and murky, even though the underwater scenes were shot in a crisply filtered swimming pool with harsh lights strafing the swimmers.
We are always careful not to impose a visual style upon a film that is not appropriate to the era in which it was made (for example, making a Jess Franco film look like a David Fincher film with its extremely limited palette, “crushed” blacks, and heavily gelled lights). The greatest liberty I took with ZOMBIE LAKE was to give the WWII flash- back scenes their own distinctive look— desaturating much of the color and giving the scenes a slightly earthy tint. This not only gives the war scenes the illusion of greater historical authenticity, it also delineates the flashbacks from the contemporary scenes, even though they were almost identically filmed. (We employed a similar effect for the dreamy flashbacks in Rollin’s THE LIVING DEAD GIRL.)
It may seem like a no-brainer, but one of the greatest challenges in color-correcting a raw nega- tive is determining which scenes occur in daytime and which occur at night. Films of this budgetary level almost always shoot day-for-night, with no in-camera change of exposure to darken the im- age. It is quite common to see brightly-lit scenes that are supposed to be occurring in near-dark. More than once, we’ve completed work on a scene,
only to have a close-up of a clock striking mid- night reveal that the entire sequence was supposed to have occurred at night. (Sound effects of crick- ets and owls, and the presence of candles and torches within a shot are also helpful indicators.) The flashback sex scene of ZOMBIE LAKE was shot with direct sunlight beaming in through a window, but the plot demanded that we “relight” it as a night scene. The scene in which the Ger- man corpses are thrown into the lake, and the climactic flame-thrower scene were also turned from day to night in the mastering process. Beyond this, we also do small things to remove unintended distractions from the viewing experi- ence, such as removing cue marks at the end of each reel (remnants of the now-extinct dual-pro- jection system), digitally painting out large chunks of dirt and obtrusive splice marks and making other, more subtle, changes.
When the zombie kills the laundry woman near the beginning of the film, a fair amount of his green greasepaint smears onto the victim’s skin. By isolating that particular shade of green, we were able to remove much of the residual makeup, and preserve the illusion just a bit. In fact, we toned down the zombie makeup throughout the film so that, instead of sham- rock green, the flesh of the undead has more of
Jess Franco regular Antonio Mayans plays one of the undead Nazis.
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