Lighting Project

[Techie Andy]

HI guys!

 

Thanks to all that responded to my last post.

 

I have another interesting query for you all...

 

My project has taken a slight turn and one area I am investigating now is to do with post-production techniques and lighting. I have based this on the video for Dido's 'White Flag'. On 'the making of...' I am sure that for one particular scene, she is walking down a road. She was lit with what appeared to be a flourescent light with a deep magenta-ish gel over it. In post-production, they somehow reversed this effect so her face appeared 'natural' and the backgroung had turned a really cool blue.

 

I would like to know if anybody has experience with techniques similar to this or any comments on this kind of lighting.

 

Thanks again everybody!

 

Andy

[Brian]

Hi Andy

 

It's an easy effect to do. As you say you light the face in a saturated colour for the shoot. In post, you desaturate the picture and adjust it's hue until the skin tones look right which means that everything else will be desaturated and/or have different hue.

 

The other way to do it would be shoot it straight and then create a travelling matte during post (a soft-edged mask) which you can use to selectively tint parts of the picture. The first way is the quicker.

 

These days nothing you see on screen need be real; TV and film post techniques mean we can create just about any effect you can think of.

 

Brian

(with 10 years as chief engineer of a major london post-production house under his belt)

[Techie Andy]

Thanks Brian!

 

I just wanted re-assurance that it was possible and not too complicated!

 

Do you or anyone else have any more experience/ideas for techniques like this. Where something is done in terms of lighting at the shooting stage and then further worked upon in the post-production stage?

 

I know you mentioned that the possibilities are endless but I would like some further examples if possible

 

Thankyou once again!

 

Andrew

[Brian]

Don't forget film techniques, which are often done 'in camera' (by adding filters etc in front of the lens).

 

Have a google on 'shooting night for day', which is where you shoot a night seen in broad daylight, one example I found is

The other, more "English" approach is to use a tremendous amount of light and ND the lens (use a dark, neutral colored gel on the camera) and adjust the f-stop so it looks dark. It sounds screwy until you try it and do it well, in which case it looks like a million bucks.

 

Most of the big English epics like Lawrence of Arabia were filmed this way, and you can see every penny of it on the screen. I even remember doing a somber scene once in a little girl's bedroom at dusk after her best friend had died. The set was only about 12 x 15 feet, but we must have used more than 100,000 watts of tungsten and HMI light on the set. The thing was, we bounced all this light into three huge 20x20 white griffolyns (huge white reflectors). The light, gelled to be slightly bluish like late evening, in turn filtered into the set through two small windows... and that was just about all that lit that room. All that power, and we only had an f 2.4. The thing was, since the sources were so huge, and far enough away, the light stayed almost the same f2.4 from the window where her father started the scene all the way across the room where he walked and sat on the foot of the bed to comfort his daughter. The exposure just didn't change much, and there is no other way we could have lit that shot and have it look so natural. It was beautiful.

 

The thing about shooting a scene 'with effects already added' is, of course, you're stuck with it. Once you get it into post and it's wrong then the edit often becomes a rescue session. Without starting one of my rants about the lack of talent in a lot of the people involved in the 'creative' side of the video industry I'll just say that we have a number of saying such as 'SH :P T in, SH T out'.

 

The other technique you might want to google up is lighting for chroma key.