Monday, September 24, 2012

What's Next on the Hit Parade

I know from past experience* that composites are a lot easier if your whole color palette is limited. Our next picture is a dragon movie. This means there Will Be Dragons.
The dragons will probably be a lot more photo-real if our notion of what is "real" in the world has fewer colors than real life. And the colors the world does have will be over-saturated. And the blacks will sink into lush and inky darkness. The short way of saying that is that the movie will look like a movie.

In any case, our big question is what will the movie look like? We'll be shooting with a Panasonic GH1 using Canon S.S.C. lenses (probably mostly a 35mm and a 50mm at 1.8 or 2.0 or so, the 50mm will be like an 85 on an APS-C).
We'll be shooting a few days outside during the day. The slowest you can make the GH1 is 100 ISO. We could put some ND filters on the lenses. But we won't. So up there where I said we'd be shooting at an f2.0? I lied. We'll be stopping down much further than that for exteriors.
The other option we have is that we could turn up the shutter so that instead of a shutter of 50 we could go to a shutter of 100 or so. That would cut out some of our light and reduce rolling shutter distortion (which would make our composites easier.) But it would look more like a kung-fu movie fight scene. You tell me if that's good or bad.
I think we might want to go for some nice candy spot colors. Maybe. Each dragon could really be a color. Or, you know, we just sink the blacks down toward green, make the highlights go toward blue, and have the midtones go toward the Y line. I just don't know.
Here's the place where on a regular-budget movie you'd say "shoot some test footage". Yeah right. That is not going to happen. Our test will be on the first day of principal photography.
Has this little discussion of the look of our next movie actually resulted in either me or you having any idea of what our next movie will look like?
Unfortunately, no.
I'm just glad we had this little talk.
Maybe I'll shoot all the exteriors at f5.6 or down with the kit zoom lens. Maybe not.

*All experience is from the past.

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