How do I get the film/cinematic look with a digital camera?

[David Mullen ASC]

Or a move like "Dune" (1984) where the image was flashed with brown light to take any blue out of the shadows, and many scenes timed very warm:

[David Mullen ASC]

Or "Geronimo" (1993), all shot through Tobacco filters:

[Satsuki Murashige]

There were plenty of movies shot on film in the past that played with color temperature to get a warm or cold cast -- I don't see that particularly as an aspect of digital image manipulation anymore than pulling the 85 filter off when shooting on tungsten film to make a day scene go blue as being a "digital" technique.

 

Certainly, though I think that grading with video-style Lift/Gamma/Gain corrections to tint shadows, midtones, and highlights separately, as well as photo-style curves and secondary manipulations is fundamentally different from global RGB printer-light film-style corrections. I can't help but think that it leads to fundamentally different-looking images - what we might call 'the modern look.' For better or for worse, many of the images we see today could not have been made photochemically. I think that is what makes images that don't use modern grading techniques feel less slick and possibly more nostalgic.

 

I realize there were ways of tinting shadows and highlights separately in the pre-digital grading era like flashing, colored smoke and diffusion, or through optical printing, but I don't think they were ever the norm.

[David Mullen ASC]

Movies in the past tinted shadows / blacks in different ways -- no, it wasn't the norm but there are examples, particularly the movies that used the Lightflex device to flash the film with colored light. And plenty of movies in the past have gone for a faded, warm look, particularly for westerns and period movies.

 

What was hard to do in the photochemical days was to change gamma easily, but I think a movie that copies a photochemical trick like flashing or silver retention printing for a manipulated look isn't necessarily making a movie look more digital. I guess I believe that all you should judge is the finished look and whether it works or not, not label some manipulation techniques are "good" and others as "bad" just because they were done with one technology or another.

 

And keep in mind that we had these video style lift/gamma/gain corrections for features shot on film starting in the D.I. days of the early-to-mid 2000's and even earlier for TV commercials, music videos, etc. back in the 1980's when the flying spot scanner and the DaVinci color-correctors first appeared, again for things shot on film.

 

It's not necessarily a bad thing that one can more easily achieve an artistic effect, take an idea and make it into reality. Personally I'm not against experimentation and I'm also not opposed to unreal and unnatural images, I think people are too obsessed over realism these days. And now that it is easier to experiment, yes, we may see more failed experiments but that's just the price we pay.

 

If I see an odd approach that clearly has a strong visual take on the dramatic material, I'm more likely to cut it some slack than when I see the same technique applied to something blandly commercial and safe, story-wise.

 

I actually have less objection to visually manipulated material than I do with the slick, perfected, overly polished look of most movies today.

 

But come on, if shooting in a different color temperature other than for a neutral balance is to be avoided, it doesn't leave a lot of creative tools at the cinematographer's disposal! We'd be back to the 1940's and 50's color movies where skin tones had to be neutral no matter if an actor was standing next to a fire or under the moon or watching the sun set.

[Peter Bitic]

I view color grading mostly as a gimmick, a heavy-handed approach to create an atmosphere or evoke feelings (or just trying to make a picture look pretty). We live in a world where we are sad, happy, depressed, scared etc. despite colors being natural, so a filmmaker should be able to achieve those states in the audience without color grading (same goes for lightning really, where certain genres of movies are lit differently than others, which is a totally overused convention). I like color grading as a purely visual effect sometime, but I think the *default choice* of filmmakers should be a neutral picture, not as now where it is actually hard to see a natural-looking movie.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Makes a lot of sense, thanks for the macro perspective David. I guess conventional thinking is the death of art. It's troubling that it can be so seductive.

[Mark Kenfield]

This is just one example of exaggerated color temperature shift, and it doesn't look very good at all, the lighting is pretty terrible and the composition is far too distracting. They should have placed the camera lower on Rami Malek, it looks like floating heads. it doesn't make sense to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLo-XXvFn2k

I couldn't disagree more. I think it's perfect. The show is about a guy who is so totally detached from reality and the people around him, that he's completely incapable of relating to the world in any conventional way.

 

Personally I think the visual construction of the show absolutely nails the presentation of that. It puts you right there in this world you can't quite relate to, where everyone's looking out the short side of the frame, and seems a little off.

 

I think the show's a masterpiece for that (in combination with the sublime writing and acting).

