Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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

for that indoor nyc , i would talk to a few production designers too. walnut sounds right and you might if you have the time play with a few other textures(sands,etc) to see how much of it you want to see cause that is was sells a shot like that. besides the great silhouette,etc. - Jason
 
dracul said:
Mr. Mullen,

Could you confirm if this is an ideal way of exposing the following shot of yours.
Click to expand...

I don't think you're getting my explanations of how I expose a shot.

In this case, since this was just for video transfer to HD, I didn't rate the stock much slower than normal -- it was low-con 5229 (Expression 500T) rated at 400 ASA. I just exposed her face for what my meter said was correct for 400 ASA, so her face is 1/3 of a stop overexposed technically.

If this was for theatrical projection, I might have rated 5229 at 320 ASA instead or used a different stock (5229 is a bit grainier than other 500T stocks.)

Now the transfers for the show were on the contrasty side, the colorist taking the lower contrast negative image and darkening the blacks more.

Exposing a face two stops over and printing down to normal would be the same thing as rating 500 ASA stock at 125 ASA, which is rather low and hard to light for. Like I said, I usually rate a stock either 2/3's over or 1/3 over, not two stops over. I would only expose a face two stops over if I wanted it to end up looking two stops over.

You've got to separate how you rate the stock from how you expose for a look, otherwise you're just going to confuse yourself. If the stock rated 2/3's slower than rated by the manufacturer gives you good blacks, then using the rating, you just expose things for how bright you want them to look in the frame. If you want a face to look normal in brightness, you just expose for that. You let your slower ASA rating create the necessary overexposure so you don't have to think about it (and two-stops is too much in general to correct for.)

The problem with too much overexposure is that you get milkiness all over again because you've pushed too much highlight information into the flatter shoulder of the characteristic curve, so your highlights start to grey-out and lose detail.

I mean, if you really want to actually meter faces and overexpose them for a later "normal" look rather than simply setting your meter to a lower ASA rating, that's up to you but I find it confusing to constantly have to remember to expose differently than what my meter tells me.

But at the most, I would only overexpose by one-stop and bring it down to normal.
 
ok. that makes sense and yes it is easier. But in this shot there is pretty big difference between the key and the fill from camera side. Looks like a 3 to 3 1/2 stop difference. So that would mean you underexposed the fill about 2 1/2 stops correct? And this is still ok for a clean no grain look in the shadow?
 
I don't measure fill, I just add a little by eye and the film picks it up. The overall noise or grain is based on overall exposure, not how much fill I used -- unless I make a mistake and end up in post trying to lift up detail in the shadows and get noise. But since I generally don't do that that, I get away with adding fill by eye.

Also, Expression 500T is a low-con stock so it naturally sees in the shadows, so it's easy to over-fill if you're not careful. I set up some fill light and then knocked it down until I could barely see it by eye. That usually is around three-stops under compared to the key.

Before you start a project, you should shoot a simple ASA test, a simple over and underexposure test (which is similar but not the same thing), and a simple lighting contrast ratio test just to see what sort of ratios look nice, but try and memorize how they look by eye and get used to lighting by eye. People make more mistakes ignoring their eyes and following their meters too much. If it looks wrong to your eye, then it's going to look wrong.

Most of the people who have horror stories about grain and noise are used to shooting in 16mm or with consumer DV gear -- in the first, you've got a small negative that is naturally grainier, and in the second, you've got cameras that often automatically pump up the gain as you get closer to shooting wide-open on the lens.
 
This is Page 85!!!

I am impressed.
I wish I had a good question but I don't.
So ill ask you a bad one, hope your listening.

MR. MULLEN,
Greetings.

My "work-flow" has been.
1994
Started as a reel to reel editor, into Non-Liner Editor / Beta-Cam & HD operator owner, learned lighting due to necessity, second unit DP and second unit Director depending on TV show or project, now I am back in post as a colorist which I absolutely love.

But all I have ever wanted to do is Direct.

