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Chris

Question on Shooting Dark Skin Tones

Today I received this question by eMail:

Just wanted to ask you a couple of questions with some ways to light darker skintones.  Today in our test shoot we found ourselves spending more time trying to light darker faces and getting their features to show without lighting up the room way up.  Coog wanted candices room to feel really dark but it was tough to bring them up, keep the light soft and also keep the light off the walls.  A big issue was that he wanted to stage them against the wall.  Dont get me wrong it made sense from a directors point of view so im not saying anything about that.  Im just wondering if there are methods to like darker complextions and standards. 

 

We also ran into the issue of figuring out blocking, then purposefully light everything 1/2 stop under to get a moody darker feel in the room, then the actor would walk back in and we realize we cant even see her at all because her complextion is like almost 2 1/2 stops under when spotted! Her skin tone being that dark was something we did not take into consideration when we lit the first setup. 

 

Coog was mentioning he wanted the film to feel very much like City of God which i love.  I noticed just right now watching it how they are lighting their actors.  It almost looks like theres some kind of oil on their skin to bring out the spectral bounce coming from the light off their skin. are they putting something on the actors faces or am i crazy?  If we could do something similar but not too much it would help so much!