[Tyler Purcell]

As for movies with a warm cast along with photochemical manipulation, take a look at "Delicatessen" (1991):

Great example, so is Amelie. So riddle me this... why couldn't the look of Delicatessen been done in camera?

 

Do you know if they did a writeup in AC about it? I bet they did, it's such a magnificently shot film.

[David Mullen ASC]

I view color grading mostly as a gimmick, a heavy-handed approach to create an atmosphere or evoke feelings (or just trying to make a picture look pretty). We live in a world where we are sad, happy, depressed, scared etc. despite colors being natural, so a filmmaker should be able to achieve those states in the audience without color grading (same goes for lightning really, where certain genres of movies are lit differently than others, which is a totally overused convention). I like color grading as a purely visual effect sometime, but I think the *default choice* of filmmakers should be a neutral picture, not as now where it is actually hard to see a natural-looking movie.

 

 

If paintings don't have to limit themselves to straight-forward naturalism, I don't see why movies should.

 

As an artist, you are free to pursue your own personal muse, but to say that every filmmaker should share the same aesthetic values as you is rather presumptuous -- and if happened, would produce a rather narrow range of artistic output. Imagine a total history of painting that only began with the High Renaissance and ended before the Impressionists. Imagine cinema without the color stylizations of Vincent Minnelli, David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky...

 

Besides, the origins of using colored lighting in cinema was partially to get away from the unrealistic approach that the light in a scene is always neutral in color, when in real life, we can encounter all sorts of colors.

 

For example, I did a scene in "Twin Falls Idaho" in a bathroom lit with green light:

 

Based on something I saw in real life, the sun was shining through a green plastic curtain over a small window in a shower, and was bathing the entire room in green light. But I also chose that color for the surreal effect it had, being a story about conjoined twins, and I felt that this degree of stylization was motived by the nature of the story. I was inspired by paintings by Munch, Picasso:

 

 

 

I'd hate to imagine a history of color cinema with only neutral and naturalistic lighting. We'd lose "Gone with the Wind", "Singing in the Rain", "The Red Shoes", "Moulin Rouge", "Henry V", "The Conformist", "Dune", "Dick Tracy"...

 

[Peter Bitic]

Of course you are right that the artist should be able to choose whatever approach he deems appropriate for the work he is doing and I certainly don't want to live in a world where everybody would share the same visual philosophy. By me saying what the "default choice" should be, I didn't mean it in a sort of dictatorship way, where I would literally want this to be the default choice of everybody, it was just expressing what I find problematic with most movies and what I would do differently. In other words, I think most filmmakers have bad taste plus there is an outside pressure for films to look a certain way (following trends, visually competing with other movies that "look interesting", trying to please clients, etc.). So the default choice now seems to be to apply some kind of relatively aggressive grade, and since I don't see this as an act of doing art, I would prefer if the default choice was something more neutral and less heavy-handed. The same way I would prefer if many other film cliches were toned down, generally.

 

But I certainly would not want for the filmmakers that are actually doing art to limit themselves in any way, even if that means that they will make decisions that I will disagree with.

 

Now, as far as your comparison to paintings - I think the latter is a medium that allows much more color stylization than movies. The movies and photography are very realistic in their nature, plus the image is produced by a machine, so fiddling with the colors after the fact risks coming across as superficicial and artificial. It's not the same as painting. In fact, I think the more unrealistic the movie looks in general, the better it stands to color grading. That's why maybe it worked better in older films, but not so much in modern, ultra HD ones, I don't know. Same way that old visual effects can look less artificial in a way despite being more cruder.

 

Also, by neutral look, I didn't mean neutral color balance, but a look that is realistic. The latter picture looks realistic to me (in case they are in a room with red lights), while your blue-tinted example doesn't. It doesn't remind of anything I have seen in real life (that's not a criticism, just explaining what I meant by that word). Also, a movie can look realistic even if the colors aren't exactly real (for example, by using a movie stock that doesn't perfectly represent colors), so I am of course not talking about 100% realism when I am talking about a neutral look. It's just a look that doesn't use grading as an effect.

[David Mullen ASC]

You've never seen people in colored light?

[Peter Bitic]

I have (I said the red colored picture looks realistic to me in case they are in a room with red lights), but I have never seen anything like your example, especially in a bathroom. Maybe I could "buy it" if that was a scene in a disco where different colored lights were flashing or in any other context where it would make sense to have such strange lights, but for a scene in a normal environment, it looks very stylized (which was also your intention as you said).

