Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[David Mullen ASC]

Hi David,

Two-ish questions considering this still from the film you shot. Firstly, did you use a separate condor to light that background silo-looking thing? It looks as though the direction of the light source could be from around where the top light for the character is positioned. Also, is that just a bright haze from actual city lights in the far off background?
Also, on another note, I was curious if for this top lights (the 5k and 1k Par Can respectively); when moving into close-ups and mediums, do you just lower or adjust the same light? or manipulate it with a smaller unit closer? Like replace either of those with a china ball per-say?

-dan

It was one condor with multiple PARCAN's in it. The glow in the horizon is from the city. I think in the close-ups at the phone booth, I floated a 4'x4' diffusion frame (probably an Opal or 250) over his head to soften the top light (not 100% sure, we were working so fast out there).

It would have been hard to switch to a Chinese Lantern because of the Cyan 60 gel on the light -- if it had been a white light, I probably would have done that.

[Shawn Nelson]

David,
I watched 'Se7en' last night really enjoyed how rich it was. Not only the blacks, but even the whites had such a heavy nice feel to them. My friend told me it was because Darius Khondji used a resilvering process on the negative. I am unfamiliar with this term and process. Have you used it before? Second, and this may be blasphemous, are you aware of any digital plugins that approximate it? Or are there DI tricks that can almost replicate it?

[David Mullen ASC]

David,
I watched 'Se7en' last night really enjoyed how rich it was. Not only the blacks, but even the whites had such a heavy nice feel to them. My friend told me it was because Darius Khondji used a resilvering process on the negative. I am unfamiliar with this term and process. Have you used it before? Second, and this may be blasphemous, are you aware of any digital plugins that approximate it? Or are there DI tricks that can almost replicate it?

No, "Seven" did not employ any resilvering to the negative, that was for the prints. So any of that look is due to digital color-correction from the original negative -- the early Criterion laserdisc version did use a telecine print stock that was run through a silver retention process, creating a very high-contrast and dark transfer, but later when Fincher re-did the transfers, he decided to use the original negative so that look had to be added digitally in the color-correction.

Silver retention to a print basically increases the contrast in the shadows, deepens the blacks, slightly desaturates the colors (especially dark colors), and adds silver grain. Most of that can be simulated in a telecine color-correction except for the additional grain, that would require some extra work but so far, most silver retention movies don't bother, they just live with the grain of the original negative.

Now a few movies did do silver retention to the original negative, which adds density to the highlights, increasing the contrast there instead of in the blacks (because silver is where highlight detail is, a black area is mostly clear on a negative), reduces color saturation as well, and adds a lot more grain -- mainly because the silver grains in camera negative stocks are much larger than they are in print stocks or intermediate stocks, because camera stocks range from 50 ASA to 500 ASA, whereas lab stocks are in the 5 ASA range.

"Minority Report" is probably the most extreme example, they did a skip-bleach process to Kodak 800 ASA stock (a product that was discontinued) for a number of scenes. But Deakins did a partial silver retention to the negative for "Jarhead" and "Assassination of Jesse James" to get a bit of that silver grain texture into the image.

Other than "Minority Report" however, most of the Kaminski-Spielberg movies with that silver retention look did it to the prints, not the original negative.

Like I said, when you do a silver retention process to the negative, there are some key differences because the silver is mostly in the highlights on a negative, mostly in the shadows on a print. I did a short film once where we skip-bleach processed both the negative and the prints, which was pretty extreme.

Most of the look of "Seven" on the negative was just good lighting. He sometimes either used a lower-contrast 320T stock for a few scenes, and a few others he flashed with a Panaflasher, to counteract the build-up in contrast and blacks on the printed image once it used the silver retention process. But other shots, he push-processed the stock to increase contrast -- he had a pretty elaborate system based on his earlier work on "Delicatessen". But it was all tied into the printing process, so modern transfers have to recreate that effect digitally since they aren't working from prints.

[Martin Stevens]

Hello David,

On your average non-anamorphic movie shoot what is the widest lens you would normally use? 18mm???

[David Mullen ASC]

It's a stylistic decision... once you start to embrace a wide-angle style, then the wide end of the working range becomes a shorter focal length. When I worked on "Jennifer's Body" the director (Karyn Kusama) liked wide-angle lenses, so close-ups were often shot on a 35mm or 50mm at the longest, and a lot of shots that were wider were in the 18mm to 25mm range. But when I work with director Charles MacDougall (Chicago Code, Good Wife pilots) we often used the 24-290mm and he generally was happiest when even the wide masters were shot above 100mm when possible. Of course with steadicam shots or wide sweeping crane moves, we'd go to the wide-angle end, that 18mm to 25mm range.

But knowing how Kayrn likes wide-angle lenses, I sometimes wondered if I should have embraced even shorter lenses when possible, that 14mm to 18mm range, though I think Karyn didn't want things to get too distorted either by going too wide-angle. It's just not a habit I normally get into, super wide-angle photography, my natural tendency is to like a natural human perspective on the scene and work in the middle focal-length range.

But wide-angle lenses can be fun -- I just did a wide, low-angle tracking shot through a big train station and used the 15mm end of the 15-40mm zoom to show off the architecture... I had in mind how Spielberg shot those banks in "Catch Me if You Can".

So often an 18mm is the widest-angle prime I usually carry, but if I have the budget, I will toss in a few shorter focal lengths just in case I need them. It's just that when the budget is tight all of your low-usage items on the rental are questioned, you get asked to drop something to save some money. So often it's the 14mm-ish and 300mm-ish lenses that get dropped, to be day-played if needed.

[Nick Gardner]

Mr. Mullen, have you used the Duclos 11-16? It has totally changed the way I think about wide angle lenses due to the extreme angles of view with an extremely flat image. It's something we are not used to seeing.

Nick

[Martin Stevens]

Thank you David!

[David Mullen ASC]

Mr. Mullen, have you used the Duclos 11-16? It has totally changed the way I think about wide angle lenses due to the extreme angles of view with an extremely flat image. It's something we are not used to seeing.

Nick

I've played with it -- it's a very good wide-angle zoom. However, it doesn't get around the fact that the field of view is much wider than what would accurately recreate the size of a space, so it definitely falls under the category of a stylized effect in my opinion, even if the distortion is low.

[JPSendall]

David,
I watched 'Se7en' last night really enjoyed how rich it was. Not only the blacks, but even the whites had such a heavy nice feel to them. My friend told me it was because Darius Khondji used a resilvering process on the negative. I am unfamiliar with this term and process. Have you used it before? Second, and this may be blasphemous, are you aware of any digital plugins that approximate it? Or are there DI tricks that can almost replicate it?

If David doesn't mind I can answer part of your question. Both Magic Bullet Looks and Tiffens plugins have versions of a bleach bypass set up. I also remember there was a plugin that emulated most (13) of Kodaks neg and pos stocks from Genarts Sapphire called FilmEffect.

[Andrew Luczenczyn]

Hi David.

Im just finishing up my film degree at the u of Winnipeg in Canada. When I first started, I hated the small redhead lighting kits that were available to us because I found the light uneven and harsh, even with usuing the limited softening modifiers we had. I assembled an alternate inexpensive kit minly of 3 Lowel DP lights, which I much prefer but I still find the light harder to control compared to the fresnels which I have limited access to.

Long story short, do you have any tips on how to even out hotspots and control these small open-faced lights, especially when used in location shoots where throw distances are short and unevenness or harsh shadows are difficult to tame?