Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[Roberto Lequeux]

David, best of luck with your Jack Kerouac "Big Sur" project! I literally can't wait to see it. Please share details when you can.

[Sam Eilertsen]

David, best of luck with your Jack Kerouac "Big Sur" project! I literally can't wait to see it. Please share details when you can.

SECOND.

Jeck Kerouac is an incredible writer and also, I think, one of the hardest to translate into film. Can't wait to see what you do with it.

[David Mullen ASC]

Haven't done rear-projection yet myself but I'm thinking of proposing it for my next feature -- we have some dreaded "driving on an unlit rural highway at night" scene and I'm not excited about inevitable pitch-black backgrounds, am thinking of shooting some day-for-night plates of the scenery and playing them very dim out the windows with projection, just to give some depth back there. So when I figure this out, I'll let you know. Shallow depth of field when doing the interiors should hide a multitude of sins.

David,

First off, thanks for being such a good sport with this thread!

I'm prepping my second proper feature and have a question for you regarding shooting night driving sequences in a car.

I've decided on rear projection process as my solution and while I'm fairly comfortable with the basics of rear projection, and have done some research on how I want it to look (Fight Club and The Game being the two visual references the director and I talked about), I was wondering if you had any tricks up your sleeve that you employ if and when you shoot rear projection night driving process? Anything I should be mindful of and is there a type of screen or projector you prefer?

It seems like the main challenge is choreographing the dance with your lamp operators to create a convincing "lights passing on the freeway" effect..

Shooting Red-MX w/ Lomo Anamorphics

Thanks in advance,
Kevin

[David Mullen ASC]

David, best of luck with your Jack Kerouac "Big Sur" project! I literally can't wait to see it. Please share details when you can.

I'll start a thread when I have some concrete info to share, right now we are still trying to nail down the basic budget, etc.

This will be the lowest-budgeted movie I've shot since "Northfork" in 2002, and there's been nine years of inflation since then, so things are incredibly tight. I'm worried about not having enough basic elements in place to pull this off.

We talked about shooting this on film originally, with a crazy idea to shoot the dialogue on 2-perf 35mm to save money, but carry an 8-perf 35mm VistaVision camera (FF35 basically) for the wide shots, to really capture the landscape of Big Sur. Being a period setting (1959-60-ish) the director (Michael Polish) wanted that classic film look, but with an epic feeling for the landscape, even though this is a very intimate story.

But the budget made that approach impossible, so naturally when we thought of getting an epic feeling with a digital camera, we thought of getting an Epic somehow. VistaVision probably resolves around 5K, so shooting 5K RAW on the Epic will be very similar, without the grain. So I'm very excited about that aspect, shooting epic landscapes on the Epic, assuming we pull this together.

[Sam Eilertsen]

What is the reason for using rear projection these days, as opposed to greenscreen? Is it budgetary or do you think there is a quality advantage to using it in certain situations?

[Taylor Gill]

David,
I've been following these posts for months and have learned so much - thank you for your time and sharing your knowledge.

I've heard varying things about white balance and wanted to know your thoughts. When shooting with HD/Digital video cameras and trying to get a white balance for the scene, it seems to me the best way would be put in a white card and do a white balance to get to neutral. In a RAW camera, that can be warmed or cooled in post, but it's taking into account the whole spectrum of light in the scene.

I used to dial in the manual WB to what I wanted the scene to be -- shooting 6500k or so if I wanted things warmer, etc, but on certain cameras, I noticed that although this would dial out the orange/blue tones, I started to get a magenta/green shift that could not be corrected in camera except for doing a custom white balance. We were able to color correct the footage in post to get back to more normal skin tones, however lost time/quality to do this on hours of footage.

Is there something I'm missing? Would you recommend doing a custom white balance? I like shooting manual and adjusting the temperature to taste, but this doesn't account for green/magenta, correct?

Thanks so much in advance.

[Roberto Lequeux]

I'll start a thread when I have some concrete info to share, right now we are still trying to nail down the basic budget, etc.

