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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

David Mullen ASC said:
You probably can adapt a short but beefy jib arm on a strong base for this purpose, as long as you are within the weight restrictions for the arm.
Click to expand...

Funny you should mention that, managed to get access to a Stinger mounted on a Chapman dolly. I'm told it should easily hold my 150lb actor. We are thinking of adding a base to the 2ft traveller on the front end. Post some pics if we get it running!!
 
Hi David,

You have mentioned that you are largely self taught. What kinds of formal training (If any) do you recommend to novice cinematographers who are learning outside of film school? What kinds of self-directed study do you recommend that may be overlooked?

Would you care to reflect upon one of your formative projects and maybe share an anecdote of a lesson learned?

Thanks for your participation in the forums. Your insight is much appreciated.
 
I started shooting Super-8 short films in high school. When I got to college, I started out as a pre-med but then tried to transfer to the film program at UCLA. Not getting into that, I spent my free time researching in the Theater Arts Library there. I read more stuff than I can list, or remember. I've mentioned before that I read every issue of American Cinematographer going back to the 1920's, and I reread the 1970's issues so much that I ended up writing my own index to that decade to save time looking up stuff. I read every issue of ICG Magazine (International Photographer) going back to the 1950's, I read any film-related articles in SMPTE Journal going back to the 1950's. I read almost every textbook there was (this was in the early 1980's keep in mind, there have been a lot more published since then).

My own personal film school, besides reading these books, started with reading the Hitchcock-Truffaut book and deciding to rewatch every Hitchcock movie ever made. I also watched a lot of Kurosawa movies, as well as those by Ford, Welles, Lean, and Kubrick. Back then, I would take a photograph off of my TV screen of movie frames I liked and kept them in a big album to study at my leisure (now it's easier with DVD frame grab software.)

I was also shooting my own work at the time, mostly on Super-8 b&w. Someone saw one of my Super-8 shorts at a local film festival and I was asked to shoot some Super-8 for a cheap karaoke video. I then started shooting and directing more karaoke videos (in 16mm, transferred to betacam). I was about 26 when I went to graduate film school at CalArts in 1988.

By then, with a decade of shooting under my belt, and even directing and editing my own stuff, I was fairly experienced when I entered film school though everything I had done to that point was more or less a one-man operation. In my "Intro to Filmmaking" class at CalArts we were asked to make a Super-8 short; I basically turned in my assignment ahead of time and it was an elaborate piece of b&w Super-8 photography (I was showing off what I had learned). I had everything in that little b&w short, macro photography, time-lapse photography, noir-ish lighting, dutch angles, dolly moves, deep-focus shots, etc. Net result was that I got typecast as a cinematographer and got asked to shoot a lot of student projects.

So film school really, for me, was about the leap from working alone on my own stuff to working with directors and crew people. And collaboration -- obviously -- is hard to learn on your own.

The thing is that when you are well-versed in the history of cinema, you find that what passes for a new idea or style has already been tried before, often before 1928 actually (the 20's were a particularly experimental time for cinema.) What's old becomes new again. The past can be "mined" for ideas and it can provide some perspective on the present.
 
Hi David,
I looked at your web site and saw some stunning images in HD and 4K. Apart from budegt what influences you and the directors to shoot HD rather than film and visa versa?
 
"Apart from budget..." reminds me of that old joke "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" :wink5:

I shot one of the earliest 24P HD features on the F900, "Jackpot", back in August 2000, and it was the first feature shot in that format/camera to be released in theaters in North America (August 2001, two weeks before the next F900 feature, "Session 9", was released). Of course, there were a couple of 24P features shot before "Jackpot", including "Attack of the Clones", in that February to August 2000 period.

"Jackpot" was made for about $300,000, shot in 15 days. This was the time when DV-shot indie features was all the rage, with "The Idiot", "Chuck & Buck", and "The Anniversary Party" all out in theaters right before we started production. It was my second feature with the Polish Brothers. Basically they told me that they wanted to shoot the movie in DV (it was a road trip picture about karaoke singers) just to see what it was like, plus it would be affordable. We looked at the DV movies in theaters and were not that impressed with the quality, but the best-looking one was "The Anniversary Party" partly because it was shot in 16x9 PAL, not 4x3 NTSC (and mainly because it was shot by the great John Bailey).

