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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, back earlier in this thread we talked about using candles on movies and you mentioned that 'movie candles' have 3 wicks to burn brighter. Since you pointed this out to me, I started paying attention to candles in Braveheart, Gladiator, etc and was surprised to see how gigantic the flames from even small candles are :-). Do you recall if these three are braided together to form a 'super wick' or if they are spaced slightly apart? I don't know where to source any so I'm just going to get my wife to learn candle making and make them for me.
 
I think the wicks are side-by-side, not braided together.

If you see "Yentyl", the musical number "Papa Can You Hear Me?" begins with an ECU of Streisand's hands lighting a 3-wicked candle, which seemed a bit odd. I saw that when I was in college when it came out and wondered if 3-wicked candles were some sort of Jewish prayer tradition...

2-wicked candles have become more common today now that film is faster, plus the flame isn't quite so large and the candle doesn't melt so fast (the bigger the flame, the faster the candle burns down.) I've heard of 2-wicked candles sometimes called "stage candles" since they were used on theatrical stage productions, however you'd think there would be fire laws now against that...

If anyone knows where to get 2-wicked candles in Los Angeles, I'd love to know. When I did "Jennifer's Body" in Vancouver, we had some 2-wicked candles for one scene and the production designer told me that Vancouver was one of the few cities in North America where there was a company that regularly made them - he said when he worked in L.A., he had to order them from Vancouver.

I guess any major production that needed a lot of them would just find a local candle maker and submit a special order for 2-wicked or 3-wicked candles.

I've heard the real beeswax burns more slowly and cleanly than paraffin, though it's also more expensive.
 
I believe you could buy a wick, drill a hole next to the existing wick and put the new wick down into the hole. When the wax melts, it will fill in around the new wick. I suppose this would be difficult with a tall skinny candle.
 
shooting on a CYC screen.

shooting on a CYC screen.

Hi David, I’m shooting a TVC with a digi beta on a white cyc screen. Is it best to completely blow out the cyc until the highlights clip or is it best to overexpose it just a little to make sure it’s an even white?

My desired look it an infinite white abyss.

Thanks for your time.
 
"Clipped" means that something is not illegal... because it's been clipped at the point it would be illegal, so the only real problem with clipping is when it looks unnatural and distracting, to have large areas of white with no texture or detail.

However, in a pure white limbo, that's OK. In fact, if you don't get near or past the clip point, often you see all the dirt and scuff marks on the white cyc...
 
Chris Newman said:
I believe you could buy a wick, drill a hole next to the existing wick and put the new wick down into the hole. When the wax melts, it will fill in around the new wick. I suppose this would be difficult with a tall skinny candle.
Click to expand...

It may be easier to get a cheap candle-making set.

Tip: start by dipping a few layers of wax onto the wicks separately, before letting them stick together for the rest of your layers. That way they'll stay nice and uniform instead of getting tangled up.
 
I shot in a completly white set. The dp wants to clip the white to hide the junction and we were shoot at 3200 k degree in studio whit tungsten lamp and what it look was bluer. They say in post production that the "base was too blue". I thougt that color temperature even wrong doesn't affect the raw picture, even if I had the blue traffic light always lit it shouldent be a problem.what do you think about?
I hope to have been clear!
 
Where you shooting film or video? I don't see how "the base" (whatever that means) could come out blue under 3200K lighting. Orange, maybe, if they assumed a 5600K base or the camera was set or filtered to that by accident. But how do you accidentally end up with a bluer image?

Now if you had been shooting film, it's not unusual for old stock to shift blue in the blacks.

Now maybe the way you had your video camera set-up, you were getting "color clipping" or something similar, where the whites picked up a color due to only one or two channels clipping. Under 3200K light, you don't have much blue signal information on the Red, so perhaps that was only channel not clipped to white, though I'm still not sure that would result in a blue cast, it doesn't seem likely.
 
i'm sorry for the confusion.
I was shooting with a red camera.
On the monitor the withe gots a little bluer and the blue traffic light was lit.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
As far as getting rid of lines on a face, David Watkin once wrote about this problem, saying that you see a wrinkle because the light is causing the wrinkle, fold, bag, etc. to throw a shadow, so the only way to reduce the wrinkle is to not get a shadow, which means rather frontally. He said diffusion filters weren't much help because all you were doing is making a shadow line under a wrinkle look fuzzier.
Click to expand...

Sorry for going back a few pages to quote this one but I met David Watkin a good few years ago just after he had won an Oscar for Out Of Africa. He told me a funny story when he met Streisand when he was up for shooting Yentl. She showed him a photo of herself from ten years before and said she wanted to look like that. He took one look at the photo and told her she needed a miracle (or was it a time machine, can't remember now) not a DP. Well, the upshot is that he got the job because she respected his answer. Interesting character, famously spotted a number of times sleeping on set.

