LAUREN Hi! Thanks for coming! Can you introduce yourself a little bit?
IRA I'm Ira Tiffen, and I'm the Vice President of the Motion Picture & TV Filter Division at Schneider Optics.
[INTRO MUSIC]
LAUREN Do you think the tendency to overlook filters is a more modern problem,
that we have digital and and that kind of stuff? Were filters more commonplace
during film? Or has it always been kind of like ... almost an afterthought or lack of education?
IRA That's actually a very good way of phrasing that question. It is an
issue that I address time to time,
in the various seminars that I've done...
Because, for the most part... filters are learned later in your learning experience, in your education.
Becoming a cinematographer or even a still photographer... and the reason for that is
you need a camera... you need a lens, you need to understand how those work.
When you've done all you can with that, and you still want more? That's when you seek out filters.
Filters are an aspect of the art
and emotional content, and the ability to manipulate light content, as well as
technical issues-- which you would need to know just in understanding T Stops
for instance, or focal lengths. Understanding filters. And as such...
all of that serves to make an individual cameraman more competitive
the more he learns and the better he gets at employing the tools that are there.
And filters are something which should not be overlooked when you gauge the universe of tools for doing this.
Because there's nothing more powerful than that slim piece of glass... and being able to do something with
everything else that you doing, all else being the same, and turn it from...
something mundane... to something magnificent and memorable.
(LAUREN) Speaking of, what are some of your favorite uses of filters in movies?
LAUREN Do you have favorite movies that have used filters in a creative way...?
IRA I like the first few minutes of "Top Gun."
[TOP GUN OPENING MUSIC]
(IRA) The ability Jeff Kimball put into building up the drama and the level of energy was
brilliant, it in my opinion. It starts off underexposed... its dark, to suggest it's
just barely sun-up... but it's enough to see. And he played around with color, and with
graduated color. And there's oranges, and reds and yellows, and things that you normally
wouldn't see, but they fit in perfectly with the background music!
Which really wasn't background, it was almost the star of this sequence.
Boy! Are you introduced to a new world instantly by what he did.
And when that color was put in there it looked ingenious! Because it's the kind of color
that signaled to you that this was no ordinary location, this was no ordinary time...
This was something that was really adventurous and exciting.
And I probably saw that several times before I thought of the color.
Because it worked its way into the story so seamlessly,
that even me, who you'd expect to be sensitive and sensitized
to seeing this kind of thing, hadn't thought of it as a filter effect...
until long after I had seen it. And I said, you know what?
That was wonderful!
But even I didn't realize it.
The idea being, when filters are used at their best levels, typically it's not something that you're
sitting here saying, "yeah, they used a filter for that."
You want it to blend in, so that it doesn't draw attention to itself,
and that it just... feels right.
There are a lot of technical applications for filters that are there to help you get proper exposure,
to control depth of field... that allow you to manipulate certain elements of
the scene, like reflections off of windows.
this one instance was beyond that.
It was just something that you had to be familiar with the capability of color
and light and understand... just how things "feel."
And so that was an excellent example to me of just a "feel-right" use of filters.
(LAUREN) There are SO many filters. There are so many filters out there...
LAUREN What are the top five that you think... that you would want to keep with you?
IRA The range of filters can certainly be bewildering, can't it?
And I think that's one of the key obstacles to people putting their foot
in the filter "water" and saying, let me try this out and see what it's like.
So I will give what I consider to be the most important five filters.
I would start with a very basic concept, and that is that if you're shooting anything where...
something might get tossed at your lens, whatever it is, could be rain, sand, mud... whatever,
the idea is that you don't want to damage that front element of your lens.
Because replacing it is expensive, time-consuming, and if you can avoid it easily,
use a clear filter. Clear filters for protection-- they have traditionally been the most popular
filter type. It's just basic common sense.
If you have anything outdoors, anything at all... polarizers are really, really useful.
There's a lot you can do with polarizers.
They have, if you understand how they work, the ability to do things you can't do digitally
that you would really enjoy being able to do.
Polarizers are famous for deepening a blue sky. You wanna deepen a blue sky? Michael Slovis,
in "Breaking Bad," used this many times using our True-Pol, which has a very high polarization
efficiency, which made the effect even more dramatic
when he would create this deep dark band in the sky, that... it wasn't natural.
But it created this palpable sense of tension and menace in the scenes that he used these on,
that you could not have obtained readily otherwise.
And it fit the story so well, because...
you had warring factions meeting on the desert. Without that deep dark sky where it was,
the actors would not have stood out so prominently and so powerfully.
And the otherwise normally to-the-eye clear blue,
would not have had that drama that the filter imparted into it.
