Big Sur

[David Mullen ASC]

In the end, we didn't shoot as much day-for-night in the woods as we planned, basically because we ran out of time, but I didn't know that early in the week when I lit the cabin. But I already had shot one day-for-night shot of Jack sleeping on a log over a river on the second day in the canyon, close to noon in full sunlight. I used HDRx, but that mainly gives you more overexposure information and with an underexposed DFN shot, that is less of an issue though the extra info will still come in handy. My stills don't have any HDRx info blended into them, but here is the tighter angle (we ran A and B camera, so A was very wide, this was the tighter shot) as I shot it:

And this is me playing around in Photoshop to make it look more moonlit:

DFN in the canyon and woods was very difficult because either I had no sun at all because the canyon was shaded, or I had nuclear hot sunlight coming from a very toppy angle.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

A few frames from our last day in Bixby Canyon, when we ran around with our actor and a camera, working our way downstream back to base camp:

 

[Justin Kirchhoff]

Amazing images, David. Very inspirational for me.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

From our day shooting along Highway One:

Getting near the end of the day, now north of Rocky Point Bridge, which I hid by picking a camera position where the bridge was blocked by a hill, otherwise it would have looked like he only walked two miles total...

 

[David Mullen ASC]

By the end of the day, we got back to Bixby Bridge for a dusk-for-night shot, but we managed to get this other scene where Jack gets picked-up by a truck near sunset (any banding around the sun is due to my Photoshop files, not in the original). I was happy that we managed to grab this shot so quickly:

Even the tighter B-camera shot on the 135mm Ultra Prime turned out pretty well for a last-minute set-up:

We shot until the last bit of magic hour for this shot. I added some stars quickly in Photoshop. It was too windy to raise any sort of lights to shoot this night for night, plus there are too many restrictions on pointing lights at drivers along Highway One, so it had to be done at dusk for night:

 

[Richard Foster]

Truly some of the most artfully lit and composed frames I've seen.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

The end of the next day, when we got to Nepenthe restaurant to shoot a dusk shot of the group (otherwise the landscape behind them would have been black):

Then we got back to Anderson Canyon and lit this wide master:

In general, I've only been posting the wide shots.

 

[Shawn Nelson]

David, awesome shots! Thanks for posting!!
Are any of those with HDRx?

Second, in what manner are you having them fog/haze the woods for you? I'm familiar with quite a variety of methods, from those crop foggers to tube-of-death

 

[David Mullen ASC]

None of my still frames used HDRx though some were shot with it on, I'm just saving the blending until post when I do the D.I. -- for example, that sunset shot of the truck was so heavily backlit that I decided to turn HDRx on just in case I wanted to pull more detail from the sky, though it's mostly just a haze. The thing is that HDRx doubles your data and with two cameras rolling, I couldn't just leave it on the whole time or else I'd run out of SSD cards and Dane would have been overwhelmed with all the downloading to recycle the cards in locations where the camera truck could be far from where we were shooting.

BTW, in the case of the sunset shot of the Jack and the pick-up truck, literally that's the only way I could have framed those shots -- the temporary traffic light that controls the one-way traffic between Bixby and Rocky Point Bridges is just framed out on the right and all the equipment trucks backed up in front of Bixby Bridge are framed out on the left!

We only had time to set-up the tube of death once, on the beach, because we were hoping all over the woods all the time, never in one spot for very long. So it was two or three guys with portable hand foggers running around the frame just before we rolled, or hidden in the rocks or bushes upwind. Trouble was, though... the wind kept shifting directions.

 

[Dane Brehm]

The thing is that HDRx doubles your data and with two cameras rolling, I couldn't just leave it on the whole time or else I'd run out of SSD cards and Dane would have been overwhelmed with all the downloading to recycle the cards in locations where the camera truck could be far from where we were shooting.

Each 128GB SSD in 5K 2:1@RC5:1 24fps is 26minutes. With HDRx its 13minutes per card. Since I refuse to do a finder copy, R3D Data Manager 6.3 takes 23 minutes to download each card to both my SAS RAIDs. I would never normally request to limit a DP in this manner but this is location Indie Filmmaking and we only had 8 cards for 2 cameras! All the other SSDs in the world were sucked up on BIG shows. It got crazy at times especially at the cabin. I'm so glad we got such amazing footage.

David on your next $50M movie I'll have 30 cards per camera

 

[Joe Taylor]

Hello David, some of these shots look so brilliant maybe because most might not have been possible in the days of film or low ISO digital cinematography. Especially the Nepenthe restaurant dusk shot. In your experience, would it have been possible to capture such a clean, well lit shot with such a landscape on 35mm film under identical conditions?

 

[AnthonyFlores]

Amazing David, can't thank you enough. I wish I had the time to turn all your posts into a book -- would be the most phenomenal resource on cinematography available. Until the day comes when someone is able to do that, threads like this are -- and will always be -- pretty darn special and helpful to all.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Hello David, some of these shots look so brilliant maybe because most might not have been possible in the days of film or low ISO digital cinematography. Especially the Nepenthe restaurant dusk shot. In your experience, would it have been possible to capture such a clean, well lit shot with such a landscape on 35mm film under identical conditions?

