Defining a Look

After many months of discussion with Dan about the look of the film. We have decided upon a few simple ideas that will help us to further define a look.

Firstly we are going to try to soften up some of the harder digital edges that you get with 5D’s and 7D’s by using a pro-mist filter throughout, except in the inital flash back scenes when we will use a 1/2 fog filter.

Clean

1/8 Black Promist

1/2 Old Fog

The reasoning behind this is that as these are flashbacks we would like them to feel slightly hazier than the rest of the film. We have also discussed using a tilt-shift lens on this scene, to again make this feel more like memories obscured through a drunken haze.

My thoughts on this Chris were that if it is possible to create the effect of a tilt-shift lens in post we should, as it would be much quicker, easier and cheaper on our end. It means we won’t have to rent the lens and we also won’t miss any details that may prove to be important, I think we should definitely test this though before the shoot. If we are in anyway uncomfortable with the results we get blurring details out in post, lets do it in camera!

As for depth of field, I want to shoot this a f/5.6 this will give us a shallow depth of field, but will still give us some depth to the images. We will be able to knock things out but won't be killing our focus puller.

Lighting wise, what has remained in my mind throughout this shoot is the work of Marcel Zyskind, specifically his work on ‘Live With Me’ a music promo for Massive Attack.

Although the lighting is supposed to be naturalistic, it would be good to keep quite a high contrast ratio. Especially in the bedroom the should be areas (I’m thinking corners) that fall away into darkness.

The lighting will all be motivated by practical sources (obivously I’m going to cheat this a little bit).

The dominant colours in the bedroom will be, moonlight and a red glow from a lamp (their may be a tungsten source for some scenes). The colour for moonlight will be Steel Blue, here is a reference photo from a short I did recently.

For upstairs, although sunlight will be present, I think it would be best to feel this around the windows, but for it to only be creeping in. This has both practical and stylistic implications.

Stefan