Plastic Fantastic?

[Joe G.]

Here's what I wrote about the images in Slumdog Millionaire, from another thread:


"I started to keep noticing the plastic like effect on the face, especially of the lead character Jamal. In almost every scene, his face looked like it was overblown or something, and didn't have enough dynamic range on at least half his face. That started to bother me."

It occurred to me that this was the "plastic" reference I had seen around here.

1) Is this caused by narrow dynamic range of the sensor?

1a) Is the increased DR of the FF35 likely to make that go away?

2) Can this be mitigated by lighting it with more texture?

The lighting for texture is what I really want to know. I do not like plasticized faces, and if I in the position of choosing a camera system, this will be very high on my list of characteristics to examine.

Faces are what we ask the audience to look at, after all, most of the time. In Slumdog, I was very aware of the image capturing limitations, and this took me out of the story repeatedly (at least a dozen times).

Some faces were more textured, from shadier lighting, moving through shadows, etc. That looked far more film like.

The faces with light aimed directly at them did not have a natural looking range of colors in them however. Not natural, to me, equals bad.

The questions relevant here are how can you add more texture to the lighting, so that this plastic effect is minimized?

Bouncing off a textured surface?

A textured silk?

Etc.

Have DPs out there addressed this issue directly with strategies for making the lighting compensate for limitations in the sensor technology?

[Cail Young]

Never make judgements of an imaging system based from graded material.

That said - in theory, a more "modelled" lighting approach (i.e. creating a difference in intensity across the face) would help; I'm not sure how you'd "texture" keylight on a face without using a projection as generally the shadow from scrims etc isn't grainy enough.

[Dan Hudgins]

You should look into what kind of noise filtering was used, if you low pass images in the low contrast parts of the image you can loose some detail in the pores giving the "plastic skin" look. Because of the compression used and the poor light in some shoots, they may have used noise filtering, and that may have added to the loss of low contrast detail that the compression also does. If you watch it on a DVD or Blu-Ray you get more low pass on the low contrast areas of the frame, and if they play a compressed "tape" over cable etc. broadcast you get more re-compression losses to the low contast details.

Even if you shoot uncompressed, today your work will be filtered to remove low contast detail for digital projection or broadcast, you just have to live with it. Low contast detail adds to bandwidth, so they filter it out.