Lighting trick of the movies...

HorseFilms said:
Half of the people who will try to tear you down have never shot a thing in their lives.
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That often seems true on this forum! :violin:

"Shoot it like ya want to see it" is a good direction - I always try to be as generous as possible with the "how to get the look" advice when I have something to add. I've been serious about beautiful lighting for 2 decades or so, but I still grab a good tip or two here.
 
Pick up a Rosco Cinegel sample wheel. I like to put warm colors (subtle though, maybe like 1/8th CTO) on the actors, and the background gets a variation of teal of blue-green. I love to pick a super saturated gel here. My backlight is usually a 1/8 or 1/4 CTB. White balance is important here as well. I prefer having the ability to manually adjust my white balance in 100k incriments, but if I can't I adjust go with the preset that matches the light on my actors (so 3200k for tungsten, 5500k for HMI).

But I agree with everyone else, shoot to what you want. This is what I like, but everyone has a different opinion. Give 50 cinematographers the ability to light the same scene and your going to get 50 different results.
 
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I think there is a lot of patient sharing of what people know with the intent of helping everyone grow on this forum. I think the downers are pretty rare, which is impressive, considering for example, that people show up and ask what lighting kit should I start with even though that has been asked and answered numerous times, all of which are sitting in the archive.

Anyway, my opinion is that this is a safe place to come and ask anything.
 
This seems to me common because of the kit required, use tungsten on your character, balance the cam a little warm and then light your BG with the tungsten correction gels that you are 90% likely to have in your lighting bag

I for example dont own any coloured gel, just blue correction gel, so this is the only way I can 'funk up' a boring scene with the normal content of my lights bag

I get thats the origin of it

The other 'look' I create is a natural face with an orange hair light

Why - because this happens it I use a mix of daylight flouro or windo as key and uncorrect tungsten sources for the rim

another 'look' from the standard bag of lights

S
 
A lighting strategy that relies on separate lights for background and foreground, or better yet, background and actors, is good because of that. It can give you the ability to control depth and contrast of your image (and ever color contrast, using the technique you described). However, it's not every set that you can do that, because sometimes, due to the confined spaces and/or geometry of the spaces, you have to have the same light doing both tasks, otherwise you get too many shadows, both in the background and the subject.

Anyway, just try to be subtle if doing this. If you are throwing in some CTO just to get a healthier skintone, I'd work with 1/4 density gels...
 
I know how to do it, its not lights on the set.hehe some guys have weird theories how to achieve this look :)
I corrected these now as examples, bottom ones are original ones uncorrected:
27121127.jpg

64212049.jpg

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Its typical new movies look, law abiding citizen looks like that or new pirates for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KgKSptuP5Q
 
HorseFilms said:
Shoot things the way they look best to you. Don't worry about what other people think and just make the best movie you can. Half of the people who will try to tear you down have never shot a thing in their lives.
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If you just willy-nilly decide on a color palette and throw on some Magic Bullet effects without having a gameplan or are just trying to ape a particular look for the sole purpose of making your movie an easy sell, and someone decides that it was a cheap attempt, it doesn't mean that it was not a cheap attempt just because the critic has never shot a movie before.
 
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