Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[StefanWiesen]

Hello David,
I really appreciate your taking the time to answer questions here. I`ll shoot a short on the Red one in late summer. There will be some desert night exteriors. (Sometimes a fire or headlights of car in foreground, flat landscape, no large objects in far background).The story would call for a more naturalistic approach light-wise in regard of background and wider shots. I would like to have some advice or ideas on how you would approach lighting the desert background at night. Day for night would not be something I'd like to do, also fog is out of the question. The budget doesen't allow for the "classic" approach of putting up bigger HMI sources on condors to backlight a larger area. Setting the scene in front of a small elevation and having multiple light sources point up in the sky behind the hill to pruduce some sort of skylight is too expensive, too.
At the moment I am thinking about using one (maybe two) ballons for "subtle ambience.
Any take on this? Thanks you so much! Stefan

[David Mullen ASC]

You can't bend the laws of physics just because you don't have money. You need light to see something, you need "x" amount of exposure... and large areas at night need large amounts of lighting if you want to see something in the distance. Balloons are fine, though expensive, but generally they can't get high (unless hard-mounted to a condor) so they don't have a lot of spread, and your background, if on a flat landscape, will still fall-off to black unless it is lit. So either you're going to have to live with that look, the black backgrounds, or shoot the wide shots at twilight. But then you'd have to figure out how to have some feeling of light behind the heads in the close-ups.

I've done lots of night scenes over the years and there really isn't a low-budget way of lighting miles of landscape. You need the footcandles over great distances no matter what type of unit you pick.

On "Fargo" they had a car chase through miles of snowy landscape and Deakins decided to play most of the scene as only lit by headlights, partly because it was the most practical solution.

[Siva Kollipara]

Thank you david - am planning to take some tests on
red footage and then will get back to u if there shld be any queries.
Thanx for the prompt response. reg

You can do test for yourselves.
But in few months, you will be watching a Tamil feature in theatres near you.

Siva

[Policar]

Hello David,
I really appreciate your taking the time to answer questions here. I`ll shoot a short on the Red one in late summer. There will be some desert night exteriors. (Sometimes a fire or headlights of car in foreground, flat landscape, no large objects in far background).The story would call for a more naturalistic approach light-wise in regard of background and wider shots. I would like to have some advice or ideas on how you would approach lighting the desert background at night. Day for night would not be something I'd like to do, also fog is out of the question. The budget doesen't allow for the "classic" approach of putting up bigger HMI sources on condors to backlight a larger area. Setting the scene in front of a small elevation and having multiple light sources point up in the sky behind the hill to pruduce some sort of skylight is too expensive, too.
At the moment I am thinking about using one (maybe two) ballons for "subtle ambience.
Any take on this? Thanks you so much! Stefan

I did a shoot under much worse circumstances. It didn't come out too great, but whatever. Our lighting budget was about $1,500 (not per day, total rental plus purchases for the month) for a month-long feature, shot on the hvx, which is significantly slower than the Red.

If you're really, really low on money, my advice would be to spend money on fast lenses before huge lights (even nikkors if you have to, but most of the old ones are soft below f2) and resign yourself to a really static look, at least for the wide shots. Even if you only rent fast lenses for the duration of that part of the shoot, it's probably worth it. Maybe you only need a few focal lengths for that scene? t1.4 is a stop faster than t2, so that means half as much light. Of course, at that stop, pulling focus becomes insanely difficult, hence the reduction of camera movement I recommended.

But this limited camera movement gives you another opportunity, too; you can boost your shutter to 270º or 1/36th of a second and if you have limited camera motion, it will still read as acceptable 24p. (Do tests, of course; this is fine for masters but usually bad for close ups, but you need less light for those anyway; since the hvx had a lens that got slower toward telephoto, we'd compensate by adding light to close ups then bringing the fresnel HMI from flood to a bit more spot for close ups, and re-adjusting its angle to hit the talent.) And since you're using daylight sources (hmis, etc.) the red will be pretty clean so you can definitely rate 500-640ISO and if you want a blue tint, just add in it post rather than setting white balance to 4200K or what have you; fire will be sufficiently warm anyway and you can put a 1/2 CTO on your headlights if you really want.

Of course, you're going to be working at such low levels that lighting your actors will be hard. Even a tiny bit of motion to or from a nearby hard source and they'll go from black to blown out thanks to inverse square. So light your talent (in close ups) entirely with kino banks or 4800K photofloods in china lanterns, maybe, since soft light has a more natural fall off. When things got really bad, I'd even follow the actors around with a china lantern on a fishing pole; the source was soft enough that it was hard to tell it was moving. Also, hard light is way more efficient than soft light, so an HMI par or fresnel might serve you better than a balloon? (I've never used a balloon; never been on a shoot with a budget.) For night, you want a hard backlight and a soft sidelight, but maybe a hard 3/4 light motivated by the moon and lighting up the sand would be nice? If you wet down the location, you need a lot less light; it will look brighter, but the desert's not good for that. Maybe look around for an area with white or particularly reflective sand?

And if worse comes to worse, underexpose a bit and throw some bright sources around. It's way better to have a lantern or fire a stop or two over and the rest under key (your fire should start to blow at at those light levels, which could be okay) than to have the whole thing underexposed because then it looks like a mistake.

