Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[David Mullen ASC]

The Attenuator doesn't have a transition line to a clear area, it just has a gradual change from darker to lighter throughout. You'd use it when you don't have any place to hide or blend the transition in a regular grad.

For example, in "The Astronaut Farmer" I used an ND.60 Attentuator here for a overcast day-for-night shot because I wanted to darken the sky but didn't want to see the grad line go through the peak of the house:


Here I used a regular soft-edge ND.60 grad:

[dean merrill]

David,
Thanks again for the helpful information. Due to a tight budget, I was only able to secure a 12x with two 1k open faces, and borrowed an Arri kit. The client really wanted the lighting to look like it was coming from the arrow, so this is what I was able to come up with. Thanks again! ~Dean

[Nicholas Matthews]

Would you mind clearing up a question I have concerning field of view with various lenses.

For instance if you have two cameras with equivalent sensors and you placed a 35mm still lens on one and a 35mm cine lens on the other, would there be any difference in field of view? Or is it simply whether the lens could cover a certain sensor? What about a 16mm camera with a 16mm cine lens that has a focal length of 35mm stacked alongside a 35mm film camera with a 35mm lens?

Thanks!

[David Mullen ASC]

Two different 35mm lenses should give the same field of view on different cameras with the same sized sensor and recorded areas. A 35mm is a 35mm. What may be different is the lens coverage -- a 35mm designed for a APS-C camera may vignette on a FF35 camera. A 35mm lens designed for a 16mm camera may vignette on a 35mm film camera. Though with longer focal lengths, often there is a larger image circle projected so sometimes you can get away with it.

[Brad Webb]

Love the new avatar. How did you like monument valley? I went last year and felt like I walked into a John Ford movie.

[David Mullen ASC]

I was just there for an hour and it was overcast unfortunately but it was great to be where John Ford shot so often.

[Alexey Milokost]

Hi David,
Another question on filtration:
Would you rather use Coral filter with Red camera or leave color tuning for post? And what are the basic applications for Coral?
Thanks in advance!
Alex

[David Mullen ASC]

In general, I don't see much use for warming filters like Corals. I started using them in film but found that when it came time to do the answer print, the timer would start out with a neutral image (taking out the Coral effect) and I'd just end up trying to find a combination of printer lights anyway to get back that warmth. So since it was so easy to time a shot warmer, I started carrying pale blue filters instead and shot just the grey scale with the blue filter so once timed to neutral for dailies, the following scene (with the blue filter removed) would have a warm tint. Then I didn't have to shoot the scenes themselves with an extra piece of glass on the camera.

And particularly with digital cameras, which are less noisy in bluer light, I just dial in a color temp that is a little higher than the scene itself if I want a warmer cast (like selecting 3700K or 4000K on the camera when in 3200K light.) So the only reason to carry Corals would be if you were outside in daylight and even setting the camera to 7000 Kelvin didn't produce the level of warmth you wanted. If this were for a western or other period movie, I'm more likely to try Chocolate filters in that situation since it is a color cast that is harder to achieve just by changing the color temp. But even then, sepia-brown is really mostly just orange minus color saturation plus a little magenta maybe.

[William Dempsey]

Hi David,

I enjoy reading your replies both here and at Roger's site. I was curious what your answer would be to this lighting question. If you had to produce what essentially appears to be a black and white or very muted / desaturated scene with selected areas in full color, and you were restricted to doing it with lighting and gels alone, how would you proceed ? I know this can be done easily with digital manipulation but I'm interested in an in camera effect.

I was thinking that some sort of gelled monochromatic light for the overall illumination and then spotted full spectrum for the color areas but I'm not sure what color would appear most colorless. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't think it can be done well in-camera other than through art direction, actually making the monochromatic areas actually monochromatic in design. The trouble with using a partial spectrum light source for the desaturated areas is that you'd record less color information, true, but you'd have a strong color cast to time out in post and that would cause the areas lit with full spectrum light to be shifted as well, unless you start playing around with color keys and separate windows in post... and then you're back to doing it in post.

The best approach would be:

1) art direct for the effect

combined with:

2) light the area to be desaturated in a strong color like blue or green so that it can be color keyed in post and corrected separately from the normal color area (which hopefully doesn't have blue or green in it unless you want to isolate it with a window.) Yes, a partial spectrum source for the colored area may help because it would not record as many colors -- the most extreme example would be to use green screen or blue screen Kino tubes, because they put out such a narrow spectrum of color. In fact, almost to what you are talking about, I once lit a red-painted room with blue screen Kino tubes for a blue neon effect on the faces, and the red walls went grey under the blue screen tube light.

Now if you can do it all with art direction then I wouldn't bother with the colored light idea for the desaturated area, just use white light for everything.