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I have a box of around 40 filters of various kinds; fog filters, diffusions, black and white pro mists, even a series of stockings. The last time I opened the box to use one on a film was in the 1980s and I regretted doing so later.
You could look online. There are many films pre 1960 that were shot on a single lens. Earlier filmmakers had little choice. And there are some recent films shot on one wide lens. And then there was, 1917, basically shot on a 40mm.
I think the new HDR is quite good. It is a challenge to control the extremes of HDR but it looks good when you do.
For ‘1917’ I did have double bulbs built into the two oil lamps set on the tables in the bunker, not a tent. When the camera faced in one direction the near bulb was dimmed down and the one out of sight was doing more of the lighting. When the camera switched direction we switched the intensity of the bulbs. In this case the two bulbs were almost touching – with a small piece of metal foil between – so there was no double shadow.
A double, triple or multiple shadow from two or more sources is alway there if those sources are not touching. Look at a 9 light or 12 light Maxi Brute. If you hold your hand close the lamp you see every shadow, though perhaps you should do this with an equivalent multiple bulb LED if you value your hand. At a distance the lamp becomes, in effect, a point source. On ‘True Grit’ we had a run of individual HMI lamps set at 5 feet apart. If you stood 20 feet from this ‘source’ you would not even be lit by more than a few lamps but where the action was, more than 750 feet away, the multiple shadows from 20 or 30 individual lamps were imperceptible on anything but an even flat surface. And there was no flat surface in picture.
This was not the scene I was talking about. The color of the light here is coming entirely from the screen and the playback we shot for the scene.
As I spent most of my career shooting film I usually keep the camera set to daylight or to tungsten. The lighting is the color it is relative to those settings for both the scenes you mention as they were shot on stage.
You might try crating as many different possible ‘looks’ using just one or two lights. I sometimes demonstrate this with a single Fresnel lamp, a sheet of diffusion, some silver foil and a white bounce board.
If you place a second bulb, a ‘gag’, behind one that is in camera you are in effect increasing the light of your source without that source overexposing your negative. With digital capture, and greater latitude in the image, the technique is less used as an adjustment can be made in the timing.
I’m pretty sure I shot that scene on 500T stock. I only use a meter to check the level of light at a point in the frame where I want a mid exposure. Otherwise I light by eye. I have no idea what teh contrast ratio read on the meter, for instance.
The ‘eyelight’ was coming from a soft cove of bounce light I was using to wrap Javier’s face. The practical itself was not at the right angle to reach around his face.
I prefer tungsten balanced stock as I feel it has less contrast and saturation. I also like to manage the shift in color as the sun sets on a tungsten stock rather than a daylight one. I probably got used to this way of working before daylight balanced stock were introduced and I am comfortable with it.
I see no definitive reason to shoot with one or with multiple stocks. That’s purely a choice based on the project and locations involved. As for the use of a correction filter, I would shoot on tungsten stock with no 85 or 85B when I wanted the shadows to feel cooler, such as on Shawshank. Even when the overall image was ‘corrected’ in the lab it felt to me the shadows stayed colder.
There was another building close to the window so I used a mirror to double the distance. It also served as a cut to shape the light.
My main set of lenses were the Arri Signature primes on Empire. Cooke are superb lenses. Sure I would use them in the right situation and I often do if I need a zoom, for instance.
I learnt through shooting documentaries and from watching films. I would suggest watching the masters of camera blocking: Melville, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Goddard, Huston, Wilder, Kirosawa ….. Study a film, a good example would be Army of Shadows, and try to understand why Melville moves the camera in one scene and shoots with a locked off camera for another. When and why he crosses the line. Why he uses a long series of seemingly simple shots to build up an event or simply cuts from one event to another with no connecting tissue. Why he holds a shot for an extended length of time or uses a rapid montage – etc.
