TECHNIQUE BLACK & WHITE
just dealing with the black & white. I’m considering doing that even when I work in colour.” Papamichael prefers a natural lighting approach to his work. “If there is a lamp, a practical or a window source, I always augment that,” he says. “I am always true to the direction of light and I do not like backlights too much.” When Papamichael captured night exteriors for Nebraska , he utilised blue gels on his lights that were illuminating the sky or the streets. “I knew I could grab that colour and intensify or reduce its luminance completely, so I actually had control of adjusting light intensity. That was really effective.” Edu Grau, ASC, AEC identifies some other potential complications when shooting in black & white. “Without colour separation, a subject’s hair can blend in with the background, making a scene feel flat,” he says. “You need to be careful how you compose light and dark within the frame, but that is also the case with colour. Everything is more elevated in this format and people tend to love your work more, as they think the result is more beautiful.” Grau found that, during tests for Passing , shooting in colour was helpful for the post-production process. “For example, we hated the colour of one wall in the house, but it was too expensive to paint,” says Grau. “When you get the raw material in colour, you can choose a colour and make it completely different.
Everything that’s red can be altered to be very dark, which was very practical for us. Obviously, we couldn’t have done that if we had shot in black & white. So, we relied on a colour camera to help us compose the image we wanted. Although we never saw a colour image on-set; everything was monitored in black & white.” Sam Levy shares a similar perspective for his work on Frances Ha , despite filming in colour. “With my history of watching black & white films as a teenager and studying how to shoot black & white reversal films in college, I already knew a few helpful techniques. In a certain way, it’s easier. You’re really just dealing with tonalities of grey, rather than the full complexity of colour. It both matters and doesn’t matter what the capture format is, as long as you know that the film will ultimately be seen in black & white.” GRADING IN GREYSCALE Chambille seriously considered shooting monochrome for Nouvelle Vague , but his colourist talked him out of it. “I never had a problem in colour grading because it was so easy to interact with the image,” he says. “We did not have the usual problems regarding skin tones or if the colour of the daylight is right, depending on the time of day.” On the contrary, Chambille had more tools and acknowledges it was easier to adjust the background and foreground.
UNFADING LOVE Passing (pictured here), Frances Ha (bottom right) and Nebraska (bottom left) spearhead the revival in black & white films
14
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook