I am talking about scenes where lets say a woman loses her father and they show scenes of them at the beach when she was a child and her father was chasing her.
These kind of scenes look blurrier, greyish. I can’t describe.
And I can’t find a clip of what I mean. Maybe someone has a clip to something simular with that filter?
There’s no one, specific way to do it, and in Hollywood films it’s usually not a plug-and-play filter like you’re thinking. Usually it’s some combination of lighting, color grading, post-processing, and even retiming.
With lighting, they might light the scene more softly and evenly, reducing overall contrast. This can be simulated in post, but it’s often more effective to do it in-camera. In more stylistic flashbacks, they may even include bright backlighting to further drive home the feeling of memories that focus on specific moments.
In the realm of color grading, sometimes just some slight desaturation, which would give the grayish look you’re talking about, is enough. Sometimes they go with that plus turning down the blue to give it a “warm” look, and sometimes they’ll go all the way and make it look sepia or black-and-white.
With post-processing, they might indeed reduce the sharpness by applying a blur, or they might just apply a slight vignette (which darkens the image slightly at the edges).
With retiming, they might slow down the film from the memory ever so slightly; by 15-25% or so. Not enough to make it distracting, but just enough to lend it an ethereal air.
Most of the time, they’ll do one or two of these; they wouldn’t do all of them unless they were trying to make a joke. Also, don’t rule out the powerful effect of sound design in scenes like this; with a few slight visual cues and a few subtle sound elements, it can completely change the vibe of the scene.
The trick is to use a different filter than other scenes. It doesn’t really matters what filter, as long as it’s different. Also, cinematographers use different in-camera setups, different lenses, usually they use old school lenses with chromatic aberrations and distortions and so on, plus physical filters in from of the lens. They can also change the lighting, set decoration, actors can change their behavior, editors can change the rhythm and so on.
The blurrier-gray-ish filter is usually a low contrast or blooming glass filter in front of the lens. Basically a piece of glass very lightly frosted that disperses the light around a bit before hitting the film/sensor.
Sepia
Super 8?
Best if the character is perusing the memories on an old-school slide or film projector that’s audibly clicking along, interspersed with occasional shots of the character’s emotional face, lit by the light from the projector.
In the old days I heard they put Vaseline on the camera lens to smooth and blur certain glamour shots, mainly woman but combined with really warm lighting I think it’d work here too. Check that and let us know if that’s the effect you’re thinking.
Also try searching “flashback filter”. You have to be more precise with search terms these days
I’m not sure exactly what effect you’re envisioning because I’ve seen “remembering” shots look a number of different ways, but from what you’re describing it sounds like desaturation and blur
Sometimes they try to mimick old recording devices such as Super 8, Betamax or VHS.
