Big Sur

[Steve Wake]

Thanks. Great pics and production details. I'm sure the 1950/60s hometown of my youth and the backdrop to half of Kerouac's adventure will be portrayed with all the character it had back then. Great Highway - no more melancholy or timeless place in the City. My old 'hood. I'll have to see it just for those few seconds of b-roll.

A story of male bonding, existentialism, Zen and madness - a prototype for decades of American macho (counter?)culture. At least that's my take. Can't wait to see how the director weaves this story.

 

[C.H.Haskell]

As always thank you David for taking the time to share. When Tom told me about the project at NAB I was very excited to hear you were on board, I am a kerouac fan so will be rooting for you guys. Holler if you need anything. Cheers.

 

[Ian Vertovec]

So is Light Iron all ready for some HDRx processing?

Hi Tom,

We've been doing HDRx for quite some time now. It's one of my favorite new things about the Epic. It takes a little bit of extra time, but the results are usually worth it.

 

[Jason Richter]

I love how in the last picture of Epic you can really get a sense of how small this brain is. It's amazing that you can achieve this level of quality out of something that tiny.

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

The style is better than I imagined! Late 50's had such a literally-cool style. Thank you for the thread David. Best of luck to all of you. Can't, wait, for this film.

On a side note, it is awesome to see you pull out your own Lensbaby for this! The Epic's resolution sounds like the perfect starting point for it. I need to get one.

Quick questions if you can. I'd also like to ask if there is any chance you might finish in 4k? And could you tell us which MPs and UPs you went for in your base set?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I have a 18mm, 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 75mm Master Prime, and a 14mm and 20mm Ultra Prime, plus the Optimo zoom. I'm trying to find a way of getting more primes because we don't have enough to really split up the two camera crews properly, plus I'm tired up building that huge zoom on the camera every time the 75mm isn't long enough.

 

[Harry Clark]

Thanks for sharing, David. Lots of great insights regarding Epic.
Cheers,
Harry

 

[shashbugu]

Here's an example of the simple lighting I've been doing -- this shot was lit with some hanging Chinese Lanterns (skirted), a Source-4 bounced off of a 4x4 beadboard for a key, a tweenie bounced off of another 4x4 for fill, and a raking edge light from a 1K Woodylight. This is a shot looking back towards the camera:

This is the shot itself:

Here are some other shots from the first week, this is from the hotel room day:

This is a close-up I shot with the Lensbaby:

A night shot:

Crissy Field, with the weather cooperating:

THe hotel room shot with the actor by the window, is that all natural light on him or are bouncingsome light to fill his side profile?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

That's just natural light but it's a corner room so there are windows on two sides.

 

[Nick Ambrose]

That's just natural light but it's a corner room so there are windows on two sides.

David, I wanted to thank you for posting these images, but just as importantly, your production diaries. Even though I am just an amateur, I always enjoy reading them.
Nick

 

[Dane Brehm]

As David has mentioned I am using RedCine-X to extract the 5K Tiffs for David each night. I also use RedCineX when David and I want to see what the HDRx is looking like. As David has mentioned I am working close with Colorfront to generate our dailies for editorial. This is Colorfront first Epic project on the system so Creative Science and Colorfront have been supporting us 110%. I also want to mention the amazing jobs our top-notch Editorial Team as well as the amazing folks at LightIron doing our DI and Conform. Couldn't do it with all of you. I feel very honored to be part of such a great team of people.

Overall the Epic's are behaving very well. I only had 1 hour where our "B" Camera had a software puke but Deanan and the Bomb Squad got back to me with asolution within minutes. Thankfully it happened minutes before Lunch so we didn't miss a beat or shall I say a Beatnik

I can't thank Tonaci, Chater Camera and the RED team enough for their untiring support of this project. I am very happy to with the results we are getting and agree totally with Davids observations about the images we are getting. The images on my 27' 2K monitor blow me away. I find the Epic Colorscience is significantly more filmic with much better skintone reproduction.
I can't wait to see what David and Ian come up with using HDRx

Beautiful. Can you see any difference between EPIC and RED ONE MX? Are you checking dailies in REDCINE-X? Anything we can do to help?

Love your work... and even more that you share here. I hope all REDUSERS understand how lucky we are to have you posting this stuff.

Jim

 

[David Mullen ASC]

End of Week 2 of 4

Halfway done, which is hard to believe. We’ve finished the San Francisco portion of the shoot and start in Big Sur on Monday, in a cabin deep inside Bixby Canyon.

We started our week on Monday at Laguna Honda Hospital to do a scene where Jack Kerouac visits on old friend in a T.B. clinic. It was very foggy that day, which was beautiful, though I joked that it was probably not the healthiest place to recover from T.B.

I mostly used available light all day. We ended the day doing some driving scenes on the Great Highway using a process trailer; I had two 1.2K HMI PAR’s for fill light coming through the front windows but it was so dark that afternoon that I ended up with every scrim I had crammed into them just to balance with the exterior. I’ll probably have to fix some of the last shots in post to make them look less dusky. But I did grab a nice unscripted moment of Jack walking along the shore at magic hour, shot at 72 fps to slow down the choppy waves. It was beautiful to watch the full-rez images in slow-motion in the camera truck on Dane’s big computer monitor.

