Just like the content area, the visual look of this film was all over the board. Even though it was all shot with the Sony VX-1000, it was shot with so many different settings that the film looks like it was cobbled together from about ten different cameras. Most of these problems arose from not dealing with similar situations in the same way.
Now, some of the afternoon scenes were shot in quite pleasant natural light allowing the footage to be properly exposed and, in post, seemed to have a high contrast filter applied to them. These looked pretty nice. Additionally, some of the scenes inside where light was easier to control looked pretty good, as well.
However, when things got out of the realm of natural lighting or small enclosed locations, things got hairy quickly. Lighting was clearly not something that was readily available for much of the film (although it was listed on the budget), so Mr. Williams and crew used a combination of pumping the gain on the camera and shooting day-for-night footage. Unfortunately, these two options do not cut together well and both solutions had serious issues.
First, if possible, you almost never want to boost your visual gain (or lux) on your camera, because that introduces digital noise into your image. The more you boost the lux, the more noise. Further, the more the lux is boosted, the less contrast you have in your scene. Considering that all of Mr. Williams’ actors had dark complexions and were wearing dark clothing, you can imagine how problematic shooting them in front of a night sky with high gain and low contrast was. There were literally some shots where the actors virtually vanished into the hazy grain. If you want to actually shoot at night there’s simply no way around lighting the scenes. Interiors of cars can be lit pretty effectively with LED panels, which will run you a few hundred dollars to buy. Outdoor scenes are harder because it’s difficult to throw a lot of light around outdoors without having 1K and 2K lights, which start getting pretty costly. However, if you can have people standing under a powerful street lamp, you can actually get a fair amount of light on your actors by using reflective “bounce” cards to reflect the light up into their faces. (I’ve directed a short film where we successfully lit a scene using this trick.)
Second, if you’re going to shoot day-for-night, you’ve got to think a few things out ahead of time. Day-for-night is a good way to overcome lack of lighting (and is especially effective when dealing with people who have darker complexions), but it has a noticeably blue coloration that can’t readily cut together with footage shot in traditional night scenes. As such, if you’re going to use this technique, shoot all of your “night” scenes as day for night. And, when you do shoot it, do NOT ever show the sky. Day-for-night filters will NOT turn day skys into night skys. As such, either shoot in such a way that you don’t show the sky or resign yourself to the tedious process of rotoscoping in night skies in post.
Another issue that arose was the sheer amount of hand-held camerawork. Apparently a steadycam was utilized for some of it, but it honestly wasn’t terribly noticeable because of the amount of hand-held throughout the film. While hand-held is often used for gritty, urban dramas, good hand-held skill is a rare and coveted ability. The hand-held in The CrossOver was excessively noticeable, although not as bad as The Bourne Supremacy. I would recommend using tripods and cinesaddles in the future, as these combine traditional stabilization (tripod) with fast-and-guerilla-stile stabilization (cinesaddle). You can put cinesaddles on all sorts of things to get a good shot, like the top of a car, a trash can, a skateboard, etc. (While any beanbag stabilizer could be used, the actual cinesaddles have patented lock-down straps which you can actually use to fasten them to car doors and windows quite effectively.)
The final visual issue that popped out at me was digital enlargement. This came about either through the use of digital zoom or the overuse of enlarging footage in post. Digital zoom is simply artificially enlarging your footage in the camera to “resemble” optical zoom. The truth is that you need to disable your digital zoom permanently and NEVER use it. It will always enlarge all the noise in your footage and degrade your image drastically. Now if digital zoom wasn’t used, then the footage was enlarged excessively in post. The most I’ve ever been able to get away with enlarging footage in post without noticeably degrading the quality was 15%. That’s not a lot, although it can be enough to get a boom mic tip out of your shot.
