Dark is the new Bokeh

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I remember that Darius Khondji's work on Fincher's Se7en made a deep impression on me when I first saw it. However dark the frame, the characters' eyes were always perfectly lit.
 
CharlesPapert said:
I can't speak for a single other one of my colleagues than myself on this, but I do know that most of us attack this all very differently.

I came up in the era where one's meter was your most valuable tool outside of your own eyes. These days it sits neglected in the case almost all of the time. My gaffer does use his to set the initial levels, and I make final adjustments based on a combination of calibrated reference monitor (I use the Sony A250), waveform/RGB parade and false color, in that order. Regardless, I still think of and communicate in stops, or fractions of stops, as I always have. Slightly to my surprise, I'm still able to "feel" light levels when out on the set, i.e. I can generally walk into a room and know what the exposure is in a given area within a fairly tight range.

A few months ago we were pre-lighting a set that was adjacent to our shooting set, we were in a major pressure cooker timewise and I was running back and forth giving notes to the electric crew down to dropping scrims etc. This was an interior shot night for day, and we had several large windows looking out to a covered breezeway that we had to bath in HMI to appear as day, yet in shadow (quite a bit more complicated than diffusion on a window that just needed to be blown out, for instance). I kept meaning to grab meter but always forgot. I gave as many notes as I felt I could without seeing it on camera, assuming we would make final adjustments once we made the move. When my monitor came online, I was pleasantly surprised to see that every instrument was right at the level I needed it to be. I tell this story not to impress, but to point out that despite my preference to light via monitor, I seem to have managed to retain the OG skill of lighting by eye with meter as confirmation. I don't really think my ratios have changed substantially--I'm filling out the digital negative as much as I did with film (and the far more delicate range of pre-log video).

I did recently shoot a short film and decided to play it less safe than I usually do with dark interiors that have much of the information in the toe (which is to light to my satisfaction, then open up 1/2 to 2/3 of a stop to fatten the negative, as it were). In post, the director wanted to open up a face here and there and I saw the noise come up. We were able to tame it with some NR and detailed work within the window, but I can't say as the final result was really worth exposing down to begin with. Admittedly I work in a genre that much of the time requires seeing into faces and eyes more than the sexy dramatic stuff, so I'm used to having to play it a little safe, so that is what it is.
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Your post for me lays out some great fundamental differences to how shoots are approached today...I would say especially so since camera's have become so inexpensive and the image so good...if lit properly (talking narrative here). And for me, the short cut result is always glaring and completely distracting....not unlike the difference between a steadycam and gimbal. I work with a DP whenever a budget exists, though on anything small and a small crew, it's always with a light meter...as important a piece of gear as anything else in the bag...including on the scout. There is however no shortcut to where you are today, in your dicription of feeling the light. It reminds me of the days of working on film sets and how terrible the viewfinders were and video village could only give you a poor facsimile of playback, but you did not know what you were getting till viewing dailies...in my most cyninical moments I think it's the individual making the choice between too flat or too dark as an attempt to do SOMETHING DIFFERENT to distinguish the film somehow, but I'm of course generalizing greatly here....truth is, I don't understand the choices. I had a problem watching both Arrival and the latest Blade Runner....it focuses my attention on the wrong thing, though. I love both films. But in the case of both films, it was clearly something decided by both the Director and DP....and as their pedigree is beyond question, it's in the end, clearly something I'm missing!
 
What meters are people using? The tried and true Spectra Cine IV-A or something with a color meter and built in reflective spot meter?
 
jvc said:
The same criticism was levelled against Gavin Finney for his outstanding work on Wolf Hall for the BBC. Personally, I thought the cinematography was a tour de force on both the technical and artistic levels. Visually, it was sumptuous while being utterly faithful to the story and the characters. His focus puller deserved a medal for getting everything spot on while shooting handheld with so few footcandles. And yet the show received widespread criticism for being “too dark”. It’s an interesting philosophical question; if the role of the cinematographer is to serve the story and if he or she does that in a faithful, artistic way but the result alienates the average viewer and takes them out of the story, is that a success or a failure? I pose that as a genuine question as I don’t pretend to have the answer. For whom do we make our films? And in this age of content being consumed in wildly different environments on very different devices, does it make a difference?
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So the question has raised its head again, this time much more publicly with the widespread reaction to the "Battle of Winterfell" episode of "Game of Thrones". Fabian Wagner's work has been heavily criticised in the media and on social media for being "too dark." Industry professionals have leapt to his defence, pointing out all the technical problems of streaming a popular show and suggesting it's wrong to blame the cinematographer for HBO's technical distribution problems.

So who's right? I don't think there's a simple answer. We can debate whether its incumbent on a cinematographer to account for the ways in which an audience will view their work. How much do you account for sub-optimal conditions, such as internet bottlenecks, small screens, crappy ambient viewing conditions? How do you find a balance between someone watching on a phone on a bus and someone watching in a darkened, big-screen home-theatre?

Years ago, when I was a student at film school. I did a workshop with the wonderful Carlo di Palma. It had just been announced that in the previous year, more VHS tapes of movies had been sold than theatre tickets. I asked him if this affected the way he worked. First, he refused to believe the evidence ("No! People will always watch movies in theatres!") and second, he flatly refused to compromise his work for the new medium. In one sense, he was wrong, hardly anyone watches in movie theatres these days. In another more important sense, he was right. In the long term, the technical limitations can be overcome and what remains is the work in its fullest expression.
 
