After shooting the plane sequence we had to show the talent having dinner in a Chinese restaurant after a long flight. Our location scout had a hell of a time finding a good location because the Chinese restaurants that were willing to allow shooting had white walls and almost no decoration. We settled on a Korean restaurant in San Francisco’s Japantown as a compromise. The restaurant had very little power available, and it was open for business the entire time, but it was fun to find ways to overcome the difficulties.
The talent is lit by a 4’x4 tube Kino Flo poking over the wall of the booth to the right of camera. The other booths were lit by similar Kinos hidden against the booth walls. We added some hard tungsten light to pop the salad and food. Leafy greens look better lit by hard light.
We shot this in tungsten light using the Tiffen 80D Hot Mirror filter. We could have shot daylight but for the fact that the lights illuminating the screens on the back wall were built-in tungsten lights, and the room itself had large tungsten lights in it that we could block but couldn’t turn out. Rather than fight the tungsten spill I decided to work with it instead.
In some cases, tungsten lights shot with a camera balanced for daylight will tend to turn green. Orange and green are adjacent on both the color wheel and the vectorscope, and excessively saturated orange can “tip over” into green. This is true of any camera, not just the RED, and can also be seen in certain film stocks. It is rarely a desirable effect.
