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In the prints, the colors got darker and less saturated with ENR. Since usually this approach was decided in prep, costumes, props, lighting colors, etc. were tested to see if any compensation was needed. For example, blood effects in “Sleepy Hollow” were adjusted, using a bright red blood on set so that it would not look too black due to the ENR process. I can’t tell you the specific effect on each color shade but by the early 2000s, colorists had their own digital simulation of ENR for DIs, reducing the usage of ENR itself — though in truth, it was not the same thing because leaving silver in the print itself allows the blacks to be deeper than D-MAX, the max density a print can achieve, a sort of blacker-than-black. There were problems with this though, silver in the print (just as with true b&w prints) tends to absorb infrared heat from projector bulbs, reducing the life of the print.
One issue that always comes up with a desaturation process is that visually, pastel colors seem to drop in saturation faster than primary colors, so a subtle color like in skin tones will go monochromatic faster than a bright red stop sign will. This is why it is better to control saturation first with production design and costumes so as to preserve skin tone saturation relative to everything else in the frame. Of course, with digital color-correction, one can isolate objects and adjust saturation more selectively though that can be time-consuming.
In general, it’s always better to get the look you want first by what’s in front of the camera, second by how you film it with your camera, and third by post-production.
In terms of color, adding a weak amount of overall white light on a negative will lift the blacks and wash-out the colors, it’s like mixing a tiny bit of white paint into colored paints.
Leaving a little amount of black silver in a print will deepen the blacks and darken the colors, slightly softening them — it’s like mixing a tiny amount of black paint into colored paints.
It’s a bit harder to visualize the opposite — flashing a print or leaving silver in the negative.
Flashing a print with white light fogs the highlights with density (normally a brighter area in the image is denser on the negative, more clear on the print) so your whites get a bit greyed, less intense, lowering contrast in the highlights. Does that affect saturation? Maybe… but only because contrast, black level and saturation are all tied together, so softening the highlights and lowering the contrast will make the colors seem a bit softer.
Leaving black silver in the negative means the highlights in the subject will get denser as if overexposed (some people compensate by underexposing the stock). So there is an increase in contrast but mostly in the highlights. There is also a larger increase in visible graininess compared to leaving silver in the print because print stock has a very low ASA so the silver grains are quite small compared to those in camera negative. Again, does leaving black silver in the negative affect saturation? Sort of, it’s a bit like having a black & white negative layered on top of your color negative.
You could affect the release prints by altering the IP or IN — plus there were silver retention processes for prints like ENR that increased the density of the blacks and the contrast in the shadows. There was also some darkening of colors and loss of saturation from leaving silver in the print.
All of this is to say that you worked backwards from your planned release print strategy in terms of the negative.
Flashing the negative increases the base fog level, lifting the blacks and bringing up some shadow detail normally buried in the contrast of the print, especially an ENR print which I believe “Fight Club” used (or Deluxe’s version called ACE.)
One thing to keep in mind is that pre-digital color-correction for features, you mainly had a standardized contrast (gamma) & saturation using Kodak print stock and FCP processing. Black level could be affected by printer lights (which in turn affected contrast & saturation), but this was mitigated by the fact that most prints came from dupe negatives — the extra density in the original negative had been compensated for when making the color-corrected IP/IN so release prints used a normal set of printer lights (James Cameron got around this by asking the lab to make lighter IPs & denser INs for “Titanic”.)
I think you answered your own question — are there people on the edge of frame or architecture? If architecture, then barrel distortion will be more distracting than rectilinear correction. If people, the opposite may be true.
I made a post on Instagram about this yesterday because I couldn’t put images here, about the two types of extreme wide-angle lenses used on “2001”, a 28mm Cooke (14mm equivalent in Super-35) which was rectilinear and a 14mm-ish Fairchild-Curtis 160º (7mm equivalent in Super-35) which was very barrel distorted.
Sure if you can find a large lavender net, that would be nice but they are somewhat rare and fragile.
It’s usually stretched on a large frame (like a Single Net) and placed about halfway between the window and the backing. You just have to consider any hard sunlight effect lighting because if it passes through the net, it will be washed out like its hitting a dirty window. So if the net is back enough to get the hard sunlight unit in front of it, that might be good. Also consider keeping other light off of the net like the backing light, again, because it will increase the haze effect — so in this case, you probably want the backing light to fall behind the net.
Another option is to neatly cover the windows with 1/8 Hampshire Frost, which will blur the view (the more blurring when the backing is farther away, so sometimes this trick is better when the backing has to be too close to the window so the blurring from the frost is subtle.)
I’ve also used 1/2 Soft Frost on a large frame to blur a backing — in this case you control the softening by the distance from the backing. Sometimes just having the frame about a foot from the backing is enough to make it softer.
You only need to be consistent shot to shot within a scene — starting a new scene, you can chose a new color balance, etc.
I pick a color temperature setting for the scene and then light around that. In a room of mixed daylight and practical sources of different colors, you just have to pick what setting gets you close to what you want creatively.
You start with what you can’t control easily, like a bunch of daylight coming in, and then work on what you can control. But there is not right or wrong choice. You may decide on something in-between daylight and tungsten so that the daylight is cool and the tungsten is warm, but to which direction you lean (4800K? 4300K?, etc.) is up to you creatively.
In situations that you have more control over, then yes, you pick something and light to that. Maybe in a day interior on location you pick 5500K and use powerful tungsten lamps outside the window for a warm sunset effect.
Again, you start by considering what you can’t adjust or control or turn-off and how you want that to render. Maybe you are using a lot of old Cool White fluorescent tubes, which are around 4800K with some green in them — if you want those to render more of a cyan, then you have to set the camera closer to 3200K — if you use 5500K on the camera, then they tend to look slightly warm-green, a yellow-ish color. I’ve even gelled daylight windows with Full 85 correction so that the Cool White tubes would render cyan compared to the daylight.
Stills from 4K blu-rays can be misleading since if it is an HDR version, you can only simulate how they might look when viewing on an SDR monitor.
DVDBeaver.com reviews of 4K discs always have this warning:
“It is likely that the monitor you are seeing this review is not an HDR-compatible display (High Dynamic Range) or Dolby Vision, where each pixel can be assigned with a wider and notably granular range of color and light. Our capture software if simulating the HDR (in a uniform manner) for standard monitors. This should make it easier for us to review more 4K UHD titles in the future and give you a decent idea of its attributes on your system. So our captures may not support the exact same colors (coolness of skin tones, brighter or darker hues etc.) as the 4K system at your home.”
Strong artificial backlighting dates back to the 1910-20s when carbon arcs started being used on sets. The technical reason was that it provided separation in b&w but the most common aesthetic reason is that it is beautiful. There are other reasons it might be used depending on the context.
It happens — ultimately filmmaking is an expensive business and you were hired to deliver a certain level of work within a budget for time and equipment. That’s the reality.
You fight for the quality of the shot when it matters, when you think a drop in quality will be noticeable and everyone in post will be trying to make the problematic shot work and forgetting soon why it was not shot as well as it should have been.
It’s frustrating and depressing when you no choice but to roll cameras on something below your standards but you try and move on because there will be other battles coming up that need your concentration. A producer once said to me (regarding a perfectionist director we were dealing with): “If you make everything equally important then nothing is important”. The other common phrase is “Perfect is the enemy of good.” You have to realize that if you take another ten minutes to make a shot better, you may be robbing yourself of ten minutes later in the day on something even more important.
Ultimately there is always a time element to lighting, which is why you plan your wide-shot lighting with how you will get into your close-ups. Lighting a tight shot by itself is often easier than lighting a wide shot. But when you get around to lighting the close-up, you are running out of time (plus if the actors have reached a certain momentum in the performance, you don’t want to kill it by taking too much time lighting the coverage) so you have to have a plan from the start for a simple way of adjusting the wider-shot lighting if you want to soften it further but maintain the same f-stop.
