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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

Hello David,

Always loved your work, I have a few new projects (not film shoots) that require some Q&A time from a few members of the ASC, SOC, and Local 600's. I am wondering if you'd be kind enough to allow me to pick your brain in private about something I cannot release to the public yet. It has to do with cinematography as a whole including technology and education. I know times get busy but if you could fine some spare time please E-mail me at: Joe@NYFilmStudios(dot)com Don't worry these wont be silly questions. If you're an SOC or Local 600 member and would like to discuss as well please feel free to email me as well.

Eventually a public meeting in NYC will be healed for this, but right now this is the start. Thanks for reading guys.
 
Hi David
Greatly enjoy this thread,,,better than any film school!

Have you ever had any 'disasters' or huge disappointments in post you care to share? In particular, when the film you originally envisioned, lit, and shot, turned out to be something totally different? I'm referring mostly to the final color grading, but as well to the entire post chain and use of DI's.
If so, can you offer any advice to other DOP's in how to prevent this from happening?
 
Certainly there are some shots here and there that were a disappointment for one reason or another -- mainly when an editor needs a shot from a different sequence in a different type of light and for some reason expects me to be able to make it match footage it was never designed to match. I just did a D.I. for a movie where I had done a nice job lighting an interior dinner scene with orange sunset light, only to have a high noon shot of the building cut into the head of the sequence as an establishing shot, now awkwardly color-corrected to look sunset-ish, but it won't fool anyone...

But nothing has happened to an overall project where it was radically changed into some other look. The closest example is pretty mild -- I did a movie called "Shadowboxer" where I was told that there was no money for a D.I. so I shot it in 35mm anamorphic for the best contact print I could make... only to see the final cut with so many reframes, digital zooms, and repeated shots that 75% of the movie would have been an optical, so they bit the bullet to do a D.I. but could only afford to do it in HD (HDCAM-SR), which was a waste of the 35mm anamorphic resolution. But other than the resolution hit, the overall color timing is still what I wanted, I'm happy with the look creatively. And the movie ended up being dumped to DVD so it probably didn't matter that it was finished in HD.

Certainly many of my movies are timed a bit brighter than I would have liked, but I also have to please the director. It's funny because on the set, sometimes I hear from the director "there's too much light!" only in post to hear the same director say "it has to be brighter!" On the set, they are overly concerned with how the light levels look to their untrained eye (I'm talking about a film shoot) but by the end of editing, they are mainly concerned about the audience seeing everything in the frame. No matter how dark the scene is supposed to be story-wise, they want to always see the actor's eyes and what they are doing in the shot. But on the set, they kept saying "remember, it's supposed to be dark!"

But I generally don't run into problems where the look is taken away from me because I was hired to create that look, and they have a certain respect for me and my abilities. So the only advice is to try and avoid the sort of people that would mistreat your work, try to figure out their intent in the job interview stage and then run for the hills if it doesn't look like it will be a good working relationship...
 
After searching the thread I'm fairly confident I'm asking something new here.

David, What would you consider the worst mistake of your career and additionally your greatest victory?
 
I've made a couple of judgement calls that I would do differently having seen the results, nothing major, just one of those learning moments -- like thinking I could silk the sun over the green at a golf course for a rain sequence with two condors with flyswatters, which barely covered one-quarter of the green... would have needed a 100'x100' silk hanging from a construction crane to do it correctly, but that was out of the budget. So I did what I could, tried my best, but it really didn't go well. The concept was probably a mistake, trying to make a golf course look overcast on a sunny day. But I tried.

Can't think of a "worst" mistake... I probably should have agreed to shoot "Precious" considering the director got an Oscar nomination and I had shot his previous movie, but I turned it down because I had just wrapped on a feature on the East Coast and didn't want to stick around another three months away from home. I try to alternate a home life with a work life, probably to the detriment of my career, or at least its speed, but to the benefit of my mental health and my marriage.

Best thing I did was probably to shoot "Northfork" after waiting almost two years for it to happen, with a lot of lost work during the time. My worst income on record was in the year 2000 when I only made $2500 for the whole year -- and the next year I only made $12,000. And when the movie finally happened in early 2002, I only got paid $5000 to shoot it, after all that time! But it got me a Spirit Award nomination, it got me the hours to finally join the union, it was a stepping stone towards bigger budgets, and it probably got me into the ASC. And it's probably my best-looking movie. So all in all, it was a worthwhile investment. But I don't want to live in the past; I want something to top it.

(Actually best thing I ever did was ask my future wife out on a date back in 1984...)

I'm probably a bit too conservative technically, which is why I haven't made any serious technical blunders... I wish I had some tall tale of a spectacular disaster attempting to make some ultimate shot, but alas, no... Someday!
 
Hello David

I have a shoot coming up on the Red MX that requires some shots to be filmed at 100fps.

The director was thinking of shooting the whole project at 2k, as she was worried about there being a noticeable quality difference between parts shot at 4k and parts at 2k.
Its a short piece with a woman against a black background and some movement that shall be shot at the higher frame rate. It shall end up being digitally projected
in a gallery.

I will not have a chance to do a test through to projection, i was wondering if you had any advice as to wether i would be able to shoot the majority of it 4k and just shoot
the necessary shots at 2k. Or would it be safer to keep the resolution the same throughout the entire piece?

Fantastic thread, thank you for being so generous with your knowledge

Sam
 
If 50% of the project is going to be at 100 fps then you might as well shoot all of it in 2K mode, but if only 20%, I'd be inclined to shoot in 3K, 4K HD, or 4K, etc. rather than 2K. Slow-motion shots tend to be distinctive anyway, you mainly notice the slow-motion, so you can get away with a mild dip in resolution / increase in noise, but I would be reluctant to shoot everything at 2K, especially if in the final cut, only a few of the 100 fps shots are left in.

