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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, reading back through the archives I see you repeatedly mention your fondness for Half Soft Frost as an overhead due to wanting to keep the characteristics of the sun. Would you say this is what you most commonly use when needing to fly something during the day? Are there other diffusions you might fly or is HSF pretty much the defacto choice for you?

Second, and related to this, how often do you try to create negative fill when in exterior shots?
 
I alternate between Half Soft Frost and regular Silk. Half Soft Frost if I don't want the actors to look like they are standing under the shade of something, and I want some directionality to the light. Silk when I need that softer overcast look on the faces.

I don't do enough with negative fill, mainly because when it's overcast, there's a tendency to shoot more quickly and do more elaborate camera moves, so directors don't want to be slowed down by large black flags, lights, etc. But I'd like to start doing it more often.
 
Hello David,

At 2:18 of the BHS video you posted for 7 Days in Utopia, it looks like the grips have built a small jib of speed rail with a par hanging off one end. Was just wondering what effect you were using this setup for?

Also, at 2:28 the sparks are flashing mechanical shutters in front of a fixture. Is this to simulate lightning?

Thanks!
 
I don't have that clip in front of me, but I believe that was a menace arm with an HMI PAR on the end of it, to get a backlight on an actor.

Yes, I used a mechanical shutter / metal blinds in front of an HMI for a lightning effect. It was tricky because it had to be shot in the daytime, so that whole lighting rig had to fit inside a black tent hung from the porch awning in front of the window. Since there was a low roof outside the window, I had to bounce the flashing HMI into a mirror board near the ceiling of the porch so that the angle of the lightning came from above the window.
 
Ah, I see. In the clip it shows the grips and sparks pivoting the menace arm on the 4.5 inch puck, I thought they were doing this mid-shot but of course they were probably setting it in position.

Another quick question, how many pages (or setups too) do the films you work on average per day? I know this question is highly dependent on budget and crew restrictions, but I've been trying to get an idea of the pace of shooting for different budget films. On the $1.2 million budget MOWs we shoot here we average about 10-12 pages per day over a 14 day schedule. What have been the pages per day ratios for the various budget levels of films you've shot? What do you find works best?

Thanks!
 
It's basic math, divide the number of script pages by the shooting days to get the average number of pages per day you have to shoot. Personally I dread anything over 6 pages a day, which is a typical average on many of my shoots, but I occasionally get the 9+ page day on the schedule. Doing 10-12 pages every day would be brutal. Also, over a 14-day schedule, that would mean a 140+ page script, which seems rather long for a low-budget MOW or feature!

I think one should plan on about 20-25 set-ups a day with the hope of getting more, but don't come in with a plan that needs 50 set-ups or you will be screwed in most situations. You can always add one if needed but don't design a scene that needs too many set-ups.
 
That is really interesting to me. May I ask what exactly set ups mean? Is it every position change of the camera, or even location changes, which can take some time in my experience. And do you rather count and discuss the set ups or the pages to do to plan the day?
 
Yea, some days are much more reasonable at 7-8 pages per day. But many times it's 10-12 pages per day because the production can take advantage of one location for multiple sets so they try to cram everything on those days minimizing company moves. Pretty crazy. The one day we had 25 scenes to accomplish in the day (each scene averaging .5 pages) on a overnight shoot. I just looked at the call sheet and laughed. It always seems that at least 9 days of the 14 day shoot are 10+ pages. Many 16 hour days.

Do your days usually cut off at 14 hours or have you found yourself on long grueling 16 hour shoots quite often?
 
Yes, it's nuts when people just look at page count when scheduling because not every page is equally easy to shoot or cover. A simple 2-page dialogue scene with two people sitting and talking is going to take less time to shoot than if the same scene had seven people in it. New scenes take more time to initially set-up than coverage within the same scene, so ten single-page scenes are harder to shoot than two 5-page scenes in general. I look at a call sheet with 20 scenes on it and I figure that each scene would have to be shot in a single set-up if we were to make our day, and yet a couple of those scenes are going to need two or three set-ups.

I'm on an ambitious TV show shoot right now but I was also told flatly by the producers "we are not going over 12-hours" on a shooting day so I really have to find ways of keeping things moving.

A set-up is a new shot, period. Simply switching lenses and getting tighter is technically a new set-up, and a second camera shooting another angle on the same set-up counts as a new set-up, so some set-ups are easier than others.
 
You say you have to find ways to keep things moving on these crazy days. Do you have tips you've learned for accomplishing this and keeping on schedule? Besides leap-frogging crew to pre-light sets, I imagine a large part of it is picking your battles for ambitious setups in a scene. Changing the blocking to make a scene easier to cover or light?
 
Brian Dickman said:
David,
I finally got a chance to watch Astronaut Farmer, great work! I pulled quite a few frame grabs from the DVD and the behind-the-scenes video for myself to study. Would it be OK if I posted a few of those frames along with some questions?
Click to expand...

Sounds great, go ahead!
 
Great, thanks! OK first up is this scene in the bedroom... (Let me first apologize for the very heavily compressed images)
Farmer crawls into bed with Audie after working in the barn. Audie wakes up and notices that his hands are dirty, so she reaches off camera and turns on a light to get a better look...
AF30-Bedroom-01.jpg

AF30-Bedroom-02.jpg


When we cut back to the reverse angle we see the lamp sitting next to the bed...
AF30-Bedroom-03.jpg


Is that practical lamp actually acting as the key, or is there are larger source off camera?
Can you explain how you approached and lit this scene?

I grabbed a couple frames from the BTS bonus feature... was the set really illuminated that much and the image underexposed? Or was the BTS camera rolling during rehearsals or something before the lighting was completely set?
AF30-Bedroom-BTS.jpg

AF30-Bedroom-BTS02.jpg



Thanks, David! There are a couple other scenes I have questions about, I'll post them once I have time to upload.
 
I'm sure the BTS crew wasn't shooting while I was shooting, but in terms of the light level, it just shows you that the level means less than the exposure, or in other words, just because a shot looks dark, it doesn't mean it was shot in low light levels, and just because it is bright, it doesn't mean it was shot in high light levels. I can make real sunlight look as dim as moonlight and I can expose real moonlight to look like sunlight (with a really long exposure.)

Anyway, the light levels were probably whatever allowed me to shoot at near f/4 at 320 ASA, with the moonlight being almost 2-stops underexposed, since that's what I was rating the Fuji 500T stock at, and I was aiming to shoot at f/4 whenever possible with anamorphic lenses. On the other hand, the light levels were somewhat determined by the brightness of the light bulb in the practical lamp too, I couldn't overpower that too much. But obviously the BTS crew wasn't underexposing my moonlight, nor letting it render blue in terms of color temp, so it looks bright and white.

I hung a paper lantern over the bed that came on when the table lamp came on, my theory being that the lamp would bounce off of the ceiling and come back down on the faces (and even though Virginia Madsen had the only practical lamp on behind her head, I had to see her face so I was cheating more light on her face that you'd have in reality.) I probably used tungsten lamps with blue gel for the moonlight because I usually put them on dimmers so that as the room lamp comes on, the dim moonlight goes even dimmer. So the lamp & paper lantern switched on quickly but the moonlight was faded out slightly slower so I minimized the feeling of one set of lights snapping off and another set snapping on.

Moonlight is pretty much like daylight in terms of where the light is coming from, etc. It's just much darker in exposure, and usually bluer.

The other thing to remember is that your lighting tends to be somewhat lower in contrast if you want to retain some dim shadow detail in the moonlight because if your key is, let's say, 1.5-stops underexposed, and you generally say that four-stops under is black almost, then your fill is maybe three-stops under... well, if your key is 1.5-stops under and your fill is 3-stops under, that's only a 1.5-stop difference between the key and fill, which is rather low-contrast. But you are exposing darker and then printing darker, so a lot of that shadow detail is going to get crushed down.
 
Hey David!

I'd love to pick your brain on shooting a neo-realistic film in a hospital if you have a second..

The director wants it very "real" of corse.. so I can't play to much with lighting inside the ER of the hospital in which 99% of this film takes place..

When you shoot in a hospital do you change out all of the lighting fixtures? Change all bulbs to Kenos? Change the ballasts in all of the units?

Also, how would you cheat some edge lighting when it's not really motivated with such flat lighting in a hospital ER?

Thank you in advance..

- - Justin
 
Depends on the look, the budget, whether I am mixing the flos with other color temp sources, etc. If the hospital has hundreds of Cool White bulbs and I don't have to mix them with daylight or tungsten, then I'm more likely to work with that as a base color and match everything else to that. If it's just one room, I might switch to Chroma 50's or Optima 32's, etc.

In other cases, I may want the Cool Whites to render as cyan, so I'd work at a 3200K base, mix them with tungsten sources to get that two-color effect.

You can get away with soft edges and backlights from flos in a hospital location. You can turn off sections of overheads to create more mood, you can use negative fill, etc.
 
good day sir, after somany days i am interacting with you. these are from ac mag aug 2011 artical of tree of life. i have some questions about these
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?60083-Scarlet-s-Currrent-Lens-Opportunities...&p=779941&viewfull=1#post779941
The picture was shot in standard 1.85:1, in 4-perf for maximum resolution and low grain. Lubezki explains, “Even though anamorphic has more resolution, we decided on 1.85 because the close focus was going to be extreme — we were so close to the kids, their faces, hands and feet. And we didn’t want the grain of Super 35.”
Click to expand...
by seeing abobe chart, i understood that
are they filmed with 4-perf academy 35mm(22mm*16mm) for filming and printed on 3-perf academy 35mm(22mm*12mm) for filmout, because later is 1.85:1 format am i right sir?
According to Lubezki, Malick originally intended to color time the live-action portion of the picture photochemically, but this plan changed when the print dailies came back with less detail than the filmmakers wanted. “The dailies were very well-printed,” says the cinematographer, “but they didn’t capture the wide latitude of the negative. We lost detail in the whites, for example. I’ve been printing film for a long, long time, and I can tell you that today’s print stocks are too contrasty. That’s because they’re not made to print film anymore; they’re made for the DI process.”
Click to expand...
[if any body wants to filmout their film with photochemically without DI, is it not possible these days? because todays stocks are high constrasty (said by Lubezki) and
Inception is done photochemically entirely for 35 mm filming and printout by wally pfister except 65 mm ,how they managed sir?
If so, any body want to filmout by photochemically, is there any most difference of highly light films(normal films with studio light) and filmed with available light like terrance mallick films and Lubezki's recent work?
thank you sir and forgive my ignorace if at all.
 
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