Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[William Dempsey]

Hey David,

Was thinking about the earlier smoke question.

Have you ever used framed tulle veil fabric or a similar material in a set to simulate atmosphere in a scene? I recall reading that it was used by ILM back in the 1980s to add aerial perspective to some miniature sets. I've never read about its use in film since nor in any live action shooting. Similar materials are used in plays on stage all the time. Seems as if it might be a useful option in the mid ground as opposed to smoke provided the wide shots fit within the fabric's size limitations and the ground in the scene provides a spot to hide the base of the frame. A quick search brought up material availability in bolts of up to 9 feet by 50 yards. Do you think this would still work using today's digital cameras that seem to be able to resolve finer detail ?

Bill

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I've used a large double net scrim on a frame outside of windows and doors, and the effect does somewhat make the background look more muted and soft, like from haze.

In the movie "El Cid", there is an early scene in a dungeon when Charlton Heston is visited by Sophia Loren and there are shafts of light created by a diagonal strips of scrim material lit up -- it's beautiful... though in a 70mm print, if you look closely, you can see the scrim texture and where it is nailed to the floor, but it's a cool idea.

 

[William Dempsey]

Hi David,

Thanks for your reply. What color scrim did you use ? I recall ILM using a white material but it would seem a gray or blue gray might produce a more fog like effect.

I'll need to take a look at "El Cid". My viewing will probably be limited to DVD these days as a 70 mm showing of a film of that vintage is unlikely around here.

Bill

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I've only used black scrim.

 

[Sean Lee]

hi David, with the improvements in raw video resolution and dynamic range (amongst other things), and the resulting flexibility in post, is it a viable option to light scenes with relatively 'neutral' lighting (for eg. fluorescent?) for flexibility in post?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Not sure I understand the question -- why is fluorescent a neutral light? A lot of fluorescents have a color bias, some have different color temperatures, etc. Why would lighting with fluorescents versus any other lights give you more flexibility in post? Do you mean light scenes with soft flat lighting and create lighting effects in post?

 

[Sean Lee]

Sorry, I haven't phrased it well. And in fact I may be completely wrong to begin with but here goes:

If one was to light a scene with warm colours around the 2000k mark, would it be harder to shift the mood of the scene later in post to cooler colour temps, say to 6000k or more?

Alternatively, if one was to light the scene with fluorescent light around the 5000k mark, would that then make it easier to change the mood of a scene either way, down to 2000k or up to 8000k.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Since the native color temperature of most bayer-filtered sensors is near daylight, the blue channel is underexposed in tungsten-lit (3200K) situations and thus the noisiest channel, so yes, it is easier to warm up a daylight-lit image in post than it is to blue up a tungsten-lit image in terms of noise artifacts. But not all fluorescents are the same, some have a heavy green spike and would complicate getting good flesh tones even if they were near daylight in color temperature (of course, if you are going to make the image all blue or all orange, I guess getting good flesh tones is somewhat irrelevant.)

Most people who light a scene with warm tungsten practicals want to retain that look in post, it would be unusual to make it all blue unless it was for a dream sequence. I certainly wouldn't light a blue moonlight scene with under-3200K lights and try to blue it up in post.

The term "flexibility" can be a loaded one, certainly it is always better to shoot with an intended look in mind and optimize everything for that look rather than to shoot vaguely in some neutral lighting and decide what you want in post. Flexibility to be indecisive is not necessarily a good trend.

 

[Sean Lee]

Thanks for that, very interesting. That's going to give me food for thought for a while I think. Coming from my own experiences in colour grading and raw still photography, I definitely have noticed the odd occasion when I've had some difficulty with skin tones and subtle but persistent colour casts. It's good to know that fluorescents may cause unwanted colour spikes too.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Reminds of a cool short film I once saw where someone shot water splashing down a mountain river but shot it three times sequentially on b&w film through red, green, and blue filters, and then optically recombined them. The green grass, brown branches looked normal in color but every time water splashed, the droplets were in separate red, green, and blue drops, like fireworks. He did the same thing with trees blowing in the wind, the static trees had normal color but the ones swaying in the breeze broke up into separate colors.