You can darken it in post, but you will be missing some of the detail, you may
incorporate some noise. Which, by the way, is another reason to use an optical
solution for manipulating the image, as opposed to leaving it all in post.
Because more post manipulation typically incorporates some digital
artifacts and particular noise that could be objectionable, and further limits your
ability... As you use it to fix certain things, it diminishes your
latitude and range in doing other things. So that if you've done it with an optical
approach like a filter, you'll get an image that's going to be much more dramatic, and very
difficult to replicate afterwards post.
Beyond that, is diffusion.
The idea of diffusion has to do three key things. You're dealing with sharpness, above all.
The ability to resolve fine details, and so when you don't want to see the pores on an actor's skin,
or wrinkles and blemishes, but yet you still want the image to appear in-focus,
that a key thing. It wasn't always the case.
You need diffusion.
Looking to tone down harsh contrast.
Black is too black and white is too white, and you want to manipulate that.
And then there's a certain degree of halation, of highlight flare. When you see a glow around
a brighter area versus a darker area.
(LAUREN) "War of the Worlds"-- I believe it was Janusz Kaminski--
used a pretty heavy diffusion filter to make almost every single highlight bloom a lot more,
and it kind of gave this futuristic, cold, otherworldly feel. It was a really
It was a really interesting effect because it is so noticeable, but because of the tone of the film,
it just kind of worked.
(IRA) It fit right in. (LAUREN) Yeah.
(IRA) I would suggest you take a look at what's out there. I won't tell you that you should use this one or that one,
because there's differences. And I can't say which of those would be more useful
to any one individual. Really it's up to a matter of choice of preference.
So, a diffusion filter. Something!
LAUREN So what's next on your list?
IRA I think that Graduated Neutral Density is very important,
and Neutral Densities are very important.
The neutral density is important especially now because digital sensors have very high sensitivity to
sensitivity to light-- what we would call a high film speed equivalent.
And... working with filters to take out all the light evenly through the spectrum,
as neutral density filters are designed to do,
when you are trying to direct the attention of the audience to
a certain item in the scene, a certain part of the scene... you can do so by putting
the foreground and background out of focus, relative to that object, so that
all the other distracting detail is soft and diffused, and not attracting attention to itself.
You need to adjust the diaphragm-- or iris-- opening to control depth of field,
to be able to create that effect. That you can then say, "Alright..."
"I can set the T-stop where I want it to get the effect from this lens,
the performance level of this lens that I want," and then I can play
around with neutral density filters to get the right exposure.
IRA Now, we need a 5th filter. LAUREN Mm-hm.
IRA And I would suggest one that is unique to Schneider, which is the Digicon.
What that's capable of doing is enhancing the dynamic range of your camera, whatever
whatever that happens to be, to start with.
It has the ability to bring more of the real world into the range
that your camera is capable of rendering,
and so you can capture upwards of one and a half to two stops of additional dynamic range
in many circumstances which would otherwise be lost. And so when you're trying to bring
more of the real world in, the Digicon is a particularly effective way of doing that.
Those would be the five filters I would want to have with me, and that I
would suggest people take a closer look at as they get started.
Again, keep it simple. Look at the first major need that you might have.
Start with one, and move on from there.
LAUREN So, start with your story and what you want to tell. IRA Definitely.
LAUREN That's a lot less intimidating, that's good.
LAUREN What are you excited about in terms of the future of filter technology,
and the way the industry is headed, the way cameras and lighting are heading,
Because it seems to be changing minute-to-minute, almost.
IRA I've been doing this a long time. And what I'm excited about is the fact
that I'm still, after all these years, excited about what I'm doing.
The reason, apart from any personal bias that I might have,
is that filters are still relevant. The things that I know, that I've done, and that I intended to do,
are still of importance out there, and that's remarkable!
There was no guarantee that that was ever going to be the case when I first got into it.
In fact, back in the seventies it looked
like it might be possible, when the advent of affordable home video
recorders and camcorders came out, that people could just dial in the color and contrast that they
wanted. They might not even need filters! But that didn't happen. In fact, there was an
increased need for filters. And so, even with all the digital manipulation that exists today,
There is still, I believe, even more importance associated with filters than ever.
Because there are elements of the cameramen retaining control that were
not quite as strong, as they are today, in the past.
And there are elements of manipulating that image that are
even more important now, because you do have the ability to shoot in the dark, you do have the
ability to record a broader range of dynamic range, and yet still not all that you can do.
You still need some other means of taking what a camera, and a lens, and a light can do,
and turning it into magic. And filters will help you do that.
It turns things into magic.