B/W SIN CITY QUESTIONS

[Goose]

Hey guys, I'm a 1st year film student and not very experienced in cinematography. I have a few questions and would be very greatfull for any advice I could get...

1) When filming in for b/w (done in post) should i worry about the colour temprature?
2) If I am planning to extract certain colours from my scene (e.g everything but orange), how do you propose I do this? High colour temps that dont contain much orange's?
3) Advice on getting the very dark/ bold sin city look?

Thanks. This is a small experimental project and I have my idea's on how to do it. I was just after some advice on those loose ends. Thanks again

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Color temp of set lighting really isn't an issue with a b&w image created in post, other than perhaps the camera will give you more noise in certain colors than others. That wasn't really an issue with "Sin City" since they were recording 4:4:4 HD to an SRW1 recorder with low compression.

The contrast was a function of lighting mostly, plus post color-correction.

In terms of having one color in the frame, that's trickier. The simplest thing is to think of it as a chroma key -- since fleshtones are close to red, choose a color for the object you want to leave colored that is opposite of that, like Chromakey Green or Blue. Dress the rest of the scene in the opposite, in warm tones or neutrals, so that you can pull a color difference key around that blue or green object. Then turn the background image b&w in post except for that keyed-out object, and then you can twist the color of that blue or green object into any other color and composite it back into the shot.

But since that is not always possible, more people will do it using rotoscoping techniques, i.e. basically draw around and then digitally paint an area in the all b&w frame.

Or some combination of the two approaches, creating a key and rotoscoping. There are efx software for this sort of trick.

 

[Goose]

Thanks for the advice Dave. I really appreciate the quick responce. I will keep all your pointer in mind when I attempt this project in the near future.

Thanks again.