Advances In Cinema Tech Overcoming a Strange Racial Divide 164
barlevg writes "Since the birth of film, shooting subjects of darker complexion has been a technical challenge: light meters, film emulsions, tone and color models, and the dynamic range of the film itself were all calibrated for light skin, resulting in dark skin appearing ashy and washed-out. Historically, filmmakers have used workarounds involving "a variety of gels, scrims and filters." But now we live in the age of digital filmmaking, and as film critic Ann Hornaday describes in the Washington Post, and as is showcased in recent films such as "12 Years a Slave," "Mother of George" and "Black Nativity," a collection of innovators have set to work developing techniques in lighting, shooting and post-processing designed to counteract century-old technological biases as old as the medium itself."
Re:For real? (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds unlikely to me - although some films were produced to "enhance" skin tones. Kodak had a specialised film made for weddings and portraits, and I can't remember seeing anything other than caucasians in the example brochures. You can enhance any part of the spectrum you want, but enhancing caucasian skin tones would negatively affect other parts of the spectrum. Besides, it's a creative decision as to how a film should "look", so it's largely up to the director, art department, and editor what the finished product looks like. You can have blue & orange (the current fad), or wash it all out a la 70's westerns - there's lots of ways to influence the final product - choice of emulsion, choice of lighting, and choice of post-processing, to name a few.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read the article? Or, like most Slashdotters are you spouting off based on your uninformed "gut" instincts. The article is spelling out for you how black skin has traditionally been harder to film for tangible, technical reasons which required extra work for directors to address. How many directors do you think want to have interns smearing Black actors with vaseline between shots? This has obviously let directors to say "f it" throughout Hollywood's history. This has nothing to do with the "reverse racism" rants you hear on daytime radio.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
"Film is not "biased" towards people with "light skin." Quite frankly, I don't see how any visual medium that's designed to capture an accurate colour spectrum could be racially biased."
The error in your comment lies in the second clause - "designed to capture an accurate colour spectrum"
Very few film stocks were designed to be accurate; most were designed to be pleasing.
Many were designed with a certain colour profile or palette in mind. Some very general examples: Kodak films usually had a red/yellow bias, making things in a dreary, grey, northern climate look more saturated, at the expensive of making vivid colourful things in a tropical environment look cartoonish rainbow vomit, other films, like velvia, over saturated all the colours, and crunch all the shadows into a deep black, so sunsets would appear breathtakingly beautiful.
Nearly all of these types of film took into account that 90% of the time, they would be shooting people - so they had to make skintone look good. But they only really designed it for white skin tones.
Re:Uhh, what? (Score:4, Informative)
White skin presumably means what Europeans have. With a bit of a tan is close to 18% reflectance.
This is the same as a grey card [wikipedia.org], but the reason is that lots of other things are this tone too - foliage, brick, weathered wood, old roads. It's also, on a log scale, the midpoint between the lightest and darkest tones film can show.
Article is a load of horsefeathers. Films are no more biased against black people than they are in favour of yetis.