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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 :)

What am I missing?

Ryan Milliron said:
I always welcome honestly thats why i was brave enough to post. So I intentionally wanted to have the backgrounds fade to black in some shots. My reasons where I wanted a darker emotional feel and I wanted to try to show the different parts of the gym as individual areas almost like separate rooms. But from the looks that might have been a poor choice but it was intentional never the less. Here is shot we did with a brighter back ground.
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I think Bob is right in posting those vids. Dramatic lighting. Ryan, that last shot you posted still feels less dramatic. It's an emotional response. Those Stuart McIntyre spots have drama. The lower frame has a nice overhead, some haze in the air and lovely bounce from the ring canvas on the floor. Also those practicals are obviously not lighting him but they float there nicely giving the impression of strong overhead, in fact the overhead is slightly behind which throws him out nicely. Apply that kind of lighting to your guy lifting the bar and you begin to see it.
 
For a great overhead run some Par 64's together, run a silk under them and surround with a black skirt. Cheap and very effective. Use bounce as much as you can if you're on a low budget so you can double the use of your lights. Forget all that and head over to Mr Mullens thread.
 
Your stuff isn't too bad. A BA in film, yeah, but this job takes years of experience and thousands of hours to get right.

If you did light for 320 ISO, you have lots of room to pull things up wherever you want. You may want to get in there with some custom shapes and add some dress lighting that way if your setups don't move too much.

Using longer lenses and rim lighting are all solid suggestions.

I think you need a more subtle colouring treatment, and next time try not to light so much from the camera side as it can flatten things out.

Don't be discouraged! Find a great colourist, if you did 320 ISO in camera then you have a ton of data in there and a great colourist can make a meal out of this.
 
Thanks everyone for your input. I will take it all into consideration on my next project. I will get low key mastered eventually haha.

And I will see what a better colorist can do for me on this one.
 
Good luck!

Ryan Milliron said:
Thanks everyone for your input. I will take it all into consideration on my next project. I will get low key mastered eventually haha.

And I will see what a better colorist can do for me on this one.
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PatrickFaith said:
Ryan, I think a lot of your shots are ok if you composited in Nukex and re-colored in davinci. Lot of the major features, the shot looks like crap till it goes to professional compositers and graders in post.
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Unfortunately my older mac pro doesn't have a CUDA card so I was stuck using Apple color. I need to find someone that is a real colorist in vegas. It didn't cross my mind to composite though, you are thinking roto the actors and color them and the background separately or something along those line?
 
PatrickFaith said:
Ryan, I think a lot of your shots are ok if you composited in Nukex and re-colored in davinci. Lot of the major features, the shot looks like crap till it goes to professional compositers and graders in post.
Click to expand...

Personally I think that's a bad philosophy. Ok, in RAW of course it doesn't look great but that doesn't mean you haven't lit it correctly or dramatically.
 
Ryan Milliron said:
Unfortunately my older mac pro doesn't have a CUDA card so I was stuck using Apple color. I need to find someone that is a real colorist in vegas. It didn't cross my mind to composite though, you are thinking roto the actors and color them and the background separately or something along those line?
Click to expand...

I don't think you need cuda, it realistically it won't be a major difference for a short shot. So for example, for that girl holding the bat ... to me the scene needs to be "dirtied" up - just looks too clean. So here's what i'd do:
1) roto the girl (i would roto with a entire depth map btw, but a straight roto would work)
2) do some volumentric lighting off the lamp in the back (i.e. some rays of light off of the lamp in the back as if it is hitting some gritty air)
3) ad haze via a depth map (so it felt like there was dirt or smoke in the air)
4) defocus the background (i.e. have a shallow depth of focus look on the girl) ...
5) roto/color grade a bunch of spots so the haze surrounds the girl yet light it coming from the background
6) decide on a "story" color ... a red dirty "look" would look cool(i.e. apply a 3d-lut to roto components).
7) use a laplacian mixed with a blur to blend with minimal softening the components together(i.e. mix of nuke soften nodes with masks).

For a someone familiar with nukex, for about 15 seconds this would take about 2 days of work to get it right.

JPSendall said:
Personally I think that's a bad philosophy. Ok, in RAW of course it doesn't look great but that doesn't mean you haven't lit it correctly or dramatically.
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To me it's about money and experience (both that people coming out of school have problems with), so the choices are:
1) rent a grip&lighting truck and take over the entire gym for a day (this would also require insurance for the shoot) and a crew of about 4 people minimum.
2) getting into a gym and using primarily found lighting, and shooting for a hour ... then going home and working on nuke for two days (of which you have nuthing better to do since your looking for a job). Also you'd be bitching to yourself how much time your spending rotoing things like hair and how you'd like to shoot it next time with a full lighting setup(this would also force you to focus on the exact details and lighting problems).
 
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