[David Mullen ASC]

Keep in mind that I did not grade the image to be blue-green, it was lit that way by having my lamp coming through the window, simulating sunlight, pass through a blue-green curtain. If the curtain had been pink, then they would have been in pink light. I've certainly seen this effect many times in real life, light passing through colored fabric and bathing a person in that color. Happens all the time when you lower a yellow shade on a window to block the sunlight, for example. People standing under a green fiberglass awning are lit green as the sun passes through the plastic.

 

You really don't recognize the famous sunset scene in "Gone with the Wind"?

[Peter Bitic]

Heh, now I have remembered how everything looked green under the tents, when we were camping as scouts (though not to the same degree as your shot).

 

I didn't recognize it, nope (I have watched the movie once, but don't remember the scene neither do I know it for being famous).

[Miguel Angel]

I think that movies shouldn't be treated as a "real" element.

 

At the end of the day it is all a process which is really manipulated by a lot of people and if a cinematographer can't photograph a movie to create emotions and a photography arch by using what he / she wants to use, why should a director direct a character? or an art director to create an intention on a set?

 

Coloured lights, shades, etc happen all the time in real life, you can go to Morocco and you will see the sunlight hitting the green / blue fabrics which are on top of the markets and you will see a green / blue space surrounded by the interior of the stalls or stores which are usually very warm!, go to any super fancy hotel in Madrid and you will see that the windows on them usually have some sort of tint.

 

Many bathrooms in nightclubs have a lot of colours too! and I have been in some which looked more or less the way David shot that scene in "Twin Falls Idaho"

 

Even the bathroom in one of my previous houses had a red tint when the sunset happened! and when I shot part of a short-film on it, I decided that I wanted it to be more or less that colour because I wanted to create a feeling with the way I chose to light it.

 

 

If cinematographers were only able to be "realistic" when shooting something, it would be a very sad job and I reckon that the job of a cinematographer is to know when he / she can go further with his / her thoughts on lighting and experiment with it and when to be absolutely invisible.

 

I also think that a lot of times what we think that it is "grading" it is just a clever combination of colours and photography.

 

As for the "teal / orange" / "teal / pink" patterns, "somebody" shot this many years ago, on film and with no Baselight or Davinci..

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7UefOfcly4

 

:)

 

Have a lovely day!

[John E Clark]

Now, as far as your comparison to paintings - I think the latter is a medium that allows much more color stylization than movies. The movies and photography are very realistic in their nature, plus the image is produced by a machine, so fiddling with the colors after the fact risks coming across as superficicial and artificial. It's not the same as painting. In fact, I think the more unrealistic the movie looks in general, the better it stands to color grading. That's why maybe it worked better in older films, but not so much in modern, ultra HD ones, I don't know. Same way that old visual effects can look less artificial in a way despite being more cruder.

 

 

In still photography there was quite a bit of manipulation of the image. To be sure it was more tedious in some types of effects than a wipe on a Photoshop control... but one could 'tone' B&W images to

variety of colors. Even ones that appeared 'neutral' often were toned with Selenium or Gold, yielding a bluish/violetish/redish twinge depending.

 

Kodak papers of the early 70's tended to have 'warm' blacks, were as other papers such as Ilford had a 'bluer' black. Kodak always struck me as 'muddy'... so I tended to other papers.

 

But the pink elephant in the corner is.... B&W was hopelessly a stylization of the reality... unless of course, a person was born with out any color response at all...

 

In terms of 'painting'... often shadows have a bit of 'blue' mixed in, since the human vision+perception system tends to 'read' bluish as darker than say yellowish. So one would 'paint' highlights with yellow

twinges, shadows with blue, and the human would 'see' contrast.

 

What Digital has allowed is far greater control over such things for both still and motion picture processing that what was available in the past.

Edited July 14, 2016 by John E Clark

[Matthew W. Phillips]

Artists should be able to use any tool in the toolbox. Whether that is the DP using on set techniques or whether they (or Director for those that shoot their own movie) want to use color grading. It shouldn't really matter what they use if they are able to communicate what they want. If we carried that reasoning into other parts of the set, like Miguel said, we would be stuck with "reality TV: essentially. No fun.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Great example, so is Amelie. So riddle me this... why couldn't the look of Delicatessen been done in camera?

 

'Delicatessen' was finished photochemically, shot by Darius Khondji. Amelie' went thru a DI, shot by Bruno Delbonnel.