This will be the lowest-budgeted movie I've shot since "Northfork" in 2002, and there's been nine years of inflation since then, so things are incredibly tight. I'm worried about not having enough basic elements in place to pull this off.

We talked about shooting this on film originally, with a crazy idea to shoot the dialogue on 2-perf 35mm to save money, but carry an 8-perf 35mm VistaVision camera (FF35 basically) for the wide shots, to really capture the landscape of Big Sur. Being a period setting (1959-60-ish) the director (Michael Polish) wanted that classic film look, but with an epic feeling for the landscape, even though this is a very intimate story.

But the budget made that approach impossible, so naturally when we thought of getting an epic feeling with a digital camera, we thought of getting an Epic somehow. VistaVision probably resolves around 5K, so shooting 5K RAW on the Epic will be very similar, without the grain. So I'm very excited about that aspect, shooting epic landscapes on the Epic, assuming we pull this together.

I searched quickly and came back with almost 2.32:1 for 2-perf 35. Is there anything in particular you would be worried about when shooting 2-perf for 2.35:1? Do you always want to have a little more room?

Do you think you might consider adding real grain as an overlay, or digital grain, or maybe just only doing film projection at the theaters and letting the rest be grainless? Have you considered approaching or re-creating the color of popular film stocks from the early 60's? I am sorry. I don't mean to ask so much about the process, but can't help it. Of course we understand if you can't discuss too much.

[David Mullen ASC]

I searched quickly and came back with almost 2.32:1 for 2-perf 35. Is there anything in particular you would be worried about when shooting 2-perf for 2.35:1? Do you always want to a little more room?

Do you think you might consider adding real grain as an overlay, or digital grain, or maybe just only doing film projection at the theaters and letting the rest be grainless? Have you considered approaching or re-creating the color of popular film stocks from the early 60's? I am sorry. I don't mean to ask so much about the process, but can't help it. Of course we understand if you can't discuss too much.

I think the main issues with 2-perf are the same for 4-perf anamorphic -- i.e. gate flare and hairs in the gate, since the frames are so close together.

I'm not so worried about the limitations on reframing a shot, I rarely need to do more than a slight push-in. Of course, with 2-perf I have less resolution / more grain to factor in when enlarging the frame. Now an efx person may prefer that I shoot with a taller frame to allow some image reframing/repositioning.

Not sure about adding grain to everything in post... on a film-out, you often get enough grain just from that process, which then means making a separate master for digital projection if you want to add some grain in that... and often that grain is so subtle that it may be hard to see on home video later (and often broadcasters don't like grainy images because of how it interacts with all of the compression they use.) But I wouldn't necessarily mind adding a slight grain structure to the image as long as it did not impact on sharpness too much (it may add to it for all I know.)

We do have some 16mm home movie footage scenes which will probably need to go through a grain process if we don't actually shoot it in 16mm.

Since some of my visual references for the film are b&w photos by Weston and Adams, and jazz/beat photography, I do want to try an effect in post of halating the blacks and overlaying that back over the picture, to get those fogged blacks you see in some old b&w movies. I've tried it in Photoshop but I don't know enough about pulling keys in order to only blur the blacks rather than the whole image before I overlay it back over the clean image.

For example, I tried a blur overlay in Photoshop of this image I snapped while scouting up north of Big Sur:


I didn't isolate the blacks and only blur them before the overlay, but since the original had large silhouette areas, it's mostly the halation of the blacks you see, so this is something of the effect I am imaging, but maybe more subtle.

[Andy Jarosz]

Do you ever find use for tough spun cloth as diffusion? Do you like it for it's actual diffuisitory qualities or the interesting patterns?

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't think Tough Spun is a very good diffuser; it's a throwback to the pre-plastic days when they used spun glass in front of hot lights to diffuse them. I think its only redeeming quality is that it is heat-resistant, so if it has to be closer to the bulb, maybe it's OK but then, that's not the best way to get a soft light. But you lose too much light relative to how much softening you get out of it.