Filmmaking tips from J.J. Abrams - plus is he actually any good?

[Sean Cunningham]

Cameron is kind of his own animal when it comes to color.  It's derived from "I forgot my 85 filter".  I'm not going to say "true story" just, word around the camp fire during True Lies was that his look, from T2 forward, was from seeing rushes of shots where the camera op had made this mistake but he really liked it and the rest of the movie fell in line behind that look.

 

And I actually like your rule.  Additive, practical-based lighting is my favored approach.  Mixed, un-corrected color temp.  That's why I love several of Fincher's DPs, like Cronenweth Jr. and the late Harris Savides.  Savides especially, and his embrace of the William Eggleston stills aesthetic for cinematography.  Light the room and let the people inhabit the room.  And a dislike for traditional film lights.

 

As much as I like instances of the BBL, photochemical or DI, these films rarely inspire awe (Bladerunner being an exception...every frame of that film inspires awe).  The BBL through DI is definitely artificial.  Sometimes I like it, sometimes not.  Its current form doesn't hold a candle to naturalistic light for pure photographic beauty.  All that work and toil and you're thinking it looks really slick and cool and then you turn over and see a Terance Mallick film and its like all of a sudden you can see again.

 

 

edit: I've found that a good test for knowing where someone is coming from, cinematographically, is to ask them how they feel about The Birdcage.  It's almost a trick question, considering that DP's transformation later on.

[Axel]

All that work and toil and you're thinking it looks really slick and cool and then you turn over and see a Terance Mallick film and its like all of a sudden you can see again.

 

 

edit: I've found that a good test for knowing where someone is coming from, cinematographically, is to ask them how they feel about The Birdcage.  It's almost a trick question, considering that DP's transformation later on.

 

It happens I have Children Of Men and Sleepy Hollow recorded on my receicer's harddrive. I just checked them:

Children: Veery teal, classic BBL. It didn't bother me, I didn't notice at all, though I saw the film only two weeks ago.

Sleepy: Most scenes are grey-beige (the always anaemic-looking people) with pastel-green backgrounds. Few scenes include candles, torches or fireplaces. Then the absence of green is a relief.

 

Malick: I can't remember The New World to be much sytlized (but I may err), Maybe some scenes in the fort (mud) were somewhat desaturated? The Tree Of Life had everything, if I remember correctly. Possible that some skyscraper-scenes with Sean Penn were conventionally blue/green. If so, the boring color-scheme had a similar function as Jake in Avatar awakening in the so-called 'reality'. The light was very often backlight, and it clipped.

[Sean Cunningham]

Oh no, I wasn't meaning to imply the Malick stuff had anything to do with the BBL.  

 

My only point with this connection is that The Birdcage, seems to be a DP magnet film,  I've heard it, more than almost any other film, lauded over and over and over by all sorts of DPs as something as close to "perfect" and beautiful as you might wish for.   I find it incredibly synthetic looking and am actually turned off by its lighting.

 

It's pleasing in a conventional sense, in that the whole thing is obviously lit with the biggest, softest sources known to man...or maybe not known to man, maybe so big and soft they had to bend space-time to fit them into the sets.  Anyway, it's one of the most obviously "lit" movies I've ever seen, so much that I'm just constantly looking at this impossibly soft lighting on everything and taken out of the movie.  I hate that as much as being able to tell that I'm not looking at location photography but something on a set, not lit like a real location at all.  

 

Kinda like your rule for lighting the actors with logical light, more often than not movie lighting isn't logical or relative to anything in either the story or the location and that can be as distracting as the BBL DI.  3-point lighting for instance.  It has its place, sometimes even when you're not shooting a TV magazine talking head interview.  It's a basic beginning though, sometimes the first thing that needs to be thrown out.

 

Fast forward to, and get closer to Tree of Life and you see a shift in the Birdcage DP's work away from Hollywood studio lighting and far more naturalistic scenarios, culminating in his work on Tree of Life which was mostly artful use of available light and far more beautiful, far more stunning, than anything to do with The Birdcage.   It's the anti-Birdcage.  And the anti-BBL.

[Oscillian]

Cameron at his color best: Attack of medlabs in Aliens. RED!!!