Lighting Challenge #15: Film Noir

[altbighead]

I am working on this film noir challenge from cgtalk in a break time.

I am gonna have to rent some film noir movies as I am not that familiar with this genre.

here is my first pass.comment and critique please.

Edited May 22, 2008 by altbighead

[abvfx]

nice, like the look alt.

I have been storing the scene files of those challenges so i can do some lighting studies. Everything from shaders, to Comp all in Houdini.

It would be cool to have a forum section where we can post these studies, maybe a subsection of the Rendering forum. Maybe , maybe not.

By the way, tell us more about the render, in terms of shaders, lighting method (physical or traditional) etc

Two critiques right now would be the light beams are a little bit too sharp. Looks like a distant comet is lighting the scene, im sure a blur will make it look better and the actual light source looks alot like a sphere. I cant tell if its a car light or a lighthouse . But its looking good, you got the mood down.

Hope this helps.

-andy

[altbighead]

sorry , i am on vacation right now but i will upload a scene file once I come back.

yh I noticed the images is over sharpern on my lcd but it looks fine on work crt.

[Allegro]

nice, like the look alt.

I have been storing the scene files of those challenges so i can do some lighting studies. Everything from shaders, to Comp all in Houdini.

It would be cool to have a forum section where we can post these studies, maybe a subsection of the Rendering forum. Maybe , maybe not.

By the way, tell us more about the render, in terms of shaders, lighting method (physical or traditional) etc

Two critiques right now would be the light beams are a little bit too sharp. Looks like a distant comet is lighting the scene, im sure a blur will make it look better and the actual light source looks alot like a sphere. I cant tell if its a car light or a lighthouse . But its looking good, you got the mood down.

Hope this helps.

-andy

Why not contact Jeremy Birn and let him know that you're doing this? It would be cool to have the houdini files available for download from the same place as his other files.

[Dhiren Shah]

Hey Allegro.

There are files in fbx format available and with H9.1 we can easily import those files in houdini

I tried doing that and it just works fine.

Try giving that a shot.

Dhiren

[symek]

I am working on this film noir challenge from cgtalk in a break time.

I am gonna have to rent some film noir movies as I am not that familiar with this genre.

here is my first pass.comment and critique please.

As a note: if you refer to the Hollywood's origins, '30, '40, Bogart's movies etc, etc. there are lot's of books on this subject from a dops point of view. There were very specific circumstances which were influencing that "Look".

One of the most important is a film stock with a very low sensitivity (speed) forcing dops to work on a very high-key lighting -> leading to very sharp pictures, developed, worked out lit, with dozens of small *local illuminations. In fact also cameras before '30 hadn't a loop for an operator (he was watching a movie on "focusing screen" or something similar, so he had to have full of light on a stage to see anything on this. Proverbial sentence was: "Lit that corner or it won't exist!"

(There is a funny story about Nykvist, who was shooting his first movie in nearly darkness, the pictures were exposed properly (as he wanted), but he constantly was losing moving characters, because he was pointing camera based on sound, not view in a loop...)

Another consequence of that was that a film was very easy to overexpose (and under of course). Modern films make magic here, being able to save 5 stops (3 easily). That film was very narrow, so any light pointing towards camera was exposing as a big white glowing spot. That's why any directional exposing was for a long time prohibited in movies. You can see it in famous Citizen Kane's scene in cinema. But also any street lamp, spotlight, headlight etc was very distinct with much less illuminate farther in distance. This was leading to these nice glows around white spots (including bright reflections and speculars). Kaminiski (Spielberg's dop) loves this effect (Schindler List, Minority Report among others).

I'm' not very sure if this can be useful for you or what could be practical guides from that, except most obvious things like: using more narrow spot lights with physical attenuations that cover with light anything you'd like to show, white beams for any light source directly exposed, keeping it in a middle for standard shots, or dramatically underexposed for shots so typical for that kind of movies. Keeping it sharp, any DOF effect has to be carefully considered. Using post-processing for beams or glowing emulsion.

That's all, as to me (basics).

Cheers,

sy.

PS You can find some really elaborated studies about properties of those emulation and lenses. Also proper rendering b/w images seems to be challenging for me. Surely someone was doing this before

Edited June 4, 2008 by SYmek