Have you ever been in that kind of situation (not sleeping on set!) where the talent puts you on the spot like that? How do you deal with it?
 
All you can do is given a honest, if guarded, assessment and assure them that you know how to solve any problems, or at least, minimize them. Now the truth is that perhaps the director wants a more realistic rendition and isn't so concerned about lines and bags on the face, but you can't tell the actress that, you let the director tell her that if he has the courage to, but honestly, more than likely he wouldn't mention it either because he wants the actress to stop worrying about her looks and concentrate on the acting.

I was on a shoot where the mid-30's actress wanted to play herself in a flashback where she is 14 years old, and the debate was whether to hire a young actress or use our lead actress (it was a brief shot, in near silhouette, etc.) -- I was caught off-guard when the actress said "you can light me to look like I'm that young, right?"

My suggestion was that we do two takes, one with our lead actress and one with the 14-year-old, just to be safe. Well, the lead actress wasn't all that happy with my answer, but that's how we did it, both ways. And the truth is that there were arguments to be made for either version, because the audience identifies more if the lead actress is playing herself, but on the other hand, the 14-year-old definitely looked more pre-adolescent physically and more delicate and waif-like. Story-wise, the point of the flashback was an image of this young women just before she was sexually assaulted, so seeing a real youngster in the shot did make it seem sadder and more disturbing, but on the other hand, it's less clear that this is our main character from the past because the person looks different. Plus our lead actress really could act; the young woman wasn't really an actress.

Anyway, in the end, they dropped the whole idea of the flashback and didn't use either version.
 
Hi David,

As a DOP do you find performance driven films like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh make, or the recent ‘Rachel getting married’ appealing to you as a DOP?

In a way I guess the challenge is keeping these films objective and giving the actors priority. Do you consider this type of lighting less challenging and creative and therefore less appealing to you as the photographer?
 
If the script and cast are good, then I'm interested, and if a naturalistic look that is subservient to the acting is called for, then that's what I try to do.

But I'd probably become dissatisfied if that was the only type of movie I shot, I'm not obsessive about realism in cinema, I think it's a bit overrated actually. It has nothing to do with how hard or easy it is, it has its own challenges, but I am drawn towards movies with a strong graphic design to them.
 
When you discuss the look of a film with a director, what kind of references do you use. Are story boards or Fine Art books, for example, used to communicate about the image?

Gregory
 
Anything and everything is pulled if relevant... commercial advertisements, movie clips, art photos, paintings, drawings, etc.

Often the production designer also collects references for color and style and pastes them onto a big board for each set or location or major scene.

I spend some time looking in bookstores and art libraries for ideas before a show. I also like to pull frames from DVD's to show directors.
 
Hi David, thank-you for your responses to my questions to date.

I have a question regarding your lighting method when approaching an interior scene. Assuming you have adequate time to light it, but have not seen the location before hand what are the elements you look for?

Do you initially consider how to light for the wides and then make adjustments to the lighting plan for the tighter shots?

Also, are you looking to control the locations natural light by blocking it out and using lights in it's place to better manipulate it?
 
I try to get the director to take the light sources in the room into account when staging the scene and where the camera will be placed for the master. This matters more when you're talking about day interiors that will be window-lit, as opposed to a night interior where you have more flexibility to move sources around.

But there is also the issue of what the room's best angle is, just like when shooting a face. I tend to go for what can be called "the long diagonal" or "the long axis", meaning what camera angle has the most depth to it for staging purposes. When scouting, I often seek out this angle in a room and see how it relates to where the light sources are. Now sometimes you don't want a deep effect, you go for a 2D graphic effect using flat planes rather than diagonals. But more often than not, you try to avoid having the actors being pushed up against a wall or something (which means instead that often the camera is pushed up against a wall or into a corner... the actors are in the foreground, and the entire room is in the background.)

I try to light the wide shot so that the close-up lighting will require minimal changes -- not only does that save time, but it gives you more consistency in look. So I think first about how I want the faces to look in the close-ups and then work backwards into how the wide shot should be lit.

Whether to use available light or replace it is a judgement call based on the needs of the scene. I often go around a room switching on and off lights and opening and closing curtains or blinds to see how the room looks in those different conditions.

You try to avoid "fighting the location" -- it sort of asks to be shot and lit in certain ways, so you tend to go with the flow rather than fight it. Now sometimes it's easy to get a radically different look in a room with a simple change in the lighting, but other times, it's too much work to change the look, so you have to ask yourself if it is worth it. You can end up struggling on every set-up trying to create an effect that is unnatural for the space.
 
Hi David,
I'll be shooting the fireworks at our International Fireworks competition here in Montreal (http://www.internationaldesfeuxloto-quebec.com/EN/) and I would like to know if you have any tips on how to get the best results on a RED...

Many thanks

Jean Deraps
 
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