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Lighting Question
The scenes don’t take place in a club or anywhere the light is coming from naturally. We’re shooting in a living room or something normal.
It always looks student filmy if there’s no intention to it and there’s just some rgb lights thrown up everywhere
It also messes with skin tones and stuff etc
How do you light scenes when the director is dead set on that?
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Everyone wants to look like A24 or Wes Anderson lol. It helps to have a small neon or LED "practical" somewhere visible in the shot that you can use to motivate some sort of light RGB kick on your subject. It's almost always an unnecessary stylistic choice, but if it's the hand you've been dealt, might as well make the most of it and try to make it look cool. Good luck to you
Out of curiosity, is there a quintessential example of that light being used as such?
If you look up Euphoria cinematography you'll get a few. Dark misty moody rooms with some sort of neon light in the back and a pink or green wash on the actors
Yes, thank you!
I’d politely remind them that A24 is a distribution company and ask for a mood board.
It’s shorthand communication, and pointing this out is unnecessary and doesn’t accomplish anything.
This obviously acknowledges that this director is NOT interested in cultivating their own aesthetic vision and is chasing trends and established visual narrative qualities, but as a DP, our job is to achieve that for them, and not overcomplicate the process by requesting redundant information (while hopefully injecting our own creative sensibilities and style into it when possible).
This can be a double edged sword, though. A director who DOES have a unique vision will come to you WITH that information up front… but in some cases, these types of directors may stifle your ability to achieve your own creative vision in the process, since you will essentially be hired as a tool to manifest achieving their specific vision.
The flipside here is that if the Director doesn’t know exactly what they want, and is only requesting such a broad aesthetic sensibility, you may find that you get to exercise your own creative intent more frequently during the project itself since they don’t have any vision for themselves.
Also I just want to say that in my mind, the shorthand is totally understandable… A distribution company is basically the same thing as a record label, and we all know stylistic record labels focus on a particular sonic aesthetic, vibe, or genre…
In the same way that that using creative genre shorthand such as “let’s make drum and bass like liquicity” or “let’s write indie rock like arts and crafts” or “deep house like anjunadeep” etc. it’s completely reasonable to cite a highly stylistic distribution company which has a market-comparatively specific aesthetic as an inspiration source as shorthand.
It’s not like they were like “let’s make a blockbuster like warner brothers”… I’d be like lolwut? But you could easily say “let’s make a blockbuster in the marvel style” because that shorthand is so evidently obvious what they mean (despite being a weak creative approach).
Especially when the specific distribution company in question has adhered to a myopic set of very identifiable aesthetic qualities that you as a DP are familiar with, pointing this out to a director or client is only putting more unnecessary work on them for no reason.
In other words, a Cinematographer….
Exactly
this is the answer.
I disagree, it's glib and pedantic.
We both know what they mean. They mean something probably like Moonlight or Euphoria and the right thing to do is pull some references from those shows and dial in exactly which RGB A24 look they're imagining, because some are more exaggerated than others.
Then the real answer is to get the Production Designer to help you create motivation for those RGB tones with something built into the set that makes it make sense for these bright saturated colors to be present.
How is it possible to be unaware of this and end up as a director of any level lol
They are your director. It’s much better to have an attitude that supports them than judges them. People direct for a ton of reasons. You can be a brilliant director and not know anything about camera and lighting. That’s why they chose you right?
my point is it's wild to me that someone immersed enough in video/film to get to the point of directing can think that a distribution company has a "look" based vaguely on like 5% of its movies. It's like saying you want the "miramax look" which somehow means you want the "tarantino look" which somehow means who knows what
I understand op is referring to a work superior and over a decade of design work I've learned that my opinion doesn't matter. You do what the client wants.
But as far as my personal reddit opinion goes, this director seems strikingly ignorant
Sorry I’m not trying to be hard on this. But it’s important to not just do what the client wants. These are your collaborators if you feel intuitively it should be different then you must offer them that and in a way that is persuasive. We are artists making something it’s only a chain of command issue if it has to be. They are you. Convince yourself. Don’t judge anyone. You don’t know what they might be going through right now in their life. Help them and they’ll care about your contribution. Buck them and they’ll resist you.
They are directors. Artists. Not technicians. They direct the heads of the technicians. They are story smiths. Not image smiths. Often director use language like children and are naive about technical stuff. I’ve worked with directors from all over the world. If you want to be in this industry you can’t judge someone for how they got here. Otherwise it’s gonna be really annoying for you. I
Didn’t they produce euphoria and other shows, not distribute?
They produce plenty of movies, but there's no set look.
For some unfathomable reason, "filmmaking" YouTubers have latched on to talking about an A24 look (that doesn't actually exist) now that they've beat talking about the FX3 into the ground (did you know The Creator was shot on it?) .