 

The 'Amelie' two-disc DVD has a great featurette on the grading process with Delbonnel. They had lots of power windows and secondaries to change specific colors in the frame and to make certain colors pop. It's interesting to see what the film looked like before grading, it actually looked similar to 'Delicatessen' and 'City of Lost Children', very warm overall and a bit desaturated.

 

The film dailies that they show in the DVD looks like they shot through some kind of warming filter, maybe Antique Suede. Or maybe they just timed the prints warm. I don't know if 'Amelie' went thru any silver retention processes, but I doubt it since they probably needed all that color information as a base to do the digital grade.

[Tyler Purcell]

Dang, I'll have to re-watch the Amelie extras, it's been a while. So maybe Delicatessen's look was done in camera then.

[Luke Lenoir]

As far as I know, Jeunet likes using a tiffen sepia 2 to get his signature antiquated look, but then he also adds colors digitally.

 

And according to the documentation Ive seen about Delicatessen, the footage went through the ENR process, and then some portions were flashed with color.

 

I've always wondered how they got that perfect high-contrast orange / teal / green color cast in some of the scenes. It looks to be more than lighting.

 

Hands down one of the best looking movies of all time.

[John E Clark]

It's been a while since I've seen any of Jeunet's films, but I recall on the "Amelie"(2001) Special features, there was some discussion about setting a 'blue' thing in the shot, otherwise with a 'yellow' cast.

And that was due to a Brazilian artist, Juarez Machado, style that the director liked.

 

I also believe "Amelie" was one of the first for Jeunet to be shot in part 'on location'. His other films were studio based, where total control of the lighting was available.

[Carl Looper]

Part of the great thing about digital is the ability to do more involved post-work without busting the bank. And to do stuff that just would have been next to impossible to do in film anyway. But certain effects (lighting being the main one) you just can't do in post. You have to do them on the day. Or at least it's a zillion times cheaper, and better looking, to do it on the day. I mean how does one, in post, add a back light to get some detail in some hair to contrast with a dark background? One can imagine some artist (and/or AI algorithms) labouring over each frame to add it in. While that's not impossible it does turn the work into a different kind of work. One might say the result (or indeed the process) is more graphic than photographic, so to speak.

 

But it all depends on the kind of work one is trying to make. If a distinction can be made between the graphic and the photographic, one can choose either or both, or indeed choose to suppress the distinction (to advantage or disadvantage). One can certainly argue that there is no difference, but creativity allows one to make such distinctions anyway, and exploit such distinctions. They can be made visible or invisible. A choice not to use digital post is as much a creative choice as one that does do so. And one might use or invent a particular philosophy to guide those decisions without in any way denying that alternative philosophies are just as relevant.

The worst philosophy is the one that insists on all others being wrong. A decision to do something in a particular way does not mean, on another day one can't make an alternative decision. Too much emphasis can be put on consistency. Or not enough for that matter.

 

C

Edited July 15, 2016 by Carl Looper

[David Mullen ASC]

In both the books "Cinematography Screencraft" and "New Cinematographers" there are examples of polaroids that Khondji took of his set-ups for "Delicatessen" -- usually the film stock was either 5248 100T or 5296 500T, and there is often a Lightflex flash level indicated ("LFX 1"). There is also a filter called "TR1" or TR2" that I don't know, unless his handwritten "B" looks like an "R" and he meant "TB" for "Tobacco". He also mentions using "golden gels on lights" for some scenes.

[Tyler Purcell]

Lightflex?

[David Mullen ASC]

An article from International Photographer on the device:

http://www.slideshare.net/MartinConn/lightflex-article

 

The short answer is that the Lightflex consisted of a light box above the lens pointed down into a curved sheet of plastic in front of the lens so that the camera saw an even reflected glow of light over the whole image, essentially like flashing the camera negative but doing it in front of the lens so the effect could be seen through the viewfinder, and dialed up or down as desired, and gelled if you wanted a color flash.

 

A photo of the Lightflex unit in front of the camera, with additional lights on each side of the lens -- this set-up was used for "The Wiz"; the Lightflex flashed the shadows with colored light and colored light next to the lens reflected back from 3M Scotchlite material used on the sets and costumes, similar to what was done in "Superman: The Movie" to make the Krypton costumes glow:

 

The Lightflex was replaced by the smaller ARRI Varicon device, where a piece of glass glowed from being edge-light:

 

Darius Khondji used a Panaflasher device on "Seven" to flash the negative but used the ARRI Varicon device on his non-Panavision movies like "Evita" to do the same thing.