We couldn't find the exact camera used on "Anniversary Party" (Sony DSR500P / PAL DVCAM) for rental in Los Angeles -- apparently there were only two in the area and privately-owned. We then looked into PAL Betacam equipment and the rental price was something like $1000/day. In the catalogs, I noticed that the interlaced-scan Sony HDW750 HDCAM was $1200/day. So we considered using that when suddenly we got a call from Rodney Charters who wanted to show us some tests he was shooting on the new F900, which was brought down from Canada by SIM Video, who had bought them for "Earth Final Conflict".

We asked SIM Video if they would basically lend us the F900 for our little 15-day feature before the camera went back to Canada. Then we had a week to learn everything about HD and 24P before we started shooting. We filmed a 1-minute test out at Efilm and The Post Group decided to help us on the post, partly to get some experience with 24P.

Anyway, the net result of shooting "Jackpot" was that I shot seven more F900 features after that. Most of these shows had already picked the camera and wanted someone who knew how to shoot with it. Others sort of came to the conclusion with my help that the F900 was what we could afford and would get us the right look. On one show, the camera was already owned by the director. In general, I sort of felt at the time that the grainless clean look with the extra depth of field of a 2/3" camera was better suited for comedies, though "The Quiet" (my last F900 feature) was a dark drama.

Then as the budgets of my movies climbed, I stopped shooting HD for a couple of years and went back to 35mm.

Then the Polish Brothers came to me in 2008 with their two back-to-back movies, "Manure" and "Stay Cool" and said they wanted to shoot them quickly on digital, ala "Jackpot" (but with a bigger budget). We had shot two 35mm anamorphic movies after "Jackpot" ("Northfork" and "Astronaut Farmer") and the Polish Brothers were curious as to the current state of digital, figuring it must have gotten better since the F900 days. So I gave them a list of the state-of-the-art options, pros and cons, and they picked the Red One, partly because their new production company could buy the cameras and not count that as part of the feature's budget, based on their financing deal. (I didn't quite understand all of that.)

Right after that, I shot a series for Showtime, who mandates digital origination, so I picked the Panavision Genesis camera (at the time, they were asking me about the F23 as a possibility; I got them to go up to a 35mm sensor camera.)
 
Wow, you must be very proud to have gotten into graduate film school on independant study. Was it eight years or did you start after you finished undergrad? If you don't mind me asking... What was your undergrad course of study?

Do you care to rate your CalArts experience? How does it compare to what you were doing on your own?It sounds like you probably had most of your own projects shot before you even arrived. I bet the other students were loving you! I have worked with a few students who have stated that it is difficult for them to find cinematographers in class with time enough to work with them, let alone any with skill.
 
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I started out at the University of Virginia as an undergraduate pre-med student, temporarily transferred to the English Dept. when I quit pre-med, then transferred to UCLA, didn't get into their film program (due to grades as a pre-med), but got into their English Dept. Studied poetry writing as a minor. Graduated in the standard four year period when I was 22.

Some friends of mine were at USC during this time and I secretly shot some of their Super-8 projects and worked on some of their 16mm projects.

After graduation I went to work in an office for four years, paying off my student loans and making short films on the weekends. I took one Super-8 class from UCLA extension and the teacher was so impressed that he asked me to keep retaking the class for free just to inspire the other students with what could be done with Super-8.

So I went to CalArts when I was 26 as a grad student. They don't clearly differentiate between the undergrad and grad program there, the only difference being that the undergrad program is four years and you have to take "core" classes, whereas the grad program is three years and you have to make a thesis film. Personally I wouldn't go to an expensive private college like CalArts for an undergrad degree, four years is a long time at those rates, and I'm sure core academics are better taught at one of the UC campuses here in California.

The plus side of CalArts is that they are very open-minded about experimental / alternative cinema, they aren't trying to be USC. I came to school with years of studying classic cinema as my personal film school, so it probably was good to go to a place that taught experimental film, etc. They have some excellent filmmakers teaching there, like Thom Anderson and James Benning. When I was there, the 1960's experimental filmmaker & illustrator Ed Emshwiller was the dean of the film school, and the head of the Director's Program was Alexander Mackendrick (director of Ealing comedies like "The Ladykillers" and "The Man in the White Suit", and later the drama "Sweet Smell of Success".) I wasn't in the Director's Program but I audited some of his classes. I also got to study under the cinematography professor Kris Malkiewicz, whose books I had read and memorized years earlier. I ended up being his TA for my three years there.

The downside of CalArts was that it wasn't particularly academically rigorous (my point of comparison being the English Dept. at UCLA), the equipment there was so-so (compared to these new schools with a lot of state-of-the-art industry equipment), it's not highly-structured (which was fine for me, being self-motivated to learn).
 
David that is a really interesting story. Thanks for sharing :thumbsup:
 
Hi David

Received The Astronaut Farmer from Netflix yesterday and really enjoyed it.

Knowing you were the DP, I paid more than usual attention to the cinematography.

You did some beautiful work with the big sky settings. Were these done by great timing or were some done in post? The funeral scene comes to mind but there were many others. Loved the young daughters playing in the field.

Also wondered how you lit the rocket. (Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis)

and last let me ask about the square dancing scene at the county fair. Did you light it with just the china ball practicals or was there other lighting added?

The Polish brothers did a great job with this clever little film. Mark was good as the FBI agent and Logan and Jasper Polish were great as the two young children.

I've got Manure in my Queue (not available yet) .

Love your work and thanks for all you do here on reduser
 
The big skies were all captured in camera, no efx work. I used ND grads and Polas to enhance the sky, and perhaps in the D.I., I added more contrast to the clouds to bring them out a bit more. We got lucky with all the sunsets, including the funeral scene. I used a Coral grad on the sky rather than an ND grad, but it was mild. Some shots of the funeral procession where they were walking towards the camera, not silhouette in profile, were shot earlier in the day and we had to monkey with the sky in the D.I. suite to get it to feel like the later sunset.

Basically to shoot all of that in one afternoon, I started on top of the hill and worked my way down the hill, looking up at the hilltop, figuring that if I lost the light, I could still get enough exposure for a silhouette against the sky. I did the same thing for that blue dusk scene at the funeral reception where Farmer is questioned by the bank auditor looking at his cattle. So as it got later and later, I went lower and lower, and down the hill, to just get figures in silhouette against the fading light in the sky.

I saw the rocket being built in a garage space and noticed that the curved surface of the rocket acted like an anamorphic lens, spreading a single fluorescent worklight down the surface as a sheen. So for the lower-half of the rocket in the basement set, I had fluorescent worklights just at the top of frame to create a reflection. For the barn set and the upper two-thirds of the rocket, I had the art department put tungsten worklights on the vertical beams of the barn, creating multiple spots on the surface of the rocket. I got that idea from an old NASA photo of the Atlas rocket in the Assembly Building, surrounded by hundreds of small lights. The windows of the barn in daytime also naturally reflected in the surface. So basically I didn't have to add any movie lights to the rocket, it was self-lit (though it became hard to shoot night for day in the barn because of that, the rocket was a big mirror.) I did add an HMI PAR spotted on the black Mercury capsule on the top of the rocket, that was a black hole compared to the Atlas rocket.

The Atlas rocket, with a Mercury capsule, was nearly 100' tall in real life. The production designer felt that this would make the barn too large in size to fit the rocket inside; and thus would look out of scale compared to the house next to it.

