Enhancing Your Look In Post

Working with cheap cameras.

Shooting a certain way can help get your look in camera, then push it in post.

The seeming popularity of my last article was unexpected, but awesome since it gave me more confidence in talking about the visuals of my movie, and the process by which I worked to get them.

The Lens

The key component of the “look” of the film was the Helios 44–2, an old Russian bootleg of a 1930’s Zeiss lens.
The schematics for the lens were taken after the Battle of Berlin in 1945, when the Zeiss Factory was raided by the Soviets.
In the coming decades, the Soviets produced MILLIONS of copies of the design, across several versions, that are all scattered across Europe now since they were included as kit lenses for many Minolta cameras.

The oval aperture of the also means no stopping up or down for light.

In addition to the older design and imperfect production which makes for a unique look in every lens (for better or worse), the particular lens I bought
(for $60 USD on eBay) had it’s aperture ring removed and replaced with an acrylic oval disk, approximating the oval bokeh (out of focus bits) of classic films.

Shot with areal anamorphic lens, notice how out of focus pinpricks of light take on an elliptical shape instead of a circular one, plus the swirl in the corners of the image common to 70’s anamorphic as well.

Not my image, but an excellent example of the swirl of the Helioscaptured on a larger Full Frame Canon 5D Mark III by Olia Papaskiri — https://www.flickr.com/photos/oliap/

An even better addition to the lens is that the Helios has a very unique kind of barrel distortion that swirls the edges, when out of focus, extremely similar to some older anamorphic lenses.
My camera has a slightly smaller sensor, but even so the swirl is evident in many of the shots in Mockingbird, and one of the things I enhanced in post.

The Light

The film was captured chiefly with available light, which can be very mercurial.

The use of natural and available light was one part artistic choice and one part necessity.
I don’t own any lights (that would be any use in a film) and don’t have the money to buy any. While my lead actress and another actor DID provide lights for certain key scenes, the majority of the film is shot in whatever light we had to work with, which led to a number of creative and logistical challenges that needed to be met and overcome quickly and practically.

The chief side effect of these choices were many of the shots are extremely dark. This compliments the tone of the film and was something I accounted for in shooting, but it can still be extremely ballsy to throw half or more of your frame into solid black, and if not done carefully, can simply look amateurish.

When executed confidently, an extremely dark image can be seen as intentional, even if it’s used as a workaround for an actor who did not prepare. Image from Apocalypse Now.

My actress DID prepare, but the limited time we had to work meant I went for an extreme Noir style for this shot.

Luckily for me, the cast and what crew we had were trusting that I wouldn’t shoot something unwatchable, and the quick lighting set ups left more time to work on character and dialogue beats that would be much more important in the long run.

Post Production

Capturing the image in a Neutral picture profile gave me some wiggle room in dialing in the image I had captured in post, but even so I made sure to customize the white balance and dial in my exposure.
After learning the difference between “dark” and “what the hell is even happening I can’t see what the fuck” on my previous film, I went into Mockingbird knowing that while I wanted to keep a darker look, I wanted to be sure the crucial parts of the image (read: the actors face) weren’t completely invisible unless it was supposed to be.

A very dark image from the film, but intentionally so. We had three large lights available, though only used the one to the right of his face, left of frame. The top light was already built into the church. The idea was the character is hard to read. Making him hard to actually see helps with that.

After shooting ended, I immediately took a selection of images from the film, what I called “key images”, to do a look-test.
Each scene is important, and in a film this long, the same location is used multiple times across multiple days.
I wanted to keep the environments fresh, instead of looking like we shot all the scenes in that location in one day (which we did).

The look book of key images was put together, and I decided to share some of the images with my cast and crew through Facebook, then shared that post to The Frugal Filmmaker group that I’m a part of, to more attention than I’d expected.

As I got into the editing process, the key images needed to be adapted from still to motion.
Sometimes things that look GREAT in a picture, just look bad in motion.

A color test for the film, with enhanced barrel distortion and some basic color and contrast work

The intensity of a particular “radial blur” effect on my computer means that for editing I’ll be keeping it turned off, until export.

In Conclusion

Each of the parts in the process are important, but if there is a hierarchy it’d be Light->Lens->Post.

Without the light, no matter how expensive your camera or computer, you wouldn’t get anything good.
When deciding to make God your cinematographer, you have to be prepared to adapt. For a number of shots, the entire scene’s light would fluctuate wildly as dark storm clouds passed in front of the oppressive July sun.
But again, when handled confidently, it suddenly becomes part of the aesthetic rather than a problem to try and solve.

All this shit to say, pick a solid lens or selection of lenses, know your challenges, and execute with confidence.
Even if it ends up awful, it’ll be awful with ✧ passion ✧

Martin R. McGowan is a filmmaker living in Aston, Pa.
He enjoys long walks in Hyrule and ignoring his responsibilities.
When not stressing, he can be found asleep, or pretending to sleep as the world around him may or may not be crumbling.

I can also be found on Instagram, and building a YouTube channel, about five years late to the party.