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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

Thanks!

I put some frames from "Extant" on my website:
http://www.davidmullenasc.com/styled-21/index.html

We shot Alexa, 1080P ProRes 4444, using the lightweight Angenieux zooms and either a 1/8 Black Frost or 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic for close-ups, a few flashbacks used a 1/4 ProMist or post diffusion.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Thanks!

I put some frames from "Extant" on my website:
http://www.davidmullenasc.com/styled-21/index.html

We shot Alexa, 1080P ProRes 4444, using the lightweight Angenieux zooms and either a 1/8 Black Frost or 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic for close-ups, a few flashbacks used a 1/4 ProMist or post diffusion.
Click to expand...

Looks gorgeous David!! Love how Promist (the white, not the black) is making such a comeback. Seems to be used more and more as a way of evoking the past, or a memory. 1/2 White Frost was used on Hitchcock (50s), 1/4 Promist on "Don Hemingway" (70's), etc...

Again, lovely, lovely frames. Thanks for sharing!!

best
 
edge light

edge light

David Mullen ASC said:
Thanks!

I put some frames from "Extant" on my website:
http://www.davidmullenasc.com/styled-21/index.html

We shot Alexa, 1080P ProRes 4444, using the lightweight Angenieux zooms and either a 1/8 Black Frost or 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic for close-ups, a few flashbacks used a 1/4 ProMist or post diffusion.
Click to expand...



Hi David,

As for the last still in this series… the father has a faint eyelight/edgelight coming from the table lamp area. Is this actually from that? Or do you have a unit off-screen creating that nice lift. If so, where is it?

Thanks,

Dan
 
I often had a bed sheet taped on the wall next to that lamp to bounce a Source-4 into, but in this case, it was probably so knocked down that most of the light was coming from the practical lamp itself. The mirrors in the background made rigging the lighting for this shot difficult so most of it came from practicals and the small Chimera lamp lighting the boy's face (probably a Woodylite, which is a unit that my gaffer Keith Morgan makes, similar to a Lowell Rifa but containing 4 250w light bulbs and 1 1K EGT bulb in the center so you can switch between light bulbs or the EGT globe, and each bulb could be switched individually and there was a dimming knob on the back of the unit.)
 
It's used in stage theaters -- if you front-light the scrim and darken the background behind it, it looks like a solid flat (if painted) but when you dim out the light on the scrim and bring up the light on the background set behind it, it feels like the foreground wall disappeared. Often after that transition, a stage show might raise the scrim for the rest of the scene. Storaro used this trick for transitions in movies like "One from the Heart" and "Goya in Bordeaux".
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Thanks!

I put some frames from "Extant" on my website:
http://www.davidmullenasc.com/styled-21/index.html

We shot Alexa, 1080P ProRes 4444, using the lightweight Angenieux zooms and either a 1/8 Black Frost or 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic for close-ups, a few flashbacks used a 1/4 ProMist or post diffusion.
Click to expand...

David, it looks fantastic as usual!

What would you say the difference between black promist and this new Hollywood black magic is? Black promist seems to have fallen badly out of fashion. And how glimmerglass compares to them too in your opinion?

If I may ask another somehow unrelated question, what lighting gel would you recommend to get the cyan or teal shadows on set instead of on color grading?

Thanks David.
 
A Schneider Hollywood Black Magic is a combination of a 1/8 Black Frost (similar to a Tiffen 1/8 Black ProMist) and whatever strength of HD Classic Soft you pick. HD Classic Soft has a smaller, more irregular pattern of dimples in it than regular Classic Soft, so it is less likely to come into focus when using a smaller sensor camera or stopping down -- it was originally designed for 2/3" sensor cameras. Combining it with a 1/8 Black Frost just gives you an additional misty halation around points of light.

The recent Star Trek movies used a 1/8 Black ProMist for many scenes, so I don't think it has fallen out of fashion, just the heavier ones when that ProMist-y look in general became less popular after the 1990's.

