Let's Talk About Clothing on Film ...

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Homunculus

Carbonite Member
Hi guys. I've been falling in love with cinematography. I want to learn about it from you experts.

One thing so far I've been clueless about is clothing. What I mean is choosing types of clothing and colors/textures of clothing that are correct for your scene and lighting setup and lens choice, etc, etc...

Are there any beginner's tips, like caveats, or cardinal rules sort of things that we can talk about here regarding clothing on film. For example let me ask a few beginner's questions to get the dialogue going:

1. in a scene are you supposed to accentuate the colors of your shot with the clothing, by accentuating those colors with SIMILAR colors of your talents' clothing? Or are you perhaps supposed to do the opposite and make the clothing into complementary colors ...or opposing colors or what?

2. is it a general rule of some sort for example to NEVER make clothing the same color as your scene? If everything has a blue-ish hue in your scene would it be bad to put blue clothing for example, what color would be best?

3. and how about textures, I've read some things in my research about certain patterning like of flannel and such being bad on film ...can someone go into depth with some of this?

thanks...........
 
General rules:

1) Bright red... tends to 'bleed' sometimes on BOTH film and digital

2) White clothes *can* be distracting. It is very reflective and will draw the eye. An off white still looks clean but doesn't glare.

3) Black... looks so good, but sometimes you might want to avoid it... unless it's totally called for. In dark scenes, it will be hard to get enough light on the black.

4) Very very small and compact textures... such as very tightly packed stripes, will alias. It will happen on just about every digital camera. I've had it happed on HVX200, Red, etc... and GOD help anyone that tries it with the MUCH worse DSLR's. This can happen with lace, and other fine textured fabrics. Flannel is fine so long as the design isn't very intricate and contrasty.

Also be aware of how clothes look under different light. Blacks suddenly will have green or red tints in them when otherwise it looked simply 'black'.
 
Ryan Patrick O'Hara said:
General rules:

1) Bright red... tends to 'bleed' sometimes on BOTH film and digital

2) White clothes *can* be distracting. It is very reflective and will draw the eye. An off white still looks clean but doesn't glare.

3) Black... looks so good, but sometimes you might want to avoid it... unless it's totally called for. In dark scenes, it will be hard to get enough light on the black.

4) Very very small and compact textures... such as very tightly packed stripes, will alias. It will happen on just about every digital camera. I've had it happed on HVX200, Red, etc... and GOD help anyone that tries it with the MUCH worse DSLR's. This can happen with lace, and other fine textured fabrics. Flannel is fine so long as the design isn't very intricate and contrasty.

Also be aware of how clothes look under different light. Blacks suddenly will have green or red tints in them when otherwise it looked simply 'black'.
Click to expand...

thanks that's exactly the type of advice I was looking for. I actually figured the white thing out on my own yesterday. I shot in a really bright room and just happened to have a white shirt on. Was shooting myself on a tripod just to test the scene and lighting and when I viewed the footage my entire body was just completely blown out in a luminous haze. You could not see a single strand of detail on my body and shirt because it was just completely over exposed blown out..so that was lesson #1 for me....

Is it a good idea to just avoid super contrasty clothing altogether and use more dim colored clothing rather than really bright/saturated colors? I noticed the most distracting thing to me in DSLR indie films is when there's a low key scene and someone pops in with a super bright red shirt or something like that.
 
We test fabrics for moire before shooting whenever possible. Some fabrics are obviously going to be a problem, others sneak up and surprise you.

I tend to let talent know that pure white presents more problems than the aesthetic benefit it provides. Especially contrasty situations (combinations of people, wardrobe and background) should be avoided if you're not prepared with lighting and grip to combat the effects of higher dynamic range.
 
Shadow color tint is a problem that comes from electronic white balancing, and really can't be avoided with the lower end cameras that are not setup to have their sensor(s) natively white balanced for a particular color temperature. If your shooting on something like a Red One, which is natively balanced for daylight, you won't have issues under daylight. As long as you optically white balance when shooting under tungsten, you should also be fine.
 
Last time I worked with I Bloom he told me 'no blacks, no whites, no stripes, no logos' is the mantra and to this day it rings clear as a bell in my memory.

The only thing I would add is ...

cotton, cotton, cotton
 
J Davis said:
Last time I worked with I Bloom he told me 'no blacks, no whites, no stripes, no logos' is the mantra and to this day it rings clear as a bell in my memory.

The only thing I would add is ...

cotton, cotton, cotton
Click to expand...
interesting thanks...who is I Bloom though?
 
J Davis said:
Last time I worked with I Bloom he told me 'no blacks, no whites, no stripes, no logos' is the mantra and to this day it rings clear as a bell in my memory.

The only thing I would add is ...

cotton, cotton, cotton
Click to expand...


Great if you have a choice. Quite often I don't have any and just have to try and make things work the best I can.

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I hear you. Life is full of compromise.

BTW - I was answering the original posters question who was asking about choosing types of clothing.

Good job on those shots
 
Homunculus said:
1. in a scene are you supposed to accentuate the colors of your shot with the clothing, by accentuating those colors with SIMILAR colors of your talents' clothing? Or are you perhaps supposed to do the opposite and make the clothing into complementary colors ...or opposing colors or what?
Click to expand...


I don't usually give this kind of advice... but this is why you would hire an art director... who would have a list of color gumuts that 'work'.

Ok, back to 'do it yourself'...

One of things that one does in studying art is to analyze the color scheme of a work.

The problem with doing this by 'online' sources, or 'book' sources, is that the printing/digital capture process skews the colors significantly...

By a 'happy' misfortune the Wife and I were able to take detailed pictures of Gustav Kimts "Der Kuß". Few books, few 'online' sources come close... the 'unhappy' event was we were supposed to shoot another Klimt having gotten permission from the Schloss Belevedere press department... well, the day we were to shoot... they had shipped out the work to Korea for an exhibition... the press person the 'suggested' the more famous Klimt as 'compensation'... As a note the Belvedere also had some 'press' images that had much better resolution, and some had color charts included for press releases.

So, with a few color charts, we were able to get reasonable images. The deal here really is to contact the press dept. of the museum, and see what they may have to offer.

You can shoot in the US National Gallery for many of the works owned by the Gallery... for other galleries, one has to find out what their limitations are... usually no tripod or other 'support' devices like a monopod... we're trying to figure out how to make a 'crutch' sufficiently stable so that we can over come this sort of regulation...

Anyway, once you have a set of images, then you analyze the images and find what are the color combinations, and ranges, and create a table of color patches that represent the major colors, and also one can create an 'accent' list, of small amounts of color that an artist has used to give the overall final effect.

In the case of the Klimt... there is an awful lot of gold, but there are 'cheats' as well to give the impression of 'gold'... In addition, Klimt put a lot of 'texture' in the form of 'paste', so not only is there the 2-d image, but the significantly 3-d texture.

I would also recommend watching Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet"(1968) and "The Taming of the Shrew"(1967), for edification. (The problem there is the transfers I have on DVD are somewhat 'less' than good... but if you have seen some amount of italian art of the Renaissance, you can 'see' where Zeffirelli is coming from...)

For a more modern example, "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain"(2001, "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain", or just "Amélie") The filmmaker makes specific use of 'complementary' colors, matching up a touch of blue with 'yellows', as well as other color combos (I just have this one scene in mind at the moment...).
 
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