Also, if you look at something like There Will Be Blood, which had good but much less precise lighting than No Country for Old Men where they shot a bunch of 18k pars into the sky to get some ambience, there are some continuity issues with regard to evening versus night and whatnot and the scenes by the fire had no light whatsoever in the background, but the shooting style really worked all the same. The fire scene, for instance, was about a small group of people and the (ultimately illusory) intimacy between them, since their relationship would fall apart soon after that scene. And the lack of background detail worked okay because the scene really was about them and not about them in this area.

Of course, were it a horror movie or something where maybe you wanted a little hint of "something out there" this would never work, and I don't think it would work much beyond a scene or two in any context; the other night exteriors in the film were more conventional.

Anyhow, just ranting to avoid work.

[kmikami]

There will be some desert night exteriors. (Sometimes a fire or headlights of car in foreground, flat landscape, no large objects in far background).

I would do all of the shots locked down, using a stills lens on the Red and shooting background plates using the same lens on a dslr with long exposures. You could even bracket the exposures and make an hdri. Then get the same shot with the Red, lighting the talent or whatever foreground elements the best you can and just composite your foreground elements and background plates in post.

Actually, to be honest I would probably just manufacture the shots completely. I would first get some nice background plates with a still camera. Then shoot the foreground day for night in front of some rocks, a hill or some brush in such a way that it will be easy to composite in. CC the different elements to match and you could end up with an amazing shot that would have never been possible practically.

If you wanted to include camera movement you could even take the latter approach, track the camera moves you made with the foreground footage, and then make a 3D background environment using your stills and camera projection.

[Oliver Soravia]

Hello David Mullen.
There`s a low (very low) budget movie (big screen) I`m going to visualize this summer in germany and I`m checking different formats and systems and post production facilities in order to ensure the best quality at the lowest costs available...not meaning storytelling qualities. Apart from conventional filmproduction steps and mostly used HD video sytems, I ended up on concerning the SI2K or the RED ONE. Especially regarding the workflow with FCP and aditional software as speed grade xr. My questions are: did you have a lighting/exposing situation in which the lens was stopped down by NDs so that some magenta flare occured on the chip? Do you already have experiences in doing your "own" DI in 4K without the lab? Thanks a lot for some good advices. Best. OLI

[Brian Harbauer]

Hello David,
I really appreciate your taking the time to answer questions here. I`ll shoot a short on the Red one in late summer. There will be some desert night exteriors. (Sometimes a fire or headlights of car in foreground, flat landscape, no large objects in far background).The story would call for a more naturalistic approach light-wise in regard of background and wider shots. I would like to have some advice or ideas on how you would approach lighting the desert background at night. Day for night would not be something I'd like to do, also fog is out of the question. The budget doesen't allow for the "classic" approach of putting up bigger HMI sources on condors to backlight a larger area. Setting the scene in front of a small elevation and having multiple light sources point up in the sky behind the hill to pruduce some sort of skylight is too expensive, too.
At the moment I am thinking about using one (maybe two) ballons for "subtle ambience.
Any take on this? Thanks you so much! Stefan

For really wide shots you could get a good matte painter. Though when you shoot, you'd have to be really careful with lighting and perspective. I don't know what would be required (measurements?).

[Tom Lowe]

Hey David, kind of touching on a thread that is ongoing at cinematography.com, do you know how the Vista Vision guys dealt with the shallower depth of the field on that camera vs cinema 35mm? I guess on something like the Searchers they could have simply stopped down with all that available light, but on Veritgo or North by Northwest, maybe not.

I guess this would roughly be like trying to "pull focus" on a full frame DSLR with an f/2 or f/2.8 lens or whatever - not real easy if the sbuject is moving.

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, I think back in the 1950's they just worked around, or struggled with, the shallower focus of the larger negative formats -- you can see some bad focus pulls in "My Fair Lady" (65mm) for example. They probably lit sets to the same levels. Luckily with a hard light style, getting some stop wasn't as hard as it would have been if they used soft light.

Hitchcock wanted a "European" soft light look (he was probably thinking of what Coutard was doing, bouncing lights off of ceilings for Godard's movies) when he did "Torn Curtain" so the DP bounced most of the lighting -- but to get the stop they wanted, they used silver boards, which ended up making the light not much softer.

A lot of those large format epics had outdoor daytime scenes where getting more stop wasn't a problem.

Also, old movies used fewer close-ups, especially the period epics and John Ford westerns -- so you don't see the shallower focus as well when the camera is mainly shooting wide and medium shots.

[Paris Remillard]

Hey David, kind of touching on a thread that is ongoing at cinematography.com, do you know how the Vista Vision guys dealt with the shallower depth of the field on that camera vs cinema 35mm? I guess on something like the Searchers they could have simply stopped down with all that available light, but on Veritgo or North by Northwest, maybe not.

I guess this would roughly be like trying to "pull focus" on a full frame DSLR with an f/2 or f/2.8 lens or whatever - not real easy if the sbuject is moving.

Wouldn't it be about the same or slightly easier pulling focus on Vistavision than pulling focus on 'Scope, though. The Vistavision frame is 36mm (or apparently 37.72mm according to Wikipedia) wide, whereas the cinemascope frame, when unsqueezed is around 43-44mm wide, I believe. So Vistavision is actually a slightly smaller format than 'scope. Though it would be higher resolution, I'd assume, since it uses spherical lenses on twice the filmstock real estate (approx. 24x36mm vs. 18x22mm) to get a similar sized frame, instead of squeezing then stretching the image to fit a larger format into a smaller physical area.