Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Cinematography of Lighting Black Skin-HBO's 'Insecure' [VIDEO]

HBO: Insecure

Ava Berkofsky, 'Insecure’s director of photography, was brought on for the show’s second season (currently airing on HBO) to give the show a more movie-like look, which includes making black faces not only legible, but striking.

“When I was in film school, no one ever talked about lighting nonwhite people,” Berkofsky said in a phone interview with Mic. “There are all these general rules about lighting people of color, like throw green light or amber light at them. It’s weird.” These rules are a start, but they’re far from a complete picture.

“The conventional way of doing things was that if you put the skin tones around 70 IRE, it’s going to look right,” Berkofsky said. IRE, a unit used in the measurement of composite video signals (named for the initials of the Institute of Radio Engineers), ranges from 0 to 100. “If you’ve got black skin, [dialing it] up to 50 or 70 is just going to make the rest of the image look weird.” The resulting image looks very bright, Berkofsky noted, similar to what you’d see in traditional sitcoms like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or The Cosby Show." –Mic

READ the entire article about lighting black skin on Insecure @ Mic  HERE and WATCH the great video below.



Friday, September 1, 2017

Black Panther’s Production Designer Talks About Bringing the Film to Life

African American film Production Designer Hannah Beachler has worked on Fruitvale Station (2013), Creed (2015), Miles Ahead (2015), Lemonade (2016), Moonlight (2016) and the upcoming Black Panther (2018).

In the video linked below she talks about working on Black Panther.

ADDITIONAL 
You can read more about what exactly a Production Designer does in our post

What Does a Production Designer Do?