I feel like people who don’t understand the details and process of art dept and cinematography say they want an “A24 look”. To me A24 is just affiliated with really creative works that tend to lean away from commercial looks and more toward art or experimental visual concepts, and that usually means there is color and great cinematography & art direction involved. To the untrained eye that’s just a color RGB light.
I guess people remember the ones with high saturation, popping colors and film grain. I'm trying to even remember which ones would have made this impact but my favorites don't feature that look lol
Edit: spring breakers, moonlight (only a few brief scenes), good time
Isn't the "A24 look" just pink, violets and greens? They've just moved around the colour wheel when teal and orange got overused.
They are a TV studio, so they produce and distribute. For films, they sometimes produce (e.g. Moonlight, The Green Knight), sometimes acquire finished (e.g. Talk to Me).
Holy blast from the past, Batman!
Believe me, I hesitated before actually hitting “comment”! But it bothered me that no one had answered your question. I’m sure you have spent the last 3 weeks in constant suspense lol
A24's average production budget is about 15 million.
This is the equivalent of asking for a "cinematic" looking movie, when in reality they are looking for something more Art-House.
Be that as it may, I would ask the director what they think, or any ideas of such a look that come to mind, and tell them to illustrate or show me what they are thinking. They are the Director afterall.
Sounds like fishing with a shit pole in a bucket full of fish.... Excuse my dad's old, and terrible AA quotes.
The “music video” look syndrome
And that’s exactly why I prefer music videos, I just like making cool shit. Majority of artist just want cool shit.
I feel it can work if your lighting is also reflecting the mood and tone of the scene. So if it’s somber or lonely, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use warm colors, etc, but blue & purple hues can really communicate that. Also look for things you can use for motivated light, like a TV or computer screen. You can get away with some subtle motivated color there (though usually cooler in temp). Mixed lights (eg blue and red) would be hard to do tastefully if it isn’t motivated by the scene, story, or mood.
Sounds like a nightmare though, working with someone without a vision just copying what they like in another movie. Best of luck k to you!
Personally my rule of thumb is every thing can be colored but it’s best to have your key light be white. If it must be color-ish, try 1700-2700k or 6500-8000k on a fixture that isn’t shit in those ranges like something from DMG. If it must be color, desaturate the color coming from the key or hitting skin by a few points. A color meter is great for this since you can see if your color is over saturated. At the end of the day, do what looks good but do it with intention and with the knowledge that skin tones need to be preserved as much as possible
There is no “a24 look”
Α24 ...has many looks and alot of their movie's don't have RGB lights in scenes...
So ...choose a movie that don't have RGB lights and if the director tells you that didn't ask something like that ...tell him you said that you want something like A24 .
Ask for the intention of doing that. You’re the DIRECTOR of photography, not the clerk who has to follow any order. I say that as a director. If they don’t accept that screw them
I feel like just a cam op half the time I dp…
Yea you gotta stand your ground. YouTube brainrotted many people, they just want those punchy and colorful looks because that is "real" cinematography for them. As a director it's your job to really think about everything and in 99% of the cases "I just like it" shouldn't be your reason. if they don't do it they're bad at what they do.
They’re the one paying my bills tho, if work wasn’t as scarce I’d 100% stand my ground. But if I don’t listen to them they’re just gonna find someone else lol
If they say they want the A24 look, just shoot everything in Black & White likeThe Lighthouse 🤣🤣
If they complain, tell them they should try & be more specific.
Teasing aside, I have been seeing A LOT more color saturation akin to movies like Suspiria. I'm not against this but I think a lot these directors are forgetting that the hyper aesthetics of something like that, or Anderson or Kubrick is secondary to the story. Dune is the perfect example of this.
It's like putting caviar on a Big Mac.
Go into any space and look at the light on a subject. Notice that there is a lot of color constrast as the sky and bounce from the ground and the color of the walls and the green from plants even bounce from the skin tone of the actor themselves all create and incredibly diverse set of color sources on your subject. It’s very subtle and takes some attention. Now imagine that you played that up by a subtle amount and curated the colors. Just enough to notice. What they are after is something with more depth than bicolor lighting. Coordinated with production design. Just my humble opinion.
It’s you job to show them what they want if you think they have the wrong idea. Be persuasive not argumentative . Yes and.
Ask more questions about the motivation behind the light. Is it just to follow a trend?
Ask them which A24 film they are talking about. Everything Everywhere all at Once? Beau is afraid? Iron Claw? All dirt roads taste of salt?
A24 have a large variety of films they distribute and they all have a very different aesthetic depending on the director that shot them.
you're working? damn...