Smoque Filters

[Frank DiBugnara]

A few days before my last shoot, I found out I was not able to smoke a few locations. So I decided to bring in a set of Smoque filters. There has been some talk of these lately so I thought I'd post some side by side comparisons from my shoot. I always shot one take without the filter. Stock was 5205 and stop was about a 4.

 

I had no ability to test ahead of time, so I played it safe. I had intensities 1 though 4. Even on a wide lens, a #1 (lightest) looked pretty significant in the viewfinder--much more significant than on film. I shot this scene at two focal lengths:

 

Wide Shot was UltraPrime 24mm. I used a #2 on this shot:

 

 

24mm Prime with Smoque #2 Quicktime

 

For comparison, here's another take clean with no filter:

 

 

24mm Prime No Filter Quicktime

 

For the close up I switched to the the Optimo 29-250 at about 110mm. I assumed that the Smoque filters would behave more like the ProMists in that the effect would be much more pronounced at longer focal lengths. Because of this, I shot the CU with a #1. The effect was pretty subtle:

 

 

CU with Smoque #1 Quicktime

 

 

CU with no Filter Quicktime

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

Where I'm seeing the effects of the filter the most is in the elderly gentleman's wrinkles. His face appears quite smoother in the filtered take, and of course contrast is just a smidge lower.

 

The difference is small, but some light diffusion on the lens in this case seems quite nice.

[David Mullen ASC]

The tricky thing with Smoque filters is that the effect depends on the brightness of the light source in the frame. In these examples, there is not a window much brighter than the room itself for the filter to really catch and create a halo, so the effect is subtle. So you have to watch out shot-by-shot for anything that might overreact to the filter.

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

The tricky thing with Smoque filters is that the effect depends on the brightness of the light source in the frame.

 

And with that actor crossing in front of the scene and blocking the light source, that would effectively ruin the effect of creating the appearance of actual smoke.