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How did they light these amazing shots?


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Are there more than one color of light used here, or is it all the magic of Resolve?


With grading, would it not require doing heavy tracking at every shot in every part of the image? I found that too difficult to do so far. And I don't see how it would be possible to light the shirt that way in the first image. Or is the shirt's color really not white but greenish white? So how are the colors we see in these 3 images achieved?


Also, I know that in Hannibal they grade using Resolve, but if there is tracking done for the colors, is it done in Resolve or something like After Effects?

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Third one does, and looks like this:

 

0e58a6975ca24a22ca59898c7c2dd1e4.png

 

It's a biggish not-that-soft source above and to the right of camera. His nose is pointing a bit to his right of it, hence the shadow on his right cheek. If you just wanted to light the nearest character, it could just be an LED panel with some diffusion on it, or a chimera on a 1K a bit further away. It's not that soft so I guess it's something a couple of feet across, about six feet away. Or, it could be something four feet across, about fifteen feet away.

 

Lighting that still is easy. What's always hard is how you light that whole room so that he can walk up to camera and be somewhat consistently lit the whole time. The only way to do that is with large diffusion panels a long distance away, like a 12-foot-square diffuser thirty feet up in the roof with a 10K behind it. The more distant it is, the more gently it falls off, and the further you can move without objectionable changes in brightness, but the more equipment is involved.

 

...which is where this sort of thing gets difficult and expensive.

 

P

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There's nothing particularly amazing about any of those, they're just moderately to very soft sources, where the light has been diffused through a large area of translucent material, or where it's been bounced off a large, matte reflector.

 

What in particular interests you about them?

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How does one achieve such different colors?

 

In the first image the shirt is greenish but the highlights of faces and hands and the watch aren't affected by green color. There's also some yellowish highlights in the background. Is this done by color grading using secondaries with tracking? That was my first assumption but Hannibal is filled with such shots, I don't see how to do that without spending a lot of time.

 

The second image, again, has different colors for highlights, the background and the face. That shot look like a bit simpler since the background and foreground is easily apart. But the question is, is it the work of grading or lighting using different color lights?

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Don't overlook the fact that it may just be production design. In the first image, the guy may just be wearing a blue-coloured shirt. In the second, it may just be a blue curtain.

 

However, I think it may just be light, grading and camera setup. In the Hannibal image, the skin tones actually are quite cool and dingy, which is consistent with cool light, camera setup or grading. It's possible the skin tones have been isolated in the grade and played with separately, and it would be reasonably normal to do that for each shot. Often, the grade could simply be copied from a previous shot, if it had been photographed reasonably consistently. But it could just be lit like that.

 

I would suspect that the background in the second shot has just been lit with greenish-blue light. That colour is currently very popular and has replaced more cyanish blues as a fashionable choice for colour contrast in backgrounds.

 

I have used Lee Filters' #728 "Steel Green" to achieve this sort of effect, but many similar colours are available.

 

Remember that if the colour contrast is great, it is reasonably easy to isolate them and grade separately. I would guess (and it is a wild guess) that the face in the second image wasn't shot so warm and orangey, it was probably graded to look like that. But that would have been relatively easy to do, because the face is already orangey compared to the green background.

 

P

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So then can I assume that other than lighting the background the way you like it, the color of the lighting isn't something to worry about if you have the production design and color grading in place?

 

My whole concern was that I was always thinking about the grading until the moment I started to get into lighting and then thought for a second that to achieve such colors you needed to pay great attention to color of the lighting.

 

I can live with trying to figure out shaping the light and the shadows but if color plays such great role in it, it would introduce a whole other element to the picture (pun not intended) so that was what I wanted to get out of my head.

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Pics 1 & 3 look like soft, slight cold toplight, perhaps from partially corrected HMIs, or kinoflos tubed for 4300k. The warm accents in the background of pic 3 are most likely tungsten lamps. In pic 2 the Key is white light (that's light that matches the color balance of the camera) and could be tungsten or hmi. The background is lit with some sort of gel. Could be Steel Green, as Phil suggests, or one of the many similar colors that are available.

 

Color is just another tool to evoke a mood, just like exposure. Ideally, it works in concert with production design and wardrobe.

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