Optical artifact (halation) in 'Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'

[Karim D. Ghantous]

This is my first post. Hi, everybody! (Hi, Dr. Nick!).

I finally got around to seeing Indy 4 a few weeks ago (yes, I know, it's over 3 years old...). Sadly I was disappointed by it. However, I noticed a funny thing during one scene in South America. This was, IIRC, when Marion told Indy that Mutt was his son. They were in the back of a farm truck with a Russian guard. I noticed that the light coming through the gaps in the boards was foggy and looked like halation. Does anyone know what that could have been caused by?

I read the American Cinematographer piece on Catch Me if You Can (a much better film, one of Spielberg's bets IMO) and it quotes Janusz Kaminski explaining that fog and low contrast filters were used (gosh, that film looks beautiful!). Perhaps a lot of filters were used for Indy 4 which would explain the halation effect?

Also, less importantly, I noticed that when torches (flashlights) were shone into the lens, they produced blue, horizontal lines of flare, which also are seen in Transformers. Is this simply a mark of modern lens design?

Anyway, thank you for reading my question!

 

[Piers McGrail]

Hi Karim,

I think you've answered the first part of your question yourself - it is quite possible that you would get that halation effect from a diffusion or fog filter. You would also get something similar just by using smoke. Sometimes that halation is a characteristic of the lens design, particularly with older lenses - although I would have expected that on this project they would be using newer lenses, so it's probably more likely a diffusion filter of some kind.

With regards the horizontal flare - that is a characteristic of anamorphic lenses, which they would have also used in Transformers [you'll also notice extreme examples of this effect in the new Star Trek and Super 8]. You can also achieve something similar with filters, and sometimes they are created in post. But I would imagine that Indy 4 was shot in true anamorphic, and that they are organic flares.

Hope this helps, and welcome to the forum,

Piers