The second and third day was spent in an apartment on Haight for scenes between Jack and woman that Neal Cassady introduces him to. I didn’t mention this before, but Jack Kerouac is being played by French-American actor Jean-Marc Barr, mostly known for working with Lars von Trier. He’s been fantastic to work with, a total gem of an actor who just jumps into the moment and becomes the character instantly, but also works easily with the technical issues of filmmaking, making my life much easier. The apartment was three floors up, making it hard to light from the outside and hard to tent for night during the day, which we had to do. I did a lot of interior scenes with available window light mixed with some Kinos or a bounced Joker 800 Source-4 Leko, but for one sequence I managed to get an 18K HMI up in the air on a scissor lift, but it ended up not adding much light to the room being so far away. Night interiors were lit with a Chimera Pancake light (sort of a pyramid-shape soft light with a skirt; I think it was a 1K globe inside) hung overhead from a wall-spreader.

The fourth day was in the eastern end of Oakland shooting scenes at Neal Cassady’s suburban home in Los Gatos. Most of the scenes were set at night, so we tented the house for the first few scenes during the day, then went outside for a magic hour exterior, then went back inside, then went outside for a night exterior. All told, it was something like a 11-scene, nearly 15-hour day. It really should have been split over two days but that’s the nature of this sort of budget and schedule. We picked a house with a nice 50’ ranch-style look with a long picture window in front that turned out to be nearly exactly 2.40 : 1 in shape, so we shot a whole scene framed by that window, outside at night looking into the house.

The last day was shot just south of the downtown area in an industrial district called Dogpatch. We were mainly there because of a night exterior scene involving Neal Cassady working at a auto tire recycling center, some place where he works on retreading old tires. That was lit mainly by having the art department run some string lights over the tire yard and hang some fluorescent shop lights in the background, then bringing in a lot of tires (thank you, Max Biscoe, our Production Designer!)

We also shot an exterior scene at a phone booth by some railroad tracks, and did some poor-man’s process work with cars on an insert stage in the neighborhood. One car scene was shot with greenscreens. These were all night driving scenes as the characters drive out of town from San Francisco, or towards San Francisco, on the old Bayshore Highway. The main car was a Willie Jeepster, which has a soft top with plastic windows that were so wrinkled and scuffed up that I realized that it was pointless to put a greenscreen outside of them because you’d never be able to pull a key, and I was allowed to use a razor blade and cut out the plastic windows. So I did it all poor-man’s and hoped that the scuffed-up windows would obscure a lot. But another scene was in a Cadillac with normal glass windows, so I used a greenscreen. The third car scene was in a taxi cab as Jack is being driving along Highway One at night in the fog, just before he gets to Bixby Canyon Bridge. I shot that poor-man’s also, but with the stage heavily fogged up. I just hope I can replicate that look when I shoot the exterior scene at the real bridge on Highway One, for when Jack is dropped off by the cab. For the soft blue-ish foggy look I basically surrounded the car with daylight Kinoflos. I had a little eyelight/fill hidden behind the front seat for Jack in the back seat – I used my Roscoe Lightpad for that.

As far as filtration goes, I started using my ¼ Hollywood Black Magic (which is a Schneider 1/8 Black Frost + 1/8 HD Classic Soft) for some close-ups because this week we had female stars working on the show and I wanted to be more flattering. I also shot the scene in the tire depot using a 1/8 Black Frost just because it looked nice in combination with those string lights. Otherwise I shot clean because of my plan on softening the blacks in post.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I'll post a few reduced JPEG's but without my additional Photoshop diffusion to show you something closer to the frames that Dane sends me in the evening.

Apartment scene, mostly available light with a Joker 800 Source-4 bounce off of the ceiling for fill:

Even though we turned on HDRx for these shots because of the hot sheers, Dane tells me that the Log version without HDRx added already holds all the info in the bright windows.

The scene framed through the picture window:

The foggy poor-man's cab scene:

I liked doing that because it seemed sort of old-fashioned. The low fill on Jack's face was from a Rosco Lightpad hidden behind the seat.

The tire depot, lit with the overhead string lights, and the 1/8 Black Frost on the lens. We also had a 2K up high in the far left corner on top of the roof but most of the light came from the practicals in the shot:

 

[Deanan]

I can't wait to see this on the big screen. looks fantastic!

 

[Steve Wake]

Great job! Looks like the '50's. 'tho Neal's place looks a little too big and clean - 'course Evelyn was pretty amazing - waves crashing, Jack brooding - Ocean Beach like it was 50 years ago - minus the herring schools, greedy flocks of diving seagulls pointing out the striped bass run to surf casting fishermen with 12 foot poles - my playmates were the kid of "that woman Neal Cassady introduced him to" - collateral damage.

A brave undertaking to make a story about depression and madness - it will look incredible.

 

[Martin H]

That looks fantastic, hope it will be showed in a cinema in Denmark. And thanks for posting David, it's a real insight on how the movie is evolving.

 

[Dane Brehm]

As we were all setting up the Tire shop we watched Josh Lucas (Neal Cassidy) in the matter of 10 minutes learn how to operate the tire machine he's operating while talking to jack and the boys. Its a pleasure to watch an actor really take hold of a prop and make it part of the scene and make that moment real. He would run his lines throw a tire down then hope on a rack then rerun his lines figuring out moments to pause. Stop, then do it again all while crew is hustling to move other set dressing, monitors, lens case; almost in a complete oblivion of whats going on around him. Those are the moments when its hour 15 at 4am that you have a revitalized appreciation for why we are there.

 

[AnthonyFlores]

Beautiful stuff David. And so informative, really love this thread. Is there an estimated release date yet?

Anthony

 

[David Mullen ASC]

No, it's not a studio movie, it will need to be picked up by a distributor... Too early to discuss a release date.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

We have a great cast... Besides Jean-Marc Barr, we have Josh Lucas, Radha Mitchell, Kate Bosworth, Henry Thomas, Anthony Edwards, Patrick Fischler, Balthazar Getty...