Just shoot a test and show her the difference in quality.
 
to agree and add a little to what David has suggested:

I've had a similar job (about 40-60% was 100fps) and my tests lead me to shoot everything else at 3k... In post the 3k was produced with a specailly soft debayer and with no sharpening and the 2k had a sharp debayer with sharpening.

Good luck with the project

Michael L
 
David,

Perhaps a philosophical discussion about overlighting faces? Most films seem to put just a little too much light on the actors' faces, in most of the shots. Maybe they're so afraid of noise on the faces they overcompensate? What's your opinion on this?

I'm directing a short soon, and it's broad daylight. I'm torn about having too much contrast on faces vs. mitigating with reflectors/bouce cards (I don't have resources for butterflies).

In my circumstance it seems so easy to screw it up and overlight the faces leaving it seem artificial and amateurish. What are your thoughts on all this?
 
I did a golf movie in full sun -- on film luckily -- and mostly used "day blue" bounces (4x4 cards and larger frames). It was pretty subtle fill and kept the shadow side of the face cooler like it would be in real life.

The main thing is to just under do it if you don't want much anyway. If you are shooting digital, you can see the contrast problems on the monitor and decide then whether to get closer with the bounce fill or back off, or get rid of it.

The main reasons why faces get overlit is because the viewer tends to look at whatever has the most light on it in the frame, and directors want the viewers to look at the actors. So even if they don't insist on more light on the faces on the set, they end up insisting on brightening the faces in post because they start to panic that the audience isn't going to see every eye blink and fleeting expression unless there is a lot of light on the face. So often I hear in the color-correction session "I can't see his eyes, expression, face, etc." when you can see all of that clearly! I think it comes from a certain insecurity.

For better or worse, most narrative cinema is driven emotionally by performance, so notions of realism only go so far before the issue of whether the audience is really paying attention to the actor becomes the highest priority. And unfortunately, making the actor's face brighter tends to be the crutch that many directors lean on.
 
I should add that when I use day blue bounces, I have them made with white on the other side, so when I need more light out of the bounce, I can just flip the beadboard or bounce frame to the white side.

When I don't have a day blue bounce card available I will sometimes clip a single net flag to the white bounce, making it a gray bounce more or less.
 
Hi David, how do you usually go about deliberately underexposing a shot. lets say it a night interior and the only light is moon glow through the windows. Does noise become a concern and how do you balance it against the underexposed look?
 
An underexposed shot isn't necessarily noisy per se -- let's sat that you do a shot on the Epic at 400 ASA, and it has a normal range of brightness, not a moody shot -- but one part of the room in the shot is darker than the rest, let's say that it is 3-stops underexposed. Is that part of the frame noisy? No. So why would a shot that was entirely 3-stops underexposed be noisy? It wouldn't be if the base noise level was low -- but it would become noisy IF you had to brighten it in post.

So there are a couple of factors at work. One is the general noisiness of the camera at that ASA setting, which will become more obvious if the scene is very dim because the amount of noise relative to the amount of detail would be higher. But if the general noisiness is low than an underexposed shot wouldn't look noisy. However, if you tried to brighten it in color-correction, or tried to brighten one color channel, then the noise would be increased. So the problem with too much underexposure is really just a lack of flexibility in adjusting the image in post if there is a chance you'll have to brighten it.

Now if we are talking about a low-key scene where certain parts of the frame are at key exposure, if not hotter, but most of the frame is dark -- let's say it's a shot of a person at a desk working next to a small desk lamp, but the background is bathed in moonlight, then I would just underexpose the background for whatever amount of darkness I wanted relative to the subject in the foreground.

But if the whole scene was in moonlight, then I'd be more conservative with the underexposure. It would be better to use a mix of mild underexposure with further darkening in post color-correction. When shooting film, for example, I used to rate 500 ASA stock at 320 ASA for dark scenes, but then I'd underexpose them for the dark look I wanted. So let's say that this was a 2-stop underexposure to look correct... but keep in mind that I'm rating the stock 2/3's of a stop slower and printing "down" by 2/3's of a stop to compensate -- so the amount of underexposure on the negative itself was only 1 1/3-stop, not 2-stops.

So if I really were worried about noise for a moonlit scene on a digital camera, I'd start out with a conservative ASA rating. And if the scene did not look quite dark enough on the monitors, I'd consider selecting a lower ASA rating to further darken the image rather than further stopping down the lens.
 
thanks david. i'm still shooting on the M sensor and i find noise can be a concern. very much looking forward to being able to rate the camera at 800 and having a lower noise floor with the epic or MX.
 
Bit of a strange question but have you done any Short Films recently? You seem to have worked out a good formula for making feature films but would be interesting to see what a short film made by you now would look like. Most short films have some odd framing, shot choices, lighting etc but seeing as your a pro at it all would be cool to see what you could do in a short film.
 
Short films are a chance to be more experimental and stylized; for one thing, it helps to make them stand-out and be distinctive.

I just shot a short film for a friend this January, the first time in years since I've done one. It was a pretty fast shoot, mostly on one location.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
I should add that when I use day blue bounces, I have them made with white on the other side, so when I need more light out of the bounce, I can just flip the beadboard or bounce frame to the white side.

When I don't have a day blue bounce card available I will sometimes clip a single net flag to the white bounce, making it a gray bounce more or less.
Click to expand...

Hi Davd,
I'm very intersted in this technique of a blue bounce card, cause I've never seen it or heard about that.
Are you reffering to the blue color of the skylight, that you are enhancing with the blue bounce?
What kind of blue hue do you use, or more specific, what kind of material do you use?
Do you by any chance have a picture of a card like this in use or a frame grab of what it does with the shadows?
Regards KIM
 
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