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Shooting commertials on a cloudy day

illia

New member
First of all I would like to apologize for the lenguaje mistakes I can make.
I´ve just shot my second commertial as a DP with a sdw 750 P, mainly exteriors under a cloudy day, clipped white sky and even if the light was uniform and didn´t change to much during the day, I had the problem of the low contrasty image, flat surfaces and desaturated colors. I used a couple of arrisuns 1250W (well, low budget commertial of course) and tried to increase the contrast with a backlight on the characters, put some hot lights on the background (with a mirror) and increase the light on faces with a par used as a fill light over the camera (also as an eyelight). I used also a white promist that gave a washed out image which I think was ok because it gave us more to play in postpro (I talk about the contrast).
Nevertheless I think the image wasn´t attractive enough for a happy happy commertial as it was supposed to be, mainly becouse of the white sky (I couldn´t avoid it, we shot in parks) but also becouse I think the fill light on faces wasn´t enough light to separate the actors from the background, but I was afraid of giving to much light and have an unnatural effect... I´m not really sure if I should have played with the wardrobe (it was a little monochrome) or have asked for bigger lights... The fact is that in post the result was good enough but I noticed a lot of variety in the skin tones (cold and bluish in some scenes, and yellowish or pinky in others)
 
Color Correction

Color Correction

what editing system do you use? i use Avid Express Pro and i have used the color correction in avid to fix skin tone issues. One time we were filming outdoors in great sunlight (cant afford lights yet) and a cloud moves over the sun, CRAP SHOT RIGHT? color correction made it look just as good as the rest of the shooting. so basically alot of these problems can be fixed in post production.
 
We edited the commertial on an avid xpress to make the offline with wich we took the edl to make the online on a smoke system, the color correction was made also in the flame wich was a great machine (you also need a good operator for accurate changes). We could fix the color issues, warming the skin tones while we shot on shadows (bluish skin tone) and so, the point is that I would like to know how to prepare a shooting under these climatic conditions trying not to leave too many things to post... I´m mainly asking for lighting ratios (backlight to mimick the sunlight) fill light, or key light for the character to lift up the amount of light on a face and separate it from the background...
 
oh haha well yeah the avid color correction was just a way to fix it, i dont have alot of experiance with outdoor lighting, sorry!
 

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