I probably could come close (and have done plenty of magic hour shots in 35mm), I usually start shooting the first take at around 1000 ASA at T/2.0-2.8, which is certainly in the realm of film stocks, whether pushed or not, but by the last takes in magic hour scenes when I am more at 1600 ASA wide-open at T/1.4, sometimes with a 270 degree shutter, I am certainly are getting a cleaner image than something shot in 35mm at that point. I certainly don't think the Nepenthe shot was outside the realm of 35mm photography, it's just that with digital I can shoot a few more minutes further into magic hour than before - so maybe that's an extra take or an extra camera set-up if I move fast enough.

But certainly being able to consistently work in the 800 to 1600 ASA range in the dark woods makes life a lot easier, if only that I don't have to drop below f/2.8 as often as I might on slower film stock, making focus-pulling easier. But creatively too, there are certain natural low-light effects that are easier to capture. However, the wide latitude of film stock brings its own type of creative freedom that digital is only now starting to approach. But it's the combination of the sensitivity of the Epic and its small size that particularly makes it a powerful tool for the filmmaker. I'm sure my camera crew was happy to not be lifting a big 35mm camera with a large magazine on it every time I pointed to some steep hillside that I wanted the camera to go, and they were happier to have the Epics on their laps when we had to toss the assistant and the camera into a Jeep or gator and go up some bouncy trail.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Some frames from the second to last day, the last day with the full cast, at the beach under Rocky Point Bridge. The first and second shots show why we picked Rocky Point Bridge instead of Bixby Bridge for the scenes underneath, even though Bixby Bridge is slightly bigger/longer -- first, you can see the Rocky Point Bridge from a distance as you walk up (Bixby Canyon is choked by trees and brush right up to the ocean), and second, there's some actual beach area to walk around (and you can drive up to within 100 yards of the ocean, not hike in for 20 minutes as with Bixby Canyon):

That last shot was done just before we broke for lunch at 4:30PM -- when we got back, we finally got some moody weather, which was great for this scene where Jack is thinking some dark thoughts:

Only trouble was that now we had freezing winds to put up with...

We ended the day on the beach for a bonfire scene -- you can see how strong the wind is from the way the bonfire looks:

 

[Ivan Kovax]

David,

Did you punch in any extra light during the bonfire shots?

Oh and last thing: What kind of system have you guys decided to do the colour correction on?

Ivan

 

[David Mullen ASC]

The people are lit by the real fire, which put out a ton of light. I had some orange-gelled 1K Woodylights off camera left, not pointed at the fire, but pointed towards the camera lens, just in case an actor wandered into the foreground with the fire behind them, I wanted some orange edge-light on them... but they never did.

So really the only other light was the blue moonlight, which was an 18K HMI on the top of the cliff with two doubles in it, as a backlight, some Kinoflos for fill light, and I decided to rake the far canyon wall with a 1.2K HMI way off camera right to keep the rock from going black, but it falls off on the right side -- I would have needed to add another HMI further up the canyon to get that dark hole but I didn't have the time, the power, and the truth is that we had a small pile of equipment staged back there in the dark, where the trail ended.

Later I had a post-bonfire shot when the fire had died down to a normal level, of Jack and another character sitting alone and talking, for that, I cross-lit them with the orange-gelled Woodylights to augment the firelight, which was much dimmer by then.

We plan on doing the D.I. at LightIron on their system, Michael Cioni can weigh in on what that is (Pablo?)

 

[Ivan Kovax]

I thought I noticed "moonlight" hitting that second rock next to them there... But I couldn't tell on my iPad. Thanks for the rundown. Sounds like you had an energetic little lighting crew out there, running around canyons seating up HMIs!

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I thought I noticed "moonlight" hitting that second rock next to them there... But I couldn't tell on my iPad. Thanks for the rundown. Sounds like you had an energetic little lighting crew out there, running around canyons seating up HMIs!

They worked their a--- off!

The night of the bonfire, we had a coordinator with the CHP there to make sure that our light on the cliff could not be seen by traffic on the bridge (and he was there to make sure the bonfire did not get out of hand). So when the light came on and we looked up at it, it looked like it was right next to the bridge, so the coordinator told me I had to back it off from the edge of the parking lot and park a truck next to it to hide it from the traffic. I argued that if I backed the light up, it would not reach down into the canyon because the cliff itself would shadow most of the ground below. We went back and forth until the rigging electrician walked up and said that he put the 18K on a ledge that was fifteen feet below the top of the bridge and he walked the bridge and the light was invisible to any driver's eyes. From our perspective below, the light looked like it was on the same plane as the bridge. So everything was fine.

Here's a photo of the crew on the beach that afternoon, you can see the cliff above them -- on the top was an asphalt observation pullover area where I thought the light was going, but in reality there was sloping ground between the parking lot and the cliff top, so they had to carry the light down the hillside a bit to reach the edge of the cliff. The next morning I saw, from the roadway, where the light actually ended up when the electricians had to carry it back up.

The base of the cliff on the left:

The next morning:

The beach was below them and the bridge and parking area above them. There's a pretty steep drop just a few feet from the base of the light.

 

[Ian Vertovec]

We plan on doing the D.I. at LightIron on their system, Michael Cioni can weigh in on what that is (Pablo?)

Light Iron uses 2 Quantel Pablo 4K's with Gene Pool.

 

[Daniel Reichenbach]

These pictures and the way you work and share your thoughts - wow David, thanks, all my respect. Since the very first pictures I saw from Manure I am a big fan of your work. Thanks so much for sharing.