The look of Batman

	Re: The look of Batman by David Jones on Jul 16, 2009 at 1:26:22 am Hi Alex- The best place to learn about cinematography in current films is from American Cinematographer Magazine http://www.theasc.com/magazine/. The July '08 has the article about "The Dark Knight". In terms of Batman from the 1960's (Adam West), well, as you know it's a totally different look. They were trying to go for a more comic book feel; bright solid colors and dutch angles. The one thing to keep in mind with both films, is that the "look" (in my opinion) tends to be divided equally between cinematography and production design (meaning everything from what color are the walls to what color and style are the costumes). It's not just about shading the camera or geling the lights. Just like the cinematographer, there's a reason the production designer also gets credit at the beginning of a movie! Best, Dave J Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: The look of Batman by Todd Terry on Jul 16, 2009 at 2:25:53 pm Actually, the 60s-era Batman would be a lot easier to recreate, in my opinion. As David said, a lot of it will have to do with production design... choices of locations, props, costumes, and a heavy bent toward things with primary colors. The actual "look" of the captured image can fairly easily be manipulated in post... it's bascially going to be tweaking saturation and contrast, and probably skewing the color balance just a tiny bit toward cyan to account for the the dye fading that would have come through the years. You can do this with just about any color correction method... although plug-ins like Magic Bullet Looks will already have some ready-made presets that will come pretty close with little or no additional tweaking needed. Watch the show (or the Batman movie that was made between seasons) and study every nuance. Study the lighting design (as I recall, it was probably relatively flat, using the open-faced instruments that were common in the day). Study the lens choices... did the director and DP favor short lenses?...or longer ones? What kind of camera moves did they make? Were there lots of dollys and trucks?...or hardly any? Did they ever use zoom lenses?...or was it all primes? And of course the classic Batman dutch angles (which were ONLY used when shooting in a villain's lair). Doing all of those things right are probably actually going to be a lot more important to creating the "look" that adding grain or saturating the chroma. And... on a completely other matter... if you are an Adam West fan (and gosh who isn't?), go to YouTube and search for "Lookwell." The whole show is there. It was an NBC pilot (written by Robert Smigel and Conan O'Brien) that the network didn't pick up, but it was a scream. Adam West played an out-of-work actor named Ty Lookwell who had previously starred in a detective show, so now he thinks he can fight crime. Hilarious. T2 __________________________________ Todd Terry Creative Director Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc. fantasticplastic.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: The look of Batman by Rick Wise on Jul 16, 2009 at 11:38:43 pm You have already been given the core advice you need. I'm going to put two more cents in here. I'd suggest that if you have not yet done so, either buy or rent and then rip a copy of whatever movie you plan to emulate. Then take a scene that strikes you. Chose a scene you can actually duplicate (including the Batmobile is probably not an option.) Write up a shot description of every single shot in that scene, shot by shot by shot, noting every single detail for each. How high is the camera? Is the scene shot with a long lens, or a wide one, or a normal one? Does the camera move? How? What do we see at the beginning of the shot, in the middle, at the end? What does the lighting look like? Hard light? Soft light? A mixture? Where is the key or keys? How much fill, a lot, a little, just enough to see the shadow side? Is there a twinkle light in the actor's eyes? Etc. Etc. Etc. Also pay a lot of attention to the sets and costumes, their shape, texture, and color. Then go out and try to shoot the same scene, exactly as you noted it. Once you've shot it, edit it, then adjust gamma, color etc. Probably your first effort will look NOTHING like the original. But just go back and do it again. By trail and error, you will have created your own personal film school. One more thing: have a ball! So you don't get it "right" the first or even fifth time. So what? Every time you are learning. Love the experience. Rick Wise director of photography San Francisco Bay Area and part-time instructor lighting and camera grad school, SF Academy of Art University/Film and Video http://www.RickWiseDP.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: The look of Batman by Todd Terry on Jul 17, 2009 at 3:42:11 am [Alex Palmer] "Do you think the look of film and the dark knight will stop be possible to create with this type of camera?" Realistically? No... it's not gonna look like that. And it's not just because you're shooting with a $900 HV30 instead of a million-dollar Panavision. That's part of it, but not all of it. Maybe not even much of it. You have to remember all the things that went into creating that "look" that you want to reproduce. You had a director with almost a dozen (some major) feature films to his credit. It was shot by a fellow who is an ASC cinematographer with three Oscar nominations and almost twenty years behind the camera. He had at his disposal probably hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of lighting equipment. They had production design worth millions and millions of dollars. It had tons of tweaking via a DI that was probably well over $100,000 just to make the DI, and then million of dollars more in post time with it. I'm not saying money is the difference... it's talent, ability, and experience. I bet you could hand Wally Pfister your HV30 and give him a decent little lighting package and he could shoot something pretty darn cool with it. The camera is just a tool. Picasso wasn't a great painter because of the brand of brushes he used. The trick is, getting out there and using the tools that you have. Do as Rick said, and try to copy something. Fail. Do it again. Fail again. Try to figure out why. What went wrong? What went right? Do it again. You won't shoot something that looks like the Dark Knight... I can pretty much guarantee that. But you may shoot something that looks pretty cool, for its own different set of reasons... something that looks like something you would shoot. Above all, have fun. T2 __________________________________ Todd Terry Creative Director Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc. fantasticplastic.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: The look of Batman by John Fishback on Jul 17, 2009 at 7:43:50 pm If you haven't seen this COW tutorial by Stu Maschwitz (Sin City's Visual Effects Supervisor) on creating looks for summer blockbusters, check it out. It's terrific. http://library.creativecow.net/articles/maschwitz_stu/red-giant-blockbuster... John MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24" TV-Logic Monitor ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5 Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date) Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index