Gels & White Balance.

N

N3D

Active member
Ok guys so i am shooting a web series in November. I had this idea of sticking a Moon light blue gel to the window in one part of the section and covering the rest of the window to block daylight. The whole point is to make it seem like moonlight (practical day for night).

So question time! If i white balance to indoor lamps (incandescent) what will happen to the Moon light blue gel?
Will it become more cool or look warmer? Instead which Moon light gel should i get?


Thanks guys!

Ned.
 
White balancing for tungsten will make everything in the image (including the light coming through the gel) cooler than when white balancing for daylight.
 
So technically i should get a really pale Moon light blue because it will show up much cooler on camera after white balancing?
 
No technically since you are not shooting till November, you should test beforehand since you have the time. that way all your ducks will be in a row come time to shoot!
 
N3D said:
Ok guys so i am shooting a web series in November. I had this idea of sticking a Moon light blue gel to the window in one part of the section and covering the rest of the window to block daylight. The whole point is to make it seem like moonlight (practical day for night).

So question time! If i white balance to indoor lamps (incandescent) what will happen to the Moon light blue gel?
Will it become more cool or look warmer? Instead which Moon light gel should i get?


Thanks guys!

Ned.
Click to expand...

When you white balance, you point at a white object and tell the camera it's white.

If that object is under orange-ish light, it will adjust the orange given to it by the light and make it white, shifting the whole spectrum to accommodate.

This will emphasize blues, and make them bluer.

You need to be experimenting, as David says.

(You also aren't going to be wanting to light your interior solely by "indoor lamps," if you mean just ordinary practical lamps.)
 
The moonlight gel is not white - so really hacks parts of the spectrum away, so it doesn't just make the image blue, it removes many colours - mainly the greens and reds, so the effect is that the contrast changes very strangely. Things that are blue, look bright compared with things that are red - so you get a kind of monochrome effect - where everything is blue. It's not real moonlight, which isn't blue at all - but looks similar. Years ago black and white features used a blue filter on the camera, and the result was something that looked like night time, yet was filmed in sunlight - which gives the hard shadows that real moonlight has. The distorted greyscale of coloured items works quite well. If you compare real nightie images with the fake ones, very often the fake ones look more 'attractive'. Set your WB to 3200, or 5600 and do a few tests.

The only real problem is that the transmission factor of the dark gel means you need BIG lights because so little escapes. Lee 181 Congo blue is the darkest and weirdest - but so wasteful of light.

If you are into trying gel - then Lee 126 Mauve is a really odd one. It's a kind of purple, but although everything lit with it gets tinted purple, anything yellow turns red. In theatre you can do some great things (Google Samoiloff) so you can light a yellow and red stripey object, or costume with 126 and the costume or object looks red. Change the lighting to white, or yellow, and stripes appear. On video this can look very strange if you turn it into black and white - you can magically make things change without any after effects work! Occasionally seen in pop videos.
 
David W. Jones said:
No technically since you are not shooting till November, you should test beforehand since you have the time. that way all your ducks will be in a row come time to shoot!
Click to expand...
I understand it will be cooler but how do i work out which kind of blue gel i need to get the right moonlight effect. I already have a FULL CTB that could test with but no moonlight blue. Yes i can order it and hope it gets here on time providing its the correct gel to begin with.

also thanks to each and every one of you for the advice, never gets old!

Ned.
 
I keep 2 gel rolls. I containing diffusion and color correction gels and the other containing colors and washes. That way I always have a reference to work from. Some may think it silly to invest a few hundred bucks in gels, but these are tools we use in this business. Gels, diffusion, black wrap, cookies, flags, C-stands, all must haves for controlling and shaping light.
 
Agreed Moseph- I guess the big question is what kind of mood are you trying to set? Does the script call for practicals in scene or are you trying to imply night time inside a darkened room? In the past I have balanced to 3200 and used a single diffused HMI outside the window. This works well if you are going for single point source kinda vibe (moon lit). Do you need to see outside the window? If not, gelled or daylight bulbs in Kinoflow fixtures work well to imply night outside. Try hampshire frost to knock them down a bit. Are you shooting daytime or at night?
 
chagrin said:
Agreed Moseph- I guess the big question is what kind of mood are you trying to set? Does the script call for practicals in scene or are you trying to imply night time inside a darkened room? In the past I have balanced to 3200 and used a single diffused HMI outside the window. This works well if you are going for single point source kinda vibe (moon lit). Do you need to see outside the window? If not, gelled or daylight bulbs in Kinoflow fixtures work well to imply night outside. Try hampshire frost to knock them down a bit. Are you shooting daytime or at night?
Click to expand...

Im shooting Daytime. With incandescent practicals and 150w dedos. And daylight softboxes.
 
N3D said:
Im shooting Daytime. With incandescent practicals and 150w dedos. And daylight softboxes.
Click to expand...
I'd gel your daylight softboxes closer to 3200K with some 1/2 or Full CTO.

Put some ND gel on the windows, and set your WB to 3200K. All your Dedos will go white, your daylight softboxes will go white (assuming te correct strength of CTO is used), daylight practicals will go a tad warm, and your outside light will be a moonlight blue, assuming you put enough ND on the windows - depending on the sort of day, you might need to cut 8 stops, so two layers of ND 1.2 would be in order.
 
jax_rox said:
I'd gel your daylight softboxes closer to 3200K with some 1/2 or Full CTO.

Put some ND gel on the windows, and set your WB to 3200K. All your Dedos will go white, your daylight softboxes will go white (assuming te correct strength of CTO is used), daylight practicals will go a tad warm, and your outside light will be a moonlight blue, assuming you put enough ND on the windows - depending on the sort of day, you might need to cut 8 stops, so two layers of ND 1.2 would be in order.
Click to expand...
Thats pretty cool, thanks for that. Im going to have a think and use all the information i have gathered.
CHEERS AGAIN!

ned
 
Don't buy rolls, buy sheets and get lots of different ones to try - there are dozens of blues - so a few sheets of each one are far more useful. Rolls are great for colours you nuse often, but too expensive to experiment with.
 
David W. Jones said:
Some may think it silly to invest a few hundred bucks in gels, but these are tools we use in this business. Gels, diffusion, black wrap, cookies, flags, C-stands, all must haves for controlling and shaping light.
Click to expand...
But it is silly. Why pay for expendables when you can just steal them from a job that already has them? Save your money for hard goods.
 
Moseph said:
But it is silly. Why pay for expendables when you can just steal them from a job that already has them? Save your money for hard goods.
Click to expand...

I think I do understand this -- are you advocating theft? If not, a detailed explanation is in order.
 
When a job is over, there usually are loads of gel cuts in a crate that nobody really needs. I wouldn't call it "theft" since it's probably gonna get thrown in the garbage unless someone else wants them. Or you could ask the boss if you can cut something fresh off a roll.

Another thing you could do is to keep the diffusion from rented 4x frames after a job is done. Frames aren't rented with whatever material is in them included, rental companies price them for just the frame and they'll often leave the color or diff in them if it's still good. But they can't really charge you for not returning the frames with a gel in them since they didn't pay for that gel, some prior production did.

If you want entire rolls, that's a different story. I know Arri CSC sells partial rolls for a flat $40, regardless of how much is left, vs over a hundred for something brand new, but the only free rolls I've gotten were from a production company that was moving and throwing them out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top