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Check out this article in the print edition of StudentFilmmakers Magazine, April 2008. More photos and gaffer sidebar included in print edition. Click here to get a copy and to subscribe >>

Lighting Period War Film, Shades of Hope
Separating Worlds through Color

by Kevin Zanit

Brie Campbell, the writer and director of Shades of Hope approached me about the film while it was still being developed. I really liked the general idea of the story: a Vietnam War movie that travels back and forth between the war zones and back home. I immediately connected with it from a visual point of view and had a few ideas for the �look� I wanted for the film that came to me instinctively when hearing the story.

Behind the scenes of Shades of Hope.

As the script developed more, so did my ideas regarding the visual aspects of the story. I knew I wanted the Vietnam and back home parts of the story to have a stark contrast between them that would make the viewer immediately aware of where they were in the story. I shared some of my thoughts with Brie, and we were very much on the same page.

For the Vietnam world, I wanted to really mute the color, and because the pallet of Vietnam was predominately olive drab, I wanted to embrace the monochromatic nature of that part of the story. I also wanted the highlights to burnout quickly and knew a bleach bypass to the film negative would give me both of the above. Brie and I also decided that using wider lenses in Vietnam and avoiding very tight close ups would help show how the soldiers were somewhat engulfed by their surroundings. We also felt shooting all the Vietnam sections handheld would also convey a sense of unease.

We wanted the back home world to appear dramatically different. The production design featured a much more colorful pallet. We planned to use longer lenses to give us a pretty, shallow depth of field look, and combined this with very smooth elegant camera moves.

Lots of light defined the look of �back home.�

To really be comfortable with our Vietnam look, I knew a serious round of testing would be important. I knew the bleach bypass would give me the look I wanted with color and highlights but did not necessarily want the extreme high contrast associated with the process. To combat this, I planned to use low contrast filters which would not only help lower the contrast but would also interact with the really blown out highlights in a very interesting way. I talked to Dan Sasaki at Panavision about what I was trying to achieve, and remembered that he made up a few sets of special lenses for Janusz Kaminski when shooting Saving Private Ryan called �Flare Lenses�. He agreed that these could be a good option instead of the filters and set out on finding them for me. These lenses had their anti-flare coatings removed, thus allowing highlights to easily flare the lens and lower the contrast.

I knew I wanted to test several combinations of film stocks (three different Kodak stocks), lenses (two; the flare and Primo) and lab processes (full skip bleach to the negative and process normal). Deluxe did all of our lab work. We spent an entire day testing around 100 different options and combinations of locations and lighting methods. Frank DiPaola, the gaffer on the project was crucial in his help with the tests. The results were screened at Deluxe; I showed Brie my favorite, and she agreed. Thus, the look for our Vietnam portion of the film was set: Kodak 5229, which is a very low-contrast stock, with a full skip bleach to the negative with Panavision�s heavy Flare lenses. This combination of film stock and lens choices helped cancel out the high contrast look of the bleach bypass and gave us what I would consider a much more �normal� contrast range.

The back home portions of the movie were shot with Kodak 5217, a very nice �snappy� film stock with Panavision Primo lenses, also very good �snappy� lenses.

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