Poor Mans Car Bokeh

[Gabriel Devereux]

Dear All,

I recently came across the concept of having a series of small holes covered with different coloured gel on a roll or a series of large cards for bokeh in poor mans process (Poorly drawn diagram attached bellow). I have a number of questions and am looking for tips if anyone has attempted or tried and tested this method. I imagine you'd need to use quite a low powered fixture and the sheet itself would need to be quite far away from the cars back window? For white light I imagine you'd attach 216 or equivalent over one of the holes?

Thanks

Gabe

[AJ Young]

I'd imagine you'd need to have at minimum Opal behind all of the holes and gels for a frosted look.

Bad pitch, but what about using a projector onto a black sheet with dots made in photoshop/after effects?

[Gabriel Devereux]

15 hours ago, AJ Young said:

I'd imagine you'd need to have at minimum Opal behind all of the holes and gels for a frosted look.

Bad pitch, but what about using a projector onto a black sheet with dots made in photoshop/after effects?

Thank you for the reply! I was thinking of possibly layering black sheet with small holes, assortment of gels and then white diff. 

Re- photoshop and projector.  Projecting onto a black sheet? I was thinking of doing that a while back but never thought it would work with the lack of reflectance. I imagine duvetyne would be too dark and matted for it. Would you by any chance know a good material?

 

[AJ Young]

Well, traditionally rear projection for poor man's process used normal screen material (ie white), but I feel that the black levels are too lifted when doing that because of the white material. In your case, you're not looking for details, just bokeh dots, so I figured a black cloth would keep the black levels low while a strong enough projector could still illuminate just the dots. (Of course, it'll need to be on the highest setting haha)

Any type of black cloth would work, duvetyne being standard.

[Barnaby Coote]

I'd suggest trying Rosco ND frost or dark grey translucent acrylic for back projection, it keeps contrast and saturation a lot better than anything white. The highlights will pop a lot more than with black material too.

Edited July 30, 2020 by Barnaby Coote