“The greatest shot ever made using a filter is one where you don’t know a filter has been used”, is a famous phrase which has been circling the film industry for decades. Despite the rapid transformation to digital video and editing, this phrase is more relevant then ever.

Although physical filters on cameras is slowly becoming marginally less common (sans filters such as depth of field) – with the advancement of Non-Linear Editors, more time is being spent in the editing suite rather then on location.

To this date, most consumer quality cameras fail quite hard at detecting light and displaying true colours well, this is especially true with Canon camera’s in particular. Although companies like JVC and Sony have really paved the way for rendering true colours, a filter can still make all the difference.

For instance, just check out the before and after screenshots below. The before shots all come straight from the rushes, whereas the after shots come from post-post production with colours and lightening modified to produce a more surreal look.

This first shot was taking with a $300 Canon consumer camera, certainly not the best, and terrible at reproducing colours. Yes, it looks bad, but notice as soon as a few filters are added, in addition to a nice big manual contrast and lighting modification, things start to really pick up. Suddenly the nice shot with bad lighting becomes a nice shot with quite decent lighting.

Now look at these shots, the main difference to the previous pictures is this was all shot with a JVC consumer camera, which are known for the excellent colour reproduction. Notice how the before shot starts off beautifully already, yet the filter just makes it all the more sweeter.

Finally, let’s finish off with a really ugly shot. Remember that filters can’t fix everything, but can do a great job at softening the damage.

In summary, don’t expect that you can film some dodgy footage and expect it to turn out well after chucking in a filter. What you can expect, however, is for your footage to be refined by using some nice filters, while manually adjusting all the basics such as light and contrast. But just remember what Werner Herzog says; If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.