VISUAL INTEREST: LENS FLARES PART 8

This study took quite the journey. Originally, I wanted to study Struzan’s predecessor, Bob Peak, to see where some of Struzan’s motifs came from. I did find that Struzan sometimes uses what I’m calling the “Peak tetra-flare”. It’s a lens flare that is not photographicly correct - lens flares ghosts (the small, repeating circles) do not appear in a cross. But I was so interested in how it was used compositionally by Peak. Below are Peak’s works for the olympics using the Peak tetra-flare:

Below is a Struzan example using the Peak tetra-flare. But after more and more studying, this use-case wasn’t as similar to the Peak paintings. In the paintings above, Peak had to remove the flare from occluding the action and the subjects.

That same occlusion is what Struzan uses below with his Peak tetra-flares. The flare ghosts do not cross over Luke, Leia or Qi-Gon’s eyes - the flares are painted around the eyes and faces of the actors:

So I did more digging into Struzan’s work. Below I found what I never noticed before was another Peak tetra-flare at the top of the Attack of the Clones poster. I then noticed how much Struzan removes the flares from the subjects:

It’s the optical physics of a lens flare that makes it always lay ON TOP of everything else in the frame when the light source is visible, like in the example below:

But those laws of optical physics get in the way of montage making. Below, I did a test to see what Struzan does not do… in order to learn more about what he does do and why his pieces are so visually clear and cohesive. I painted in the full lens flares to see what it would look like if Struzan didn’t carefully omit them for a clear read of the poster:

After this experiment, I looked back at Struzan’s poster for The Phantom Menace. I noticed for the first time how Struzan omits the lens flares from key areas of the characters:

I did another test to see what the image would look like with no flare occlusion:

CONCLUSION

This was such a fun study and very insightful as I start the long journey to understanding and eventually creating lens flares similar to Struzan. I looked at the Struzan piece below:

And thought about a quote from Struzan: “I like to think that what I what I do is look into a person’s soul and not just frame his face.”. The more I learn about his rules on eye gaze and keeping the face clear, the more I see the power of his work: