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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Independent feature film shot in the UK, London

You seem to have a very consistent - and beautiful - style between this and the frames from your NYC Summertime shoot you posted. Looks like another wonderful shoot. Congrats Xax!
Peace,

-Harry
 
Incredible! I am just blown away with the excellent quality of the visuals, The only question I can think of is how much cooke lenses contributed to the shots?
 
hey xiaosu,

great work, great as every time you post some stuff.
did you again work togehter with andreas on this job? and did you do it the same way you shot that new york indie? I remember some home made rigs with bulbs. or what kind of lightning did you do for that one?
 
Hi Bernd,

thanks a lot! Yes we worked together on this one as well.

We've had a bit more to play with so we've got quite a nice kit incl. 6K HMI downwards and stuff like a PeeWee dolly.

Hope there will be some moving footage soon :)

cheers, Xax
 
Reaally really gorgeous grabs - natural and elegant without sacrificing any drama or style. It doesnt look like you fall into the trap of overlighting and hedging bets - some really beautiful, bold, simple looking lighting.

What was your lighting package?
 
Thanks Andrew, I can outline a bit what we used in the shots:

1: 2.5K HMI from outside through milked bathroom window, polyboard for fill
2: 6K through half silk plus 2.5K bounced over polyboard (would've lit it with less but it was set up for the wide)
3: 2x 2.5K HMI for background with half CTS and pure joker bug 800 hmi with chimera lantern high up for key backlight on actress
4: 2x 2.5K bounced off unbleached muslin through diffused bathroom windows plus ambient from daylight
5: 1K bounced off unbleached muslin, kinoflo tubes rigged to ceiling partially for background
6: Flathead 80 hung above the bed, skirted
7: 6K off silver lamé but mostly natural ambient
8: again 6K off silver lamé and 2.5K directly through thick curtains as ambient but lots of natural ambient as well
9: 2.5K through window again, eyelight is from bounce only
10: natural plus 6K off ultrabounce as ambient
11: 6K through half silk and 2.5K bounced off poly additionally and ambient naturally

hope that helps! will have more stills tomorrow

kit was basically

6k
2x 2.5
2x 1.2
1x joker 800 with tube and lantern

that's hmi

then we had lots of tungsten, couple 2ks 1ks 650 300 150w stuff

flathead 80, 4banks, 2banks all that stuff

that's basically it..
 
XiaoSu Han said:
Thanks Andrew, I can outline a bit what we used in the shots:

1: 2.5K HMI from outside through milked bathroom window, polyboard for fill
2: 6K through half silk plus 2.5K bounced over polyboard (would've lit it with less but it was set up for the wide)
3: 2x 2.5K HMI for background with half CTS and pure joker bug 800 hmi with chimera lantern high up for key backlight on actress
4: 2x 2.5K bounced off unbleached muslin through diffused bathroom windows plus ambient from daylight
5: 1K bounced off unbleached muslin, kinoflo tubes rigged to ceiling partially for background
6: Flathead 80 hung above the bed, skirted
7: 6K off silver lamé but mostly natural ambient
8: again 6K off silver lamé and 2.5K directly through thick curtains as ambient but lots of natural ambient as well
9: 2.5K through window again, eyelight is from bounce only
10: natural plus 6K off ultrabounce as ambient
11: 6K through half silk and 2.5K bounced off poly additionally and ambient naturally

hope that helps! will have more stills tomorrow
Click to expand...

Awesome! Thanks for that!
 
A couple more stills

l17.jpg


l16.jpg


l15.jpg


l14.jpg


l13.jpg


l12.jpg
 
Beautiful work- I really enjoy what you are able to pull off- naturally feeling, well composed work. :)
 
Question for you-

You used a lot of bounced / soft light, and the interior locations look rater small- you were on location correct, and not a set? - anyway- how did you manage spill? It doesn't look like there is a lot of room for additional flags etc...
 
One more question-

I just thought of one more - it looks like you kept the white balance to around 5000k regardless of using tungsten or daylight units, is that correct?
 
Hey Ryan,

thanks, it's really nice to see that a couple of people seem to follow what we are doing and that's really great. I also try to answer all the questions as far as my knowledge allows me since I am getting so much out of this forum and also over at cinematography.com so I am trying to give as much back as possible as well.