GlimmerGlass is essentially a Black ProMist but with silver specks instead of black specks, very roughly speaking. The degrees of heaviness are labelled differently -- a 1 GlimmerGlass is somewhere halfway between a 1/8 and 1/4 Black ProMist, so it's pretty mild, it was only recently that Tiffen decided to make a 1/2 and 1/4 version for people who wanted even less of an effect.

There are cyan gels one can use, but since cyan is blue+green, you could always use CTB and Plus Green in whatever combinations and strengths give you the amount of color you want.
 
Thanks for the reply David.

Any favorite cyan gels you have used, Lee or Rosco?

The idea of using CTB with Plus Green is a good one too.
 
Hi David,

I am loving watching your work so regularly on Extant these days. Congratulations, it is looking fantastic and is some good sci fi to boot!

I've been using Tiffen Smoque filters (which you recommended to me when I asked you for a suggestion) almost exclusively for the past year or two are not available for an upcoming shoot. I like that the highlight bloom seems fairly limited to really bright areas of the frame so overall sharpness is not very effected, and I like the subtle shadow lift as well.

I was thinking of just getting lo cons or maybe a subtle black pro mist, but wondered if you may have another better suggestion?

Thanks!
 
David Mullen ASC said:
We shot Alexa, 1080P ProRes 4444, using the lightweight Angenieux zooms and either a 1/8 Black Frost or 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic for close-ups, a few flashbacks used a 1/4 ProMist or post diffusion.
Click to expand...
No question, the cinematography was the best part of Extant! I hope you get an Emmy nomination out of this.
 
David, is there anyway that you know of to add colored halation that is only visible in the highlights through optical filtration? Specifically I am trying to find a way to mimic "Cinestill" film which is really just re-housed Kodak 500T 5219 with the anti-halation filter removed so that it can be processed as normal C-41 still film. It has this amazing portra like color response until it hits areas of over exposure. Then it gets beautiful (in my opinion) orange, sunset like flares over any highlight, regardless of the color of the light source. When you over expose this tungsten balanced film by pointing it directly at sunlight streaming in through windows or practical fluorescent tubes it still records a fiery orange flare. Here are some exampes by various photographers on flicker that demonstrate the exact light source flare look/color that I am hoping to replicate in motion:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenneth-eu/15322636025
https://www.flickr.com/photos/davewell/15153346157/in/pool-cinestillfilm
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenneth-eu/15322634225/in/pool-cinestillfilm
https://www.flickr.com/photos/95856267@N03/15122853698/in/pool-cinestillfilm
https://www.flickr.com/photos/julianmoran/14270512928/in/pool-cinestillfilm
https://www.flickr.com/photos/do_di...WUJ-otgn67-jpajPP-juZxP9-oDmzz3-jzLYW1-ooTWEQ
 
No, there isn't a simple filter to create that effect, though perhaps someone could design one. Old filters like a Fogs used to have a blue bias to their halation, it's the nature of the mist particulates used, modern diffusion strives to be neutral with the halation. But I don't know of a filter with an orange halation, perhaps something like Gold Diffusion-FX? Not something like a Warm ProMist because with those, the warmth comes from an 812 warming filter, not from gold mist particles.
 
Sort of depends on the type of work this light will have to do. If it's part of a larger stage package, then a straight tungsten lamp makes sense if you have a lot of tungsten lighting to do. But if this is part of a location package and a small one at that, where units have to do double-duty and power consumption is an issue, then the LED version makes a lot of sense.

Also depends on if you are generally using LED and fluorescent lighting or are mostly working with tungsten lighting. I would tend not to key one actor with an LED and key the actor in a reverse angle with a tungsten, for example, because the color matching is so critical and obvious to the eye, unless it was clear from the setting that the actors had different sources lighting their faces, like in a bar with multiple types of sources in the room.
 
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