More on lighting for different shades of skin

Lighting for Different skin tones

This is a good article that gives background behind how film stocks were created to make particular skin tones look realistic. 

Boots Riley: ‘In film, the more personal you get, the more universal you get

Born in Chicago in 1971 and moving to the city of Oakland, California, six years later, Riley was steeped in politics from an early age. His parents were social justice organisers and their son followed suit, joining the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labor party at 15. In 1991, he formed hip-hop collective the Coup and went on to release six politically charged albums, notably 1998’s acclaimed Steal This Album.

Making movies was a long-held aspiration – Riley studied film at San Francisco State university and spent years honing the script for Sorry to Bother You. His persistence paid off: the film was described by the New Yorker as “a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury”, while AO Scott in the New York Times wrote: “If you’re not bothered – also tickled, irked, mystified and provoked – [by Sorry to Bother You], then you’ve fallen asleep on the job.”

Read the article: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/25/boots-riley-musician-director-sorry-to-bother-you-interview

Lighting for black people- what we can learn from Ava Duvernay!

People of a certain age (and certain hue) look back on old high school yearbook pictures with mixed feelings. Chances are, the more melanin you had, the less likely you would show up as anything more attractive than a smudge, a muddy smirk — or worse, a lurking presence — as you hovered in the back row of the chess club photo.

Part of the problem is that racism was built into film processing. Until the 1990s, professional film developers compared the skin tones in photographs against a universal guide known as “Shirley cards” which helped them figure out the right mix of chemicals to process a photo properly.
The Shirleys were always white and demure.