I suggested that we only see the top two-thirds of the Atlas and imply that the base was underground in a cement pit. This cut the height down to a manageable 60'. But later the Polish Brothers decided it would be nice to see the bottom of the rocket so the art department built a separate set for that. Another change happened when we decided to show that the ceiling of the barn had a retractable roof, rather than fake it in post (hard to simulate in post all the daylight that fell into the barn once the roof was opened up, so we did it for real.)

Since the helmet of the spacesuit reflected everything, including whatever was outside the small window of the capsule, I had to build the lighting into the capsule set using small fluorescents. For the passing sun, I swung a Parcan on an arm draped in black across the window, with a large black solid above that. For the fire lighting effect during reentry, I had to bounce orange light off of blowing steam and smoke passing the window -- the light reflected off of the smoke and into the face of the actor, so basically I was using smoke as a bounce card. But at least then all you saw in the helmet reflection was hot orange smoke blowing across the window. But it was hard to get a usable exposure in anamorphic -- I shot wide-open at T/2 on the Primo anamorphic lenses and pushed the Fuji 500T stock one-stop.
 
The square dance was mostly just lit by the Chinese Lanterns and the string lights -- I shot at T/2.8 on Fuji Eterna 500T. In the far background, I had some small minibrutes on telephone poles for backlight of the fairgrounds, but that didn't add much to the dance floor area.

In close-ups, I added a bit more soft light to get the stop up to T/4, always preferable in anamorphic.

Luckily I had a chance to shoot a real fairground at night two weeks earlier, with the kids available to be in shots. That was all available light stuff, but it gave me a sense of how little lighting I could add to the fairgrounds when the booths returned two weeks later for the production to shoot the main scenes in. I just had the art department add a lot more string lights basically, then augmented for close-ups. I had a #1 GlimmerGlass on the lens to get all the lights to glow and flare more.
 
Hey David, I was wondering if you knew about figuring the difference in focal length between standard 35mm film and full-frame DSLR's. Is there still a difference, and if so, do you know how to calculate it? Thanks!
 
I just figure out the difference in horizontal view, which is the reason you pick a focal length most of the time. A Super-35 aperture is 24mm wide and Full-Frame 35mm aperture is 36mm wide. That's a 1.5X difference.

So the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a Super-35 movie camera / APS-C DSLR would be a 75mm lens on a FF35 DSLR or film camera.

To be more precise than that, you need to know exactly the dimensions of the recorded area off of the sensor in comparing two cameras.
 
I see... good thoughts. Thanks! That brought up another question. Photography wise from a DSLR... calculating f-stop conversions. For example, say an f-4.5 on a 1.6X crop sensor... how might that be converted to 35mm?
 
The f-stop is the f-stop, it doesn't change when the lens is put on different cameras with different sized sensors.

If you are asking how to compensate for the difference in depth of field when you switch to a shorter focal length on a smaller sensor (or cropped sensor) to match the view of a longer focal length on a larger sensor, the magnification factor is a rough guide to the number of f-stops you have to add or subtract to match depth of field.

So if the difference between S35 and FF35 is 1.5X, then it's also a 1.5-stop difference in practical depth of field once you match field of view, at the same distance to the subject.

So basically if you were using a 75mm lens on a FF35 camera and then switched to a 50mm lens on a S35 camera to maintain the same field of view, you'd have to shoot that 50mm lens 1.5-stops wider open on the lens aperture to match the depth of field of the 75mm lens on the FF35 camera. Or to put it another way, if you had the same f-stop on both lenses, the 50mm lens on the S35 camera and the 75mm lens on the FF35 camera would create more or less the same image... but the 50mm image would have more depth of field. To get the 75mm image to match it, that lens would have to be stopped down by 1.5-stops.

You don't have to change the f-stop for exposure reasons if the two cameras have the same ASA and shutter speed though.
 
Very insightful, thank you! Watched Astronaut Farmer the other day, great stuff. I was so pleased to notice the chinese lanterns at the fair (:
 
David,

My DP has said he would prefer not to use Zeiss T1.3 (MK3's) lenses with Red on our next short, as they look plasticy, and don't yield an organic image. I just wondered what your thoughts are on this.
 
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