight. You have an actor that has to be 3 or 4 inches away from a cyc and you want to rimlight him to get this blown edgy look?

 

Even if you edge him with striped lekos the wrap of the light won't give you the sillouette. he'll/she'll be sidelit.

 

I would try bundling a 4x4 kino-flo together with out the houseing and inserting this between the actor and the cyc so that the actor hides the lights from the camera. You'll have to mask the lamps to the cyc so that they don't spill onto the cyc. Blackwrap. The bounce off the actor should give plenty of expsure to the cyc. You could put a duv. layer on the actor's side to the cyc to cut down bounce light. I still think you'll need more like 12 inches of space though.

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