Spill obviously was our biggest enemy again since we light quite a bit on the soft side so sometimes we either use lots of negative fill (all around camera) and off screen, sometimes even a black poly above the actors just to decrease the light coming back from the ceiling, and most of the times 4x4 floppys or similar stuff in front of lights immediately since we rather cut earlier than later...

It's really hard to come up with a good recipe against bright spilled backgrounds but the bigger the blackouts are the better of course...

I posted quite a lenghty paragraph about settings and exposure over at cinematography.com, I'll paste it here:

"
We set our light meters to 250 ISO all the time to be on the safe side and verified the exposure using mostly false colors. We tried to light to a 2.8 1/2 - 2/3rds on ISO 250 all the time so if we run the lens at 2.8 the key would be that much over. We left the camera on it's default settings though and shot everything on 5000K as well. Colorwise we lit to the image we saw at 5000K, as we thought this would be the most efficient workflow to follow through by getting what we wanted into camera as much as possible.

We had a directors monitor (cheap dvi lcd) and for some stuff we had an Astro with waveform on set, which we used a couple of times, but we're quite used to the false colors now after 3 features, so that was more of a reference than the waveform.

What also helped is that we graded a project completely ourselves in Apple Color before that so we know what we can do with the RED material and what we can't. Obviously those are the nice shots but there are of course a few underexposed things as well where you get rushed by schedule and other stuff and just can't add a light after a bit of staging changed.

I think that we've found our sweet spot for a skin-keylight to be 1/2 - 2/3rds a stop over, which is pink anyways on the RED false colors since build 20. So as soon as we had spots of pink and green on the key side of the faces we were happy . No red no purple as well

We're quite happy to see that we get more and more shots where we nail the exposure, we used to have lots of underexposed shots when relying on a monitor instead of false colors.
"

hope that helps, cheers Xax
 
Yep that helps. :)

Do you have the direct link to the cinematography thread? I'd like ot check that one out as well,as I'm sure the questions / feed back has different content.

As for the bathroom (Sample #1 & #9- but most #1)- were you able to rig any negative fill, or flags in there- if so how did you do it- it must have been a large bathroom, or pretty cramped ... I really like the tones on the shadow side of that shot.
 
By the way- what is the title of the film?
 
http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=42135&pid=304418&st=0&#entry304418

you can find the title on our website in my signature, I'd rather not have a google connection of the pictures and the title yet, this should stay entirely technical for now and I might have to take them down after a while as well.

regarding the bathroom it was fairly big yes, because of the texture of the window spill controlled itself somehow, it worked out really well. as said before just 2x2.5k off unbleached muslin..
 
No problem at all- I completely understand.

That is great and rather serendipitous about the window helping to control the light.

In regards to controlling the exposure and noise with the Red in the shadows, so you find yourself metering at 250, and then exposing according to the meter, or lighting to the T2.8, and then ETTR to bring back down in post? The shadows in your images are impressive- they seem to be clear of noise yet still contain detail. I realize you said you are using false color to help with exposure- but where does your exposure actually end up at? Also, I assume that you are using false color in RAW mode to make sure that you haven't clipped anything- is that correct?
 
XiaoSu Han said:
"
We set our light meters to 250 ISO all the time to be on the safe side and verified the exposure using mostly false colors. We tried to light to a 2.8 1/2 - 2/3rds on ISO 250 all the time so if we run the lens at 2.8 the key would be that much over. We left the camera on it's default settings though and shot everything on 5000K as well. Colorwise we lit to the image we saw at 5000K, as we thought this would be the most efficient workflow to follow through by getting what we wanted into camera as much as possible.

...

I think that we've found our sweet spot for a skin-keylight to be 1/2 - 2/3rds a stop over, which is pink anyways on the RED false colors since build 20. So as soon as we had spots of pink and green on the key side of the faces we were happy . No red no purple as well

We're quite happy to see that we get more and more shots where we nail the exposure, we used to have lots of underexposed shots when relying on a monitor instead of false colors.
"

hope that helps, cheers Xax
Click to expand...


Thanks Xax for these great tips!!! :thumbup1::thumbup1::thumbup1:
 
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