STRANGERS | SHOOT STORY
There was a huge feeling of mixed colour and mixed light and I used those to accentuate what we called ‘dirty colour’ for. When I was getting the colours to read correctly on camera I got this device called a spectrometer which reads colour wavelengths. I’d take the RGB readings off the spectrometer and programme those into the other lights which were ARRI, LiteGear and Creamsource, so at least I’d have a starting point for this very subtle colouration that I was using.” For Eben it was a matter of augmenting what was already there. “There was a huge feeling of mixed colour and mixed light and I used those to accentuate what we called ‘dirty colour’. We never wanted a clean skin tone ever in the show, there’s always a dirty green fluorescent light with a bit of sodium. Even in day scenes we’d mixed the daylight coming through the windows with a practical that was slightly off daylight colours. So essentially you had two different colours hitting people’s faces, we never tried to beautify it or clean things up. Green is a big part of it, I always wanted a tinge of it – this isn’t a purple or magenta show, it’s a green show. The Police station for example at the beginning, that is a London set but I had sweaty Hong Kong sunshine coming through the windows and the practicals inside, we wanted to use daylight balanced fluorescent tubes. Instead of getting fancy film ones which are perfectly CRI colour
everything a warmth, even if it was a cloudy dull day I would put a little bit of warmth in to the highlights to make it feel sweaty and hot. There were also times we had to shoot London for Hong Kong but I was able to use the same aesthetic to bring back that heat and sweat even during the UK winter. GHOST IN THE SHELL Again we reference Ghost in the Shell with Jess Hall’s very controlled 28-colour palette. It was understandable for that film which was a remake of a Japanese animé to restrict and control the colour. Jess explained to us how he controlled his palette. “We were testing four-channel colour and I wasn’t getting what I wanted so we designed a six-channel unit which gave me RGBW, amber and Tungsten, and enabled me to get these subtle colours I was aiming
IMAGES DOP Eben Bolter (top right) shot Strangers for Amazon and ITV in both London and Hong Kong. He used colour and light to create a different atmosphere for each location.
OCTOBER 20 1 8 | DEF I N I T ION 41
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