Mixed Lighting Situation

[akmeister]

Hello I've got a question regarding a mixed lighting situation for a 16mm film I'm DPing this weekend. I don't know if I'm thinking correctly here, or I might just be confusing myself more.

Basically we are shooting a scene in a kitchen, and there is a wall of windows on one side which the director wants open. I'm using Fuji 240T so I need to correct for the daylight, to bring it to the temperature of our tungsten lights. He does not want to spend the money to gel the windows with CTO, which I have done in the past, so I'm going to use an 85 on the camera to compensate. The potential problem however is that we want a cold morning feel to the scene, so I had planned to use blue gels on our Tungsten lights. But if I use the 85, will this take away the blue effect on the lights? I have this feeling that it would, but I'm not sure. My other idea was to not use the 85 and allow the daylight to go blue anyways, and we could adjust it on the print. This idea makes me uneasy though. Do you have any advice?

Thanks ahead of time.

Sincerely,
Aaron Meister

 

[akmeister]

This too

This too

I should also mention that the scene consist of a fight between a mother and father in front of their 8yr old son. The mother then hits her son and he runs away. The actors are African American with reletively dark skin tones. I was thinking that if I didn't use the 85 or other similar filtration, when we correct for the gray card in the printing, it will bring down the reds and give a more subdued look, which might actually work pretty nice for the scene. Although I'm wondering if it'll too much on their skin tones. The director really wants a cold uninviting look. Also it's supposed to be a rainy weekend up here in the Bay Area, so we'll never actually have direct sunlight that calls for the 85. Just a little more information.

Thanks,

Aaron

 

[David Mullen ASC]

You have two issues here: overall color temperature and color temperature difference between light sources.

As for the overall color temperature, there's no reason to filter the camera with the F-250T stock to 5500K with an 85B filter if you want a blue-ish look anyway. You can either shoot with no filter and time some of the excess blue out (which is how I shot all of "Northfork") or you can use a partial correction filter like a light Coral or an 81EF, etc.

In order to get the dailies to look the shade of blue you want (I'm still assuming you are shooting in daylight), there are a number of methods. One would be to shoot the gray scale with a warmer, more correct filter, and then shoot the scene with a less warm filter or no filter. For example, if you shot the gray scale under 5500K light using an 85B filter on the lens, and then switched to an 81EF for the scene, you'd have a slightly cold image on dailies. (I'd also shoot a sign after the gray scale that said "COLOR: LIGHT BLUE TONE" or something like that.) Or you could shoot the gray scale with an 81EF (so the colorist would correct it to look normal even though it's only a half-correction in truth) and then pull the filter for the scene, so it looks half-blue (even though it's full blue on the negative.)

You could use a Tiffen LLD filter (Low-Light Daylight) which corrects for excess UV and cancels some of the blue. But I'd still add a warming filter for the gray scale as well as the LLD and then pull the warming filter for the scene so that the timer leaves it blue-ish. If you shot both the gray scale and the scene with the same filter, or no filter, the timer would try and make it normal-looking. The LLD filter barely loses 1/3 of a stop and a lot of people don't make any exposure compensation for it.

As for the color of the lights, if you want the feeling that the scene is just lit with the cold morning overcast light, you'll need to gel your tungsten units to 5500K with Full CTB, which loses a lot of their output. You'd probably be better off with small HMI's or fluorescents like Kinoflos with daylight tubes. But you could have a mixed-color effect like it's a blue morning and a tungsten lamp is on in the room. Then perhaps you could just gel them with 1/2 Blue, shoot the gray scale with this light as well, and have this normal color look from them with colder light coming through the window.

 

[akmeister]

Thanks for the advice. I think I'm definitely going without any filtration on on the scene. Thanks again.

Aaron