Why do a lot of filmmakers seem to hate deep focus cinematography?

[Brian Drysdale]

You can make white walled rooms look pretty seedy, just as you can make brown walled rooms look plush with the lighting.

[Ryan Elder]

Okay sure. As long as I am not doing anything that the audience won't accept, since I am so use to seeing locations painted instead of lit certain colors.

[Paul R Johnson]

This is NOT what we're saying. If you have white walls, you can wash them any colour. They will then look like coloured white walls. Washing a perfectly flat, white wall is possible, with enough appropriate kit, and the equipment to get the lights in the right position. What you can't do is put actors close to them because they will then be lit by the wash colour, which doesn't happen with a white wall. Their shadow then to the audience screams 'lighting' not real. They also pick up the colour, which is costume and skin tone dependent on how weird it looks. You can downlight a white wall from close in, but then surface blemishes create shadows that emphasise the roughness, and make small bumps into mountains.

The audience will accept anything for what it appears to be. They will spot picture elements that look fake, and yet again we're seeing you try to emulate elements for your movie that are new to you, there's no budget for and you don't have people who understand lighting to do it. You are fixated with the issue of the walls, and are determined to solved them with no understanding of how to do it. For instance, have you considered the inverse square law? It dictates that for even brightness, the light sources MUST be at right angles to the plane of the wall to let the light level left to right match. If the wall is lit from a distance with a medium angle, then the distance between light sources will be quite small, creating a no entry zone for your actors. Wide angle sources have hot spots, which the viewer sees as 'lighting' not reality. A continuous line of wash lights enables blended even lighting, but is a considerable weight to suspend up in the air in a real building, and won't it have a low ceiling so the lights will be in vision?

I'm throwing in problems here. If you have a real building, where on earth will the lighting fixtures go? O n a set, you hang them in the position that looks right to the camera - you just cannot do this with a few stands with lights on top. At the first meeting where lights and camera people are present, hands will go up immediately when you announce the plain white walls need to be evenly lit to look like it's been painted.

I just see no way to make this idea fly. It's going to look like a light coloured room, splurged with brownish/nicotine flavoured projected light. It could be cheaper to hire the space, paint it, then repaint it back to white!

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Every time I post a long reply I realize it’s a wasted effort. Ryan lacks the experience, knowledge, ability, equipment and money to produce a professional film. I see us spending months on how to color walls much the same way we spent on crash zooms. I have a feeling there are many other things that are far more important than the color of the walls. Don’t get me wrong in a professional movie color is important it sets the mood but were talking an amateur production where he’s struggling to even find a location.

I agree it’s difficult enough to properly light a room let alone trying to also color the walls in a way that looks natural. Come on do you think Ryan could afford the necessary lighting let alone properly use them? But like wise can you imagine the work to paint a room then repaint it to return it to it’s original color?

This is yet another crazy exercise trying to master an aspect of making a feature film.

[Josh Bass]

I still think we were onto something making a simpler, more personal film that probably wouldn't have crazy locations or special FX but that seems to have been quickly dropped.

[Brian Drysdale]

For some reason, Ryan seems to be obsessing about the colour of the walls. Any modern police station I've been in (or even older ones) don't have brown walls, they have been white or magnolia, some older ones used to have a very light green.

Useless the building hasn't been repainted since the 1940s the walls are unlikely to be deep colours. One factor is cost, the white or magnolia cost less. .

So far, the only reason given for the colour brown, is that it's used in "Seven" I don't know where the blue comes from and the reason for using that in a police station. There's good use of it in "The Passenger", where Jack Nicholson's character comes out of the hot desert into his hotel and the blue walls come as a relief from the heat.

I only know of one office in the real world painted blue, and it's pretty oppressive. It's an unlikely colour in a police station unless it's the Stasi.

When you've got limited resources, keeping it simple is the usually best way, don't get involved in repainting interiors, dress the rooms with the colours you want.

[Josh Bass]

I don't think he wants BLUE blue, he wants bluish white, as if graded in that gritty blue desaturated style that was so popular a while a back. White walls that would be pushed slightly blue in a grade. Or as if the white balance were slightly off or the ceiling lights were the "wrong" color temp. I believe that's what he's after.

[Paul R Johnson]

I'm a long term fan of the series NCIS, and the colour of their walls is the topic of hot conversation. Two tones of orange, and I quite like it.

If we collated all the answers to Ryan's questions on here - we'd have the entire content of a book on how to make movies on the cheap for beginners. We could all be co-authors? It could be called "How not to make a movie"

[Brian Drysdale]

I've shot with mixed colour temperatures, however, I suspect Ryan won't have the resources to do this on his budget. You can do it in the grade, but you do need to know what you're doing with the colour correction software.

NCIS has experienced people who what they're doing, plus the budget to do it. Ryan has neither, if he was shooting a 10 to 15 minute short it would be a possibility on his budget, although, I was involved in a very low budget horror film, but I suspect the budget was higher than Ryan's when the final numbers were crunched.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

I wouldn’t be surprised Ryan is reading some material on color in cinema that you would see in film school like this
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/ho...olor-palettes/
There nothing wrong with it, just that in general film study doesn’t concerned it self with the how or it’s proper application especially to an amateur film.

This article is far more useful because it’s directed specifically at the amateur filmmaker.
https://noamkroll.com/how-to-make-vi...ook-like-film/
Ryan would do well to read the color grading section.

“A big mistake that I see often is amateur filmmakers will over-do the color on their film. They will go in and apply a heavily stylized look to every shot in the film, making it look more like a music video than a feature. A good starting point when coloring is to make your footage look as natural as possible.
... feel free to add warmth or cool down your footage as needed to suit the mood of the film, just don’t go overboard”.

It’s uncanny how dead on this is. It’s as if it was written directly to Ryan. I guess most amateur fall pray to the same pit falls. Concentrating too much on style and not enough on substance.

[Josh Bass]

To be fair there was a period when everything was heavily stylized...anyone remember Man on Fire, Domino, Underworld, etc.? Lots of high contrast, desaturation, blue, green, etc. Doesn't seem to be very popular any more.

But yes, I remember with my own shorts when I used to be very aggressive with the "looks" and spend a lot of time worrying about the cinematography/visuals, and would fart out the script as quickly as possible.

I haven't done anything in quite a while but thankfully those two have flip-flopped on more recent projects.

[Paul R Johnson]

I knew it would end badly when the first thing you MUST do is your mood board. Every time I have heard them talked about I have ended up cringing at something designed to replace good old intuition and common sense with a cunning plan that will miraculously turn garbage into gold. Then it gets worse - the top Moodboard Apps?? Seriously? It drifts into red causes blood pressure increases, and blue is calming (when the lighting people have always termed red as warm and blue as cold when it comes to generating mood and emotion)

Then comes more educationalist clap-trap

In The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan uses the color red to represent fear, dread and foreshadowing whereas in Pleasantville, Gary Ross uses red to represent hope, love and sensuality.

That's somebodies opinion, not mine. Then it even says

Red creates an experience in the viewer

Really?

They drift into monochromatic and some how get into shades of pink and red and their example looks totally and utterly different to the classic implementations.

Then they hijack triadic. Coloraturas discordance made me quiver - a new term to describe something I've known about and used without having to even think about - for effect. That's all it is, just another effect, like the often used colour item in a monochrome image, just an effect.

Then I realised that the writers are just taking their favourite movies and attributing pseudo-science to them. Sometimes a colour is just a colour. No hidden meanings or attempts to make it something it isn't. Darth Vader and Luke had different colour beams on their light sabre - red for bad and blue for good. Just historic good vs evil colours, not describing blue as comforting or rubbish like that.

Looks like people have collated movies and ascribed decisions to them that may, or may not have been voiced by the creative team. In British pantomime, the goodie comes on stage right, the baddie comes on stage left. It's tradition. There's no science behind it.

I couldn't read further - it just made me sad and angry somebody has broken good movies down and their analysis is so flawed. I'd bet most older directors if asked did not make decisions this way at all - they just did what felt best! the costume designer produced a sketch - the direct said yes or no.

[Josh Bass]

Some of that was a little...um...abstract for me to follow, but as a guy who had a subscription to American Cinematographer for a few years I can absolutely tell you DPs and Directors, at least some of the time, choose colors and lighting styles etc. to subtly convey moods etc. Having scenes have a bluer look as when the main character is down, and then warmer as the character triumphs late in a film is simple example. The DP for an indie Im failing to remember the name of used little pink areas in some shots to represent hope, love, etc. In “The Cooler” William H Macy’s keylight is very toppy with deep eye shadows earlier in the film when his character is miserable and achieves a more flattering angle as his situation improves later. This is all per interviews in that magazine with the DPs and Directors.

