"diving-bell" look - in camera?

[christina voros]

Hey there-

shooting on the RED for my first time and lacking the budget or schedule to do tests. I have a sequence thats meant to be in heaven, a la "Diving Bell & the butterfly", working with shift tilt lenses. I'm looking for advice on how to best achieve a gauzy feel with blooming highlights. How much of this should be done in camera vs. saved for post.

Also seeking advice on how i should be rating my exposure outside for this sequence, vs the rest of the film which is interior, dark corridors, flourescent bulbs - looking for rich blacks in the shadows.

any advice greatly appreciated,

thanks,

cv

 

[Jason Murphy]

Kaminski shot those sequences in Diving Bell with a Lensbaby, so no tilt/shift in post. Might be tricky to pull off, especially if you can't do test shoots. Seems like a recipe for trouble to not shoot a few tests in this case.

 

[christina voros]

hmm. Didn't know it was a lensbaby. I've done a lot of work with tilt shift lenses, wasn't thinking about doing that part in post, my greater concern was with exposure, whether to be rating the camera at 320 - i've heard mixed things here. any thoughts?

 

[Julio Quintana]

The Diving Bell had a lot of beautiful over exposure in the frames. Typically, you don't want to over expose anything on the RED, but I think you will have a hard time replicating the Diving Bell look if you don't.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I have found that adding a gaussian blur (of just the brightest areas of the frame using a luminance key) overlay in post will also add to the overexposure of those bright areas, causing them to halate more.

Or you can do it in-camera with diffusion filters and overexposure. Just that you don't have as much option to change your mind in post -- but if it looks great...

Trouble with saving the look for post is that color-correction is often done after editing, which can be months later for a feature, at which point everyone has gotten used to the "ordinary" look and may then be resistant to creating the intended stylized look. Plus if the material looks too far off from the planned look, some people may think you weren't able to capture the intended look and that your photography is too conventional, because you played it safe and left it to post.

So you need some sort of happy balance between an in-camera look that tells everyone what the intent was, but with some flexibility built-in for final color-correction. So some of the blurring and overexposure and diffusion can be done in-camera, but perhaps to not the same strength or heaviness as the final look. You can always add more blurring and overexposure and halation later.

 

[James Alan McAleer]

Hi- Faced with a similar problem last year- I made my own limited version of a lensbaby by using the front element of a projector lens I had 'lying around'. -I made bellows from cinefoil and garden wire, all loving stuck together with gaffer tape... Works a treat.

You can approximate this effect in post- but when done optically, it separates the light in a way I have not seen with digital effects.

Using it cost me a couple of stops of light.
(sorry for the low quality image- bad camera phone in the dark)