Hi Evan,
I think you’re talking about the section between 2:25-2:29 where we see the final cut of the scene. It certainly appears that they did not light this scene to achieve this effect.
I assume when you say “spooky” you’re referring to thecontrastwith the yellowish tint and orange highlights.
In the previous scenes from 2:00-2:24, they are cutting between the behind the scenes camera that include shots of the actual production monitor that don’t appear to indicate any type of orange tinted lighting scheme except alight tint of orange behind that doorcomming from the reactive room.
There are numerous ways to achieve this effect in post but before we discuss that, I would like to fast forward to the reactive roomscene at 2:44-2:54….
It starts with the behind the scenes camera and immediately you can see that there is an orange lighting scheme unlike the the earlier scene we’re talking about at 2:25.
If you continue on from 2:58-3:13 they will show the behind the scenes camera and if you look very very very closely, you can see a man in the background messing with a lighting gel and you can see what appears to be gels over the light….
If you look at the final cut of this scene between 2:55-2:58 you’ll see that the tint of orange is much thicker than in the behind the scenes cameras…since they arlready lit the scene to achieve the desired color scheme it seems all they would have to do is makevery basic adjustments to thelevels and contrast with the apropriate filters that are included with most post production software.
But to achieve the color effect of the the earlier scene at 2:25 they more than likely used many layers in a compositing program…each layer would have a different transparency value or transparency mode like additive, screen, overlay, color dodge etc, that will give a different effect. You can also create matted layers that will allow you to apply effectsonly to specific areas of thefootage….that might explain the orange tint on his neck and face whilemaintaing a significant contrast withthe yellowish tinted background. that was also added.
As I noted earlier, there ISthat light orange tinted lightcomming from the reactive room and it’sfalloff would help considerably in controlling the color highlights within the matted layers.
There are easy ways to do this and there are complicated ways that usually give a better result….There is no tutorial on how they specifically achieved this, but here are links to some tutorials that will help you understand some color corection techniques.
Text Tutorials – These may be boring but they give some useful color correction tips
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kahlenberg_roland/coolsville.php
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/coots_brendan/greenscreen.php
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/colorgrading_1.php
Video Tutorials – these will give a better idea of working with different layers and luminace values in color correction.
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/blemish_removal/
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/day_to_night_conversion/
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/swanson_grant/sin_city2.php
.