Wow, amazing. Any idea how one could do this digitally?

 

[Jaakko Rinne]

Wow, amazing. Any idea how one could do this digitally?

My first guess to do something like this would be to just offset the timing of the different color channels in your footage by as many frames as you want. Anything that moves breaks up in color, anything that stays still doesn't.

 

[Mark palmer]

4x4 filter set ...if you only had 10

4x4 filter set ...if you only had 10

David,
Big fan here , loved your work on smash...if you only could take 10 filters with you what would they be, especially when it comes to diffusion and creamy skin tones,..I am sure you already have posted this just have not come across it also is there a brand of ND's and polo you favor?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

The type of ND would have to match the type of camera and its IR issues. Most of the polas seem to be similar.

I like to get a 6x6 ND.60 soft edge grad and an ND.60 attentuator for wide shots outdoors, but they require the 6x6 matte box.

I guess right now I'd probably get a #1/8 Black Frost, #1/4 Black Frost, #1/8 Hollywood Black Magic, #1/4 Hollywood Black Magic, #1/2 Hollywood Black Magic (all Schneider) and a #1 Glimmer Glass and #2 GlimmerGlass (Tiffen) but honestly, I try different filters on every show since I mostly rent them. Black Frosts and GlimmerGlass are similar (you can think of GlimmerGlass as Silver Frost) so you don't necessarily need both. There are some new diffusions that I haven't tried yet, like Perlescent from Tiffen.

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

David, congrats on blowing past 1M views on your thread and only picking up speed! Just noticed.

Good of a time as ever to make you uncomfortable and tell you that you are only getting better and better every time I see your work

 

[Neil Cronin]

Hi David,
I'm curious what your take is on how this was lit and shot.

I can sort of make out where the lights are, but I'm curious what your take is on what they are, and where they are. I believe it is shot on the original Red One (according to imdb -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0870984/technical?ref_=tt_dt_spec).

Thanks!
-n

 

[Neil Cronin]

Hi David,
I'm curious what you think about what the role of the DP on a film like Gravity is. Certainly the vast majority of the shots were 100% pre-visualized and shot via motion control devices. How would you imagine and visualize the script when you are staring at an abstract wireframe of the solar system?

And how is that different than, say, shooting something like The Godfather, or 2001?

Thanks!
-n

 

[PatrickFaith]

I loved Big Sur. Starting about half way into the movie, i started not seeing outside the frame, and felt like i was being pulled into the scene.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Wow, amazing. Any idea how one could do this digitally?

There's a way to pull in the same piece of media into Resolve, then break it up into three external keys, reposition each key, and after color correction, have Red, Green, and Blue images slightly out of sync with each other. I've seen it in demos, but it's the kind of thing I'd only want to pull out if somebody wanted a psychotic LSD look. At some point, though, it starts looking like bad unregistered Technicolor.

 

[Satsuki Murashige]

Since tricolor photography works with sequential exposures, I'd think all you would have to do is shoot three sequential locked off passes, use a separate RGB channel for each pass, and then composite each channel from a separate pass. This would give you color breakup for moving objects in the frame and normal color for the static objects. If you really wanted to get fancy, you could also apply motion capture principles to get moving camera shots.

A lot easier than doing it on film, where (if you wanted to do it in camera) you would need to cap the lens and rewind the film between exposures without moving the camera position, as well as also calculate the proper exposure for each pass. You'd pretty much have to shoot it with an effects camera like a 435.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

That shot of Willem Defoe just looks like a dim soft overhead (look at the faint shadow under his chin and the glow on the top of the foreground person) plus a brighter 3/4 key light on Defoe and a kicker that is sort of like a vertical slit of light judging by the shadow on the foreground person's cheek.