To the point of considering the medium: I have seen my own work "lifted up" when broadcast, as somewhere in the chain an engineer or an automatic setting pushes the luminance upwards. I do my best to be aware of the pipeline and while it is out of my hands, it is worth taking into consideration when we are shooting, at least to have a conversation. An old example of this would be the effect of a certain speed of panning when shooting 24p, going back to the film days--if asked to pan slower or faster I would indicate that this would put us into the "no-fly zone" and be an annoyance to the viewer.

A more recent version of this perhaps was visiting the set of an HBO series that I had learned through one of my AC friends was always shot at 1280 ISO on the Alexa (and wide open on fast primes, which meant a ton of ND for day exteriors). I had engaged the DP in online conversation about this and they were cagey in their response (a non-response really) and on set I asked the alternating DP about the reason for this. The response was that it added texture and grit to the otherwise too-clean image. I said that in my experience, noise had created some issues for me in the past with cable/satellite compression--it tended to get knocked out so the desired effect is reduced, but in the process mess with the bit rate. The DP had literally nothing to say about this. I got the idea they had never considered the pipeline.

You can't really plan for the limited scope of people watching on phones and tablets and how that affects perception, but I think the drawbacks inherent in the traditional delivery means need to be taken into account, and super-dark scenes are known to be problematic.
 
I agree. But as I understand it was deliberate? Symbolizing the characters’ blah blah blah.

But yeah youre not making films/tv for other cinematographers; youre doing it for regular folks, the fans. So you have to consider how theyll experience it/what they’ll feel and think.

And yes, in all the colorist forums they absolutely consider how the end viewer will see it...phones, tablets, poor. quality sets, poorly set up tvs. That’s the whole point of the high end grading monitor and perfect lighting/wall color of a pro suite...to give the largest number of people the best chance to experience what the colorist intended. To that end you also have to compromise a little since you know almost no one has an idea viewing environment (“hmmm this might be too dark for some people. We should boost it a little”).
 
The whole calibrated monitors in a suitable viewing environment seems like a bad copout. You're making things for an audience, ultimately. It's foolish to not take their average viewing variables into consideration.

I feel like I've read that audio engineers will often listen to their work in crappy ear buds, car stereos etc. It has to be palatable to what the *vast* majority of people will be experiencing it through, which isn't $10,000 studio speaker set ups.
 
Yes. I thought colorists did the same...grade for the most part on the stuff but then check it on phone, bad tv etc. and make “compromise tweaks”.
 
And the reality is....tons of dark and moody content has been produced, but this episode is the first one (to my knowledge) to have some an overwhelming number of complaints.

That should say something.
 
Bern Caughey said:
We recorded the initial broadcast, & several scenes were far too dark, but the next night streamed it on HBO Go, & could see many of the details previously missed.

That said, it was still “too freaking dark”.
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I watched on a well set up older high-end Sony XBR TV on HBO Amazon Prime (now integrated into Prime- don't need to run the Go app)- and it was fine (my TV is carefully set up not to crush blacks, etc.). So perhaps the broadcast path crushed the blacks into invisibility and overall it wasn't tested on typical consumer devices where they could see that they pushed it too far to the dark side. Couple reasons why: emotion / tension / drama, and it saves ALOT of money on CGI production costs (I still noticed where they cut corners haha). Still nowhere near the number of technical issues (visual and sound) with 70mm Interstellar in the theater (first time I walked out and got a refund).
 
I completely understood what they were doing. But with that being said, my eyes actually struggled to focus during a lot of the scenes in question. I didn't watch it until Monday night, so by then I had heard about the dark scenes, so I watched in the bedroom on my OLED set with all of the lights out, instead of my large rear projection in the den, which can struggle with really dark scenes.

Something I haven't seen brought up, though, do you think it could have been partially financially motivated? If you can't see the large undead army, you don't have to actually have a large undead army. If you don't have to animate CG characters or actually have actors made up like them, then you don't have to pay for them. Just a thought.
 
Way too freakin' dark. On my brand new TCL 6-Series 55" 4K LED HDR tv with brightness on high and pitch black room, I had a hard time making out what was going on. I normally have zero issues watching nighttime scenes in movies and TV shows, but this Battle of Winterfell was something else.

I understand it was a creative choice. I just wish they had chosen differently.

Kickass episode, though!
 
The first movie that really fell apart for me on a 4K TV (TCL best model) was Blade Runner 2049 which I bought as an HD version on Amazon. It looked like a dark, dim photocopy of what I experienced in the theatre. I noticed a huge difference when I picked up an HDR 4K copy of it. I think typical cable encoded and even streaming on HBO Go really diminished the quality. This is where Netflix and their 4K Dolby Vision pipeline really pays off. Shows like Altered Carbon and The Crown look amazing, even though they have very different shooting styles. I suspect in a dark room with a high bit rate it looks really nice. In fact I rewatched GOT as a stream this week and though it was much better and you could tell they were trying to be purposeful with the lighting.
 
Not seeing the army of the dead when it was on the other side of the field worked well for me, it created tension. And having a very dark battle where you don't know what's going on can put you into the mindset of those who "were" there and couldn't completely see and understand what "was happening" around them. That said, yeah, it may work for a while, but over more than one hour it gets tiresome. So: I don't think it was too dark, but I think it was dark for too long.
 
Run&Gun said:
Something I haven't seen brought up, though, do you think it could have been partially financially motivated? If you can't see the large undead army, you don't have to actually have a large undead army. If you don't have to animate CG characters or actually have actors made up like them, then you don't have to pay for them. Just a thought.
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I said as much to the wife, actually.
 
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