Of course it isnt consistent and one color in one movie can mean the complete opposite in another and we the viewers arent TOLD any of this, and we’re really not supposed to notice it at all, but rather “feel” it on an unconscious level. So there’s all that to consider.

[Paul R Johnson]

That's what worries me - somebody has taken the mood indicators of one movie and done a Ryan - created a rule, when there isn't a rule. Happy/Sad/Angry/Emotional/scared - all these things now have colour prescribed. So a new 'cinematographer' reads this stuff and runs with it - so all scenes with X in them must be Z colour. Educationalists are always doing this. So and so director did this, and they go on about why it was done, when often it was just how it happened - happy accidents or an experiment that worked. Things that don't work get cut, so nobody knows. I'm very happy with their colour choices in the main. After all, selecting the emulsion to use when picking the film stock was very important and needed a decision early on. Now they can experiment in post it encourages fiddling, which can be good - but I just don't believe in hard rules, just guidelines and suggestions. The bit where they looked at the superman costume with blue, yellow and red. In print they're spaced out evenly, but in video, they're not because video primary colours are different, like light - so I think I might take that reading of the choice made with a pinch of salt. Did the people who designed the superman costume really do it that way, or did they just pick a blue costume then find things that worked with the cape and boots, then add a yellow for contrast in the stylised logo? I bet they never considered a colour wheel!

[Ryan Elder]

Originally Posted by Paul R Johnson

This is NOT what we're saying. If you have white walls, you can wash them any colour. They will then look like coloured white walls. Washing a perfectly flat, white wall is possible, with enough appropriate kit, and the equipment to get the lights in the right position. What you can't do is put actors close to them because they will then be lit by the wash colour, which doesn't happen with a white wall. Their shadow then to the audience screams 'lighting' not real. They also pick up the colour, which is costume and skin tone dependent on how weird it looks. You can downlight a white wall from close in, but then surface blemishes create shadows that emphasise the roughness, and make small bumps into mountains.

The audience will accept anything for what it appears to be. They will spot picture elements that look fake, and yet again we're seeing you try to emulate elements for your movie that are new to you, there's no budget for and you don't have people who understand lighting to do it. You are fixated with the issue of the walls, and are determined to solved them with no understanding of how to do it. For instance, have you considered the inverse square law? It dictates that for even brightness, the light sources MUST be at right angles to the plane of the wall to let the light level left to right match. If the wall is lit from a distance with a medium angle, then the distance between light sources will be quite small, creating a no entry zone for your actors. Wide angle sources have hot spots, which the viewer sees as 'lighting' not reality. A continuous line of wash lights enables blended even lighting, but is a considerable weight to suspend up in the air in a real building, and won't it have a low ceiling so the lights will be in vision?

I'm throwing in problems here. If you have a real building, where on earth will the lighting fixtures go? O n a set, you hang them in the position that looks right to the camera - you just cannot do this with a few stands with lights on top. At the first meeting where lights and camera people are present, hands will go up immediately when you announce the plain white walls need to be evenly lit to look like it's been painted.

I just see no way to make this idea fly. It's going to look like a light coloured room, splurged with brownish/nicotine flavoured projected light. It could be cheaper to hire the space, paint it, then repaint it back to white!

The problem with painting the walls, and then painting them back is, is that no location so far has been okay with that idea. They do not want their places painted, even if you agree to have them painted back after. However, the Blade Runner Bradbury building was used as an example before with it's lighting, so couldn't I light a scene to be certain colors, like they did there?

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

For some reason, Ryan seems to be obsessing about the colour of the walls. Any modern police station I've been in (or even older ones) don't have brown walls, they have been white or magnolia, some older ones used to have a very light green.

Useless the building hasn't been repainted since the 1940s the walls are unlikely to be deep colours. One factor is cost, the white or magnolia cost less. .

So far, the only reason given for the colour brown, is that it's used in "Seven" I don't know where the blue comes from and the reason for using that in a police station. There's good use of it in "The Passenger", where Jack Nicholson's character comes out of the hot desert into his hotel and the blue walls come as a relief from the heat.

I only know of one office in the real world painted blue, and it's pretty oppressive. It's an unlikely colour in a police station unless it's the Stasi.

When you've got limited resources, keeping it simple is the usually best way, don't get involved in repainting interiors, dress the rooms with the colours you want.

Yeah I know a lot of buildings in real life are painted white, including police stations, but this is not real life, this is a movie, and I want to create a particular atmosphere of course.