Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Lighting and color reference. Perhaps a mix of of warmish tones with contrasting blue or green in the shadows. Slow push ins on a wide angle lens for the establishing shots and handheld or loose camerawork for the close ups, especially when things get more emotionally intense for during the surgery.
Picture reference taken from Sandy Skoglund
With the exception of standard and minor color grading, the idea to would be to get the look achieved in Empyrean by using more natural conventions like gels and different white balances. Another excellent reference for this in my opinion would be Dark City:
The use of colored lights and mixing it up with using under lighting. This second shot in particular for the bandaged woman with out any backlight being primarily lit underneath from glowing tesseract, fill from the unknown window or door behind the camera. Notice the use of top light especially for our cloaked stranger but also in the more open room using softer sources, the origin of the lights coming from the sea in the ceiling (seen or not, that's were the light is coming from in my mind). One technique used on Amelie before adding a warming filter to it was the two-strip Technicolor process. Essentially leaving the reds and greens and taking out all of the blues.
You can read more about the process here.
Shot before warming filter applied
However, we can probably even switch the process and take out the green instead, leaving the blues and reds. Both being important colors but the addition of blue could leave in more of the cyan, sea foam feeling with red providing sufficient contrast.
Photo reference taken from Evanerichards.com

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