Glow effect

[Tiago Pimentel]

Hey guys,

 

Very curious about how this simple, yet beautiful effect could be achieved (check from 1:10 to 1:50):

 

 

There's obviously more light hitting the actors than the rest, so probably softbox on grids. Anyone knows if this kind of magical glow could be achieved on digital and with the actors not wearing white (which is obviously helping them to stand out in brightness levels).

 

Thanks

Edited November 12, 2018 by Tiago Pimentel

[Stuart Brereton]

It's a little hard to tell from a low res clip how much of the 'glow' is an intentional part of the frame, and how much is a compression artefact. It looks like either a slow iris pull that overexposes the whole frame, or the key light is on a dimmer, and brought up during the shot. Either way, the glow is from overexposure, and is probably accentuated by lens diffusion.

[David Mullen ASC]

Those clips are from "Bringing Out the Dead" (1999), shot by Robert Richardson using behind-the-lens nets for diffusion, though in other movies, he's used ProMist type filters. You get halation whenever you combine diffusion with overexposure, there are many types of filters you can use. The heavier the overexposure, the lighter the diffusion can be to get the effect, you don't need much once the light gets very intense.

[Tiago Pimentel]

Thanks. My main question here is how did they concentrate the glowing effect mainly on the two actors. Is it a combination of a softlight source with eggcrates and the fact that they're using white (hence overexposure is faster than the rest)? And I wonder if the same effect could've been achieved without them using white.

 

Thanks!

[David Mullen ASC]

No, it wouldn’t have been as effective if they weren’t already the lightest toned thing in the frame. You can’t get black or dark clothing to halate with overexposure. You could use light-toned clothing though. Whatever is lighter will burn out faster, so if the faces are the lightest tone then that is what will glow before the darker objects will.

 

They are already semi-spotlit even before the overexposure begins. You could of course light a scene where you fade-up a harsher spot light on someone that is overexposed but that would be different than what they did here, which was have the exposure change.

[Tiago Pimentel]

David, so you have the same opinion as Stuart. This was probably done with an iris pull to overexpose the lightest parts of the image. You also said they are already semi spot lit? How so?

 

Edit: just got what you said. Would you say the only light source is that spot on them?

 

Thanks

Edited November 13, 2018 by Tiago Pimentel

[Stuart Brereton]

You also said they are already semi spot lit? How so?

 

If you look at the shadow of her head on the wall, you can see that it is fairly hard. It's probably a large lamp outside of the window, presumably through some light diffusion, but retaining a hard quality because of the cut of the window frame.

[David Mullen ASC]

Its a very strong sidelight, either very bright to allow one to pull the iris several stops or they did a speed change to a lower frame rate to increase the exposure time. I suppose it is possible that it is a dimmer cue except then the start of the effect would be very warm, unless it was done with metal shutters.