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suede look in No country


Mate Widamon

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Hello everybody,

 

I have an upcoming beer commercial and in terms of colours my director would be very much after a look Roger Dakins achieved in 'No country for old men'.

It is budgeted for 16mm so I am doing a filter test tomorrow with arri 416 + Cooke S4 on 250D, 200T. My aspect ratio is 1:1.78 and it goes for digital intermediate. My intention is to complete a test with Antique Suede, Chocolate, Tobacco, Warm Promist and Gold diffuse filters and then see what can be done on Da Vinci in order to achieve that desaturated look. I have the feeling that Antique Suede will provide me the best result since I should not really soften the image. Also, I believe production design and art direction is crucial here, we have to select the appropriate colours for each frame. I have mainly exterieurs, and a pub interieur with light brownish walls and yellow practical lights.

 

Any other suggestions and advices are greatly appreciated!

 

Mate Toth Widamon,

Budapest

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Hello everybody,

 

I have an upcoming beer commercial and in terms of colours my director would be very much after a look Roger Dakins achieved in 'No country for old men'.

It is budgeted for 16mm so I am doing a filter test tomorrow with arri 416 + Cooke S4 on 250D, 200T. My aspect ratio is 1:1.78 and it goes for digital intermediate. My intention is to complete a test with Antique Suede, Chocolate, Tobacco, Warm Promist and Gold diffuse filters and then see what can be done on Da Vinci in order to achieve that desaturated look. I have the feeling that Antique Suede will provide me the best result since I should not really soften the image. Also, I believe production design and art direction is crucial here, we have to select the appropriate colours for each frame. I have mainly exterieurs, and a pub interieur with light brownish walls and yellow practical lights.

 

Any other suggestions and advices are greatly appreciated!

 

Mate Toth Widamon,

Budapest

 

I think you're on exactly the right track. The one thing I might add is to test expression 500T. I shot something where I wanted a similar look and wanted to stick with one stock. It worked out pretty well. I exposed the interiors rated at 400 and the exteriors were pulled a stop and rated at 200.

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I have an upcoming beer commercial and in terms of colours my director would be very much after a look Roger Dakins achieved in 'No country for old men'.

 

You don't say which look of 'No Country..." you want to emulate.... Day or Night, or one scene in particular?

 

Roger has said in interviews in the past that he doesn't like to use filters in front of the lens, so whichever look you are trying to reproduce may well be a result of lighting gels or color-timing

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What I can scrape from my mind from reading Roger's forum:

 

Shot w/ Zeiss master primes, and a 4K scan.

 

He used 7212, 7217, and 7218 for his stocks, 100T for bright day ext., the 200T for .ext and .int later in the day/dusk, and the 500T for most .int and night .ext.

 

Night Ext. he used Full Straw and 1/2 CTO on his lights to match sodium vapour streetlights.

 

Also would use unbleached muslin as either diffusion or a bounce.

 

Definitely didn't use any sort of color filters, whatever coloring was done was most likely in the DI.

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I think I can remember him saying that he didn't use any filtration and that colours & textures were complete led by lighting and art direction. To then take it into a DI.....I think that is pretty much how he likes to shoot through all of his films.

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That warm look is mainly production design and location, plus some warmth in the lighting, and then perhaps some warmth in the timing, but not much -- if a lot of your design has brown in it, the movie is going to naturally look brown.

 

I mean, look at this frame from "Manure" -- everything is painted brown, all I did was use a little warmth for the sunlight:

 

900manure2.jpg

 

I keep getting asked what tricks I used to make the movie look brown -- you're looking at a normal color image (well, slightly desaturated) of a brown world there...

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I mean, look at this frame from "Manure" -- everything is painted brown, all I did was use a little warmth for the sunlight:

 

900manure2.jpg

 

I keep getting asked what tricks I used to make the movie look brown -- you're looking at a normal color image (well, slightly desaturated) of a brown world there...

 

That is such a cool look, David. It reminds me a lot of the exteriors of O'Brother Where Art Thou. Any idea when we might be able to see Manure?

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Stunning, David. I'm now really interested in this shot -- when you say it's just a brown world, do you mean it looked just like that to eye? It's not just the color, but the whole shot looks like it's one of those hyper-real HDR photo meshes. I should probably conclude that it's a combination of lighting and such, but it's really a showstopping look to me. Anything else used to nail down that specific look that you can recall so I can then take that idea and rip it off :)?

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Stunning, David. I'm now really interested in this shot -- when you say it's just a brown world, do you mean it looked just like that to eye? It's not just the color, but the whole shot looks like it's one of those hyper-real HDR photo meshes. I should probably conclude that it's a combination of lighting and such, but it's really a showstopping look to me. Anything else used to nail down that specific look that you can recall so I can then take that idea and rip it off :)?

 

Everything is painted brown -- the crops, the sky backing, the wardrobe. The only thing that isn't brown there is the fleshtones, and they aren't far from brown.

 

Otherwise, I had a little bit of smoke on the set, I overexposed the sky painting by blasting it with light (18K HMI on the ground), I had soft daylight overhead (Kino 55 blanket lights and HMI balloons) but used a tungsten 12-light for the sunlight (3/4 backlight) effect -- the RED camera was set to daylight-balance, so this tungsten sunlight was orange, the skylight was white in comparison. But through the smoke, the tungsten sort of washed the frame with orange haze.

 

On this wide shot, I believe I also used a Tiffen Smoque #1 filter to haze up the image (though probably unnecessary in this case); on close-ups, I used a Schneider Classic Black diffusion.

 

The RAW file was naturally muted and desaturated and I didn't really do much to add the saturation back in (this frame is an actual RED frame, reduced in size, plus I added some digital diffusion in Photoshop by using a Gassian Blur overlay.)

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Thanks for this very appropriate photo, wonderful work David!

And thanks for everybody for all useful comments! I am still happy I did the filter test today, I'check the result tomorrrow.

We only have one set of Masterprime lenses here in Budapest and I am eager to try it, now this project seems like a good reason to talk to production about it. Anybody has any experiance how Masterprime handles lens flare? I am a great fan of Cooke S4, but when it comes to lens flare S4 can be very funny, especially on longer lenses. A clear glass can be useful though, to avoid those rainbow type of lens flares.

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