Now that this RED camera is out something I can have as my own.
This is more of a reality than ever.
With a strong background in post production, and years as a beta operator.
Can you give me a guiding light on how to best developed into a useful Director with the eyes of a colorist / camera operator.

I doubt you started as a DP, can you share how you got there.
Details would be so helpful.
I took a bumpy road myself but I feel im closer than ever.
Feel free to tell me how to attack this.

I have never had the opportunity to communicate with an accomplished FILM Director of Photography as yourself.

So your words will resonate and carry a lot of weight 4 me.

I appreciate your time.
Thank you,
Luis Flores Jr.
 
I spent a decade shooting my own short films in Super-8, from the time I was 15 to 25. During that time, I got a BA in English Lit from UCLA but spent most of my time reading about filmmaking at the Arts Library there.

Around the time I was 25-26, a shot a few small projects in 16mm, some of them karaoke music videos -- I was hired to direct and shoot them by a USC grad who was producing a bunch of them. They had budgets of around $2000 each.

I then went to CalArts for three years to get my MFA in Filmmaking. Though I entered with the thought to direct, everyone was blown away by the cinematography in my Super-8 shorts and I started to get asked to shoot 16mm thesis projects as a DP. I must have shot nearly twenty 16mm short films while I was in film school. I also shot one 35mm short film during that time. I was almost 30 when I graduated.

After graduation, I worked part-time at a sound effects company doing database entry work, for about two years.

But a year after graduation, I got asked to shoot a 35mm feature for a fellow student, a non-paying job with hardly any budget but a lot of donations. A year after that, I got hired to shoot a 35mm thriller that went straight to cable and home video, but the budget was nearly 1 million dollars. So with two features to my credit, I quit working part-time at the sound efx company and started looking for shooting jobs. I mostly did a bunch of under-1-mil features in 35mm, but I also shot some infomercials in betacam for a production company. I cracked the 1-mil budget mark around feature #20.

In the 17 years since graduation, I've shot 30 features. I joined the union after my 23rd feature, in 2003. I'm currently working on a Fox Atomic feature called "Jennifer's Body", written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
I cracked the 1-mil budget mark around feature #20.
.....
In the 17 years since graduation, I've shot 30 features. I joined the union after my 23rd feature, in 2003.
Click to expand...

That is an awesome breakdown of just how much work it has taken to get as far as you have. Look at the the obsessive dedication since the age of 15. Add to that the ability to play well with creative people, all the travel etc. all the crazy direction you've probably heard. It's friggin' impressive. Congrats, and way to go, you deserve it!

I noticed particularly the 20 features under $1 million. (not to mention the other 100 low or no pay shorts etc. you worked on prior to that)

I'd guess that's where the bulk of the narrative projects live. With the business being what it is, the under $1 million dollar feature market is turning into the under $250k feature market from what distributors have been telling me.

I'm just thinking of John Sayles last movie. It was $5 mil with Danny Glover and he couldn't get a good distribution deal. He got $1 mil for DVD rights and that's about it so far. The likelyhood of him breaking even is poor.

Do you have a sense for how the marketplace is changing and any advice for investors/producers?
 
From my perspective now shooting union films, it's a bit different -- the studios have sort of given up on the mid-range films and concentrated on making blockbusters. After buying indie films for decades, all the studios set up an indie division of some sort or another, modeled on companies like Miramax (owned by Disney now).

So I got sort of lucky -- just about the time I was struggling to get above the 1-mil feature mark (and only making about $20,000/year shooting them), the studios started making more "low" budget (for them) films in the 5 to 20 million mark, and being the studio producers, they were all guild signatories so they were all union productions. And it's very hard to make a union feature for much less than 3 mil.

So now you've got a number of movies being made under low-budget IA agreements (1 to 6 mil.) and then movies made under the normal IA contract rules.

Just jumping to shooting union features doubled my income right off the bat, so in one year I went from making $20,000/yr to $40,000 to $60,000/yr, which was much better.

