One hallmark of the pre-2000s VFX was the usage of interactive lighting. I’ve noticed a trend over the past few years in there’s either a complete absence of on-set interactive lightning or the faked spill or reflection is far too subtle to notice. This leaves us constantly watching a story that breaks the disbelief barrier every couple of minutes. This causes us to lose focus and interest in the film. The image below from Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a prime example of what’s I’m discussing here. Notice there’s very little spill, no reflections in her glasses, and not one attempt to light her character or Podcast from the proton pack stream’s point of influence. If planned correctly there would be a heavy dose of lighting with harsh, nearly blown out highlights on them. The highest white value on them isn’t even close to the level it requires to sell this shot. It’s obvious the stream effect was added after the fact, and no one thought to light them both appropriately. There’s also the issue of no film grain in this shot, but that’s another issue altogether.
Steven Spielberg leaned heavily into using lighting as a character all its own in each scene in his films. There was always a strong primary light source, and additional lighting was used heavily in the VFX sequences such as lightning and the bolts that plowed through the Nazi soldiers during the film’s climax. The lighting was deliberate and so important in order to fuse effects-heavy shots together. For example: while Indy, Sallah, and the Egyptian diggers are making headway into revealing the entrance to the Well of Souls there is lightning crashing across the sky behind them. On-set lighting was timed to match the composite cloud tank and lightning effects in the background.
Back to the most prominent scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark using on-set lighting techniques after the crucial opening of the ark and the fate of the Nazi soldiers as beams shots through all of them simultaneously. Each soldier was equipped with practical lights to fire up so that once the visual effect beams were added it would seal the deal for the audience.
It’s this interactive lighting that has been pulling a “Where’s Waldo” in recent years, quite prominent in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, mentioned above, where there’s no color spill or intense edge lighting on the characters when they fire up proton packs spraying streams just inches from their faces. An aggressive curves adjustment on the heroes plate lowering the blacks a while also raising the highlights to full value would help along with some spot glows for the highlights. Then by taking the streams effect, duping it, blurring it heavily, and then adding it over the characters could help fuse them better together. In order to really do it justice though, it should have been reshot with real on-set lighting and then comped in EXR format allowing for far more aggressive and photographic comping and color grading.
“Oh, yes. The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste to entire regions. An army which carries the Ark before it...is invincible.”
Marcus Brody played by Denholm Elliott, Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981.