As for profitability, that's a problem for all movies -- a big-budget movie can make or lose a lot more than a little one, and there is a point with really small budgets where the return in investment, though the tiny movie can more easily turn a profit, just doesn't excite Wall St. investors, agents, producers, etc. They'd rather gamble big and earn big when it pays off.

But it is hard nowadays to get a movie into a theater and turn a profit. Because of P&A costs, a little indie film really has to earn at least 3 or 5 million at the box office, and most rarely do. However, even a mediocre box office showing causes some push in sales in home video and cable because those secondary markets benefit from the marketing done for the theatrical release in terms of increasing awareness. It's much harder to get a title that goes straight to video seem like a "must rent" (or buy) if the consumer just hasn't heard of it.

But because of rising production costs (not in crew so much as other factors) I've noticed that a budget doesn't get you as far as it used to. A 10-mil feature "feels" like a 5-mil feature from three years ago in terms of schedule and equipment, etc. (the things I notice as a DP.)

Unfortunately, the business model of the under 1-mil non-union feature is much harder to earn a living from for anyone other than the producer who owns the title (and actors maybe, since they still tend to be SAG productions.) It tends to work more for the first-time director trying to break-in but you can't sustain that level of work to put together a tiny budgeted indie movie over and over again. If you spend two years looking for financing and pitching a small project to private investors, that's two years where you aren't earning an income. And once the little movie gets made, you may still be deferring your salary as a director to get it made, hoping the sales will be enough to get you some money. But often even that isn't enough, and you wait years for profits to trickle in from home video and cable... and you start the ball rolling all over again looking for investors for the next indie movie.

Most directors go broke doing that more than a few times and start looking to get hired on something bigger that actually pays.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Most directors go broke doing that more than a few times and start looking to get hired on something bigger that actually pays.
Click to expand...

You're a wealth of knowledge, I appreciate it. In the interview I listened to about Sayles' Honeydripper the producer stated she felt these days any movie headed for a theatrical release would require 20 million in P&A. Simply put, most small movies will never see widespread release because of that.

It's interesting for you to note that production money doesn't seem to go as far these days while at the same time the money being offered by distributors is down.

What is driving these costs up and lowering production value at a time when technology seems to be making some things less expensive? Do you see solutions?

Apologies for veering off cinematography, but the thread title mentions ask "anything" and most RED owners have a vested interest in the business side of things whether they are producers, rental houses or shooters. :-)
 
So as a business investor producing these under 1 million straight to video features, do you think they are still profitable? If so how profitable? I see for instance plenty of horror films with no name actors coming out regularly. Are there profitable? Aside from the budged how much do they spend on publicy, advertising?
 
Above-the-line costs keep rising (star actors, big-time directors and screenwriters, plus studio costs, overhead, etc.) and material costs have been rising (wood, metal, fuel, etc.) Below-the-line salaries have not risen at the same rate. I'd hate to find cheaper ways to shoot a movie as a DP if it only means more money is given to above-the-line folks and it doesn't buy me some extra shooting days or something, something that will benefit my work. Of course, finding a cheaper way to make the movie may make the difference in the movie getting made at all, which of course benefits the crew that gets hired, assuming they want to work on that film.

Sure, these small horror films make money because it's a popular genre not driven by star actors. Whether the market is becoming glutted right now is another matter. Some distributors are starting to look for more variation and originality in the horror films, more crossovers to other genres. Or simply ignoring out the cheap-looking ones in favor of buying ones with more production value.

Low-budget producers, the successful ones, make money because they know their market -- they make enough films per year to keep feeding the distribution chain because they know it can take years to see profits trickle back in (often a market you sell to has at least six months before they have to even start sending profit shares back to the producers). So they are getting money back on some film they shot two years ago as it makes the rounds in all the foreign markets, while they are making their current film. And perhaps they either have a pretty good lock on who will want to buy the film, or they even have some sort of pre-sale done to some market. Sometimes these movies are in profit before they even get made thanks to pre-sales (though those have dwindled over the years.) These producers and distributors have long-term contacts with their markets, and know what will be bought and for how much, before they even make the movie. It's not without some risk, of course.

But all of that doesn't necessarily benefit the crew people, who don't share in these profits. And the rates that many of these low-budget productions pay are not high enough to really support yourself, unless you think it fair that a skilled grip or electrician earn the same yearly salary as someone working at MacDonald's. It's sort of a production model that benefits younger people looking for entry-level work into the industry, but few stay there. So these low-budget producers benefit from the constant influx of new people trying to break into the industry who are willing to work cheap. It's not a bad system, necessarily, since the studios no longer have the B-Movie divisions like in the classic days. But there are also limits as to the quality of a crew you can regularly put together when you're paying very low rates; it's very hit or miss.
 
thank you for your input. Any idea how much profit they make?
 
Nope. Producers are rather secretive when it comes to true production costs and true profitability, as are everyone else in the chain. The less information is made public, the more they can manipulate expectations in their favor.

I learned a long time ago that in Hollywood, it matters more that you act and look successful than if you actually are successful. Perception is almost everything; the people that "win" are the ones that survive long enough until true success comes along. In the meanwhile, they have to play the game as if they were major players, part of the successful crowd, and hope reality catches up before the bills come due. It's sort of like the U.S. economy and Wall St. in that regards; the economic numbers are one thing, but there is also this issue of perceptions, moods, expectations, fear, greed, etc. which drive the market. The worth of the dollar is really not based on anything physical.

Real success ultimately is not about how much money you make, it's about the ability to do what you love doing. So people hang in there in Hollywood hoping to get to do what they love doing. And some people, despite the lackluster sales of their previous movies, keep moving from project to project because they are perceived as rising up instead of dropping down. The ultimate success is that they are still in the game. If your last movie was a flop and you still get another movie into production, you're successful.
 
Thank you Mr. Mullen. I am very interested in entering the low budget or b movie industry as an investor for 2 reasons. Provide my own opportunity to direct/shoot, and number 2, make a profit hopefully, but, if I break even the first few I would be satisfied as long as the movies are decent.

I must of course do research and educate myself on the business side/ market first. Can you recommend a path or point me in the right direction?

Shooting on red to video market how much do you think this would impact the budget of a 500k feature?
 
Hi Dave, Love reading your posts!! I figure you'd be the one to get your opinion on Elite Optica. Have you ever shot with these lenses? Obviously they would be the older lenses and not the new ones that were just released.
 
dracul said:
Thank you Mr. Mullen. I am very interested in entering the low budget or b movie industry as an investor for 2 reasons. Provide my own opportunity to direct/shoot, and number 2, make a profit hopefully, but, if I break even the first few I would be satisfied as long as the movies are decent.

I must of course do research and educate myself on the business side/ market first. Can you recommend a path or point me in the right direction?

Shooting on red to video market how much do you think this would impact the budget of a 500k feature?
Click to expand...

I'm the wrong person to give business advice... you should talk to some distributors and sales agents of the type of movies you want to make to get a sense of the market (plus watch the movies they are distributing.)

RED's impact on the budget? Sort of depends in comparison to what. DV? 35mm? RED seems like an ideal camera for the low-budget filmmaker...
 
Abu Reno said:
Hi Dave, Love reading your posts!! I figure you'd be the one to get your opinion on Elite Optica. Have you ever shot with these lenses? Obviously they would be the older lenses and not the new ones that were just released.
Click to expand...

I haven't shot with them, but I've always heard good things about the Elites over the years.
 
David,
If (or back when) you face the situation of shooting near window(s), and needing to balance to tungsten for interior, what type of gel do you like on the windows? 1/2 CTO? 3/4 CTS? Full? Any ND?
 
Hey David,
Our opinions on "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" seem to correspond. What fantastic cinematography, especially in serving the story line! One of the things I really loved was the camera operation, in particular the car shots, and in particular the car shots when he was driving with his son near the end of the movie. It was an interesting mix of mechanical ability and human fluidity. Do you know anything about the rig they used to achieve that mix?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top