Manure

[Evan Winter]

Happy Belated David,

 

Also, the forced perspective and the cyc stuff looks much improved. The still from the reshoot is stunning. In fact, I'm surprised you managed to make it feel so outdoorsy given the size limitations of the soundstage. I can imagine the challenge it must be to make a cyc feel that real. Nicely done!

 

Evan W.

[Michael Belanger]

We decided to ask if we could reshoot the first scene of the movie, shot on Day One, of Billy Bob Thornton selling to a pumpkin farmer.

 

David, it's amazing how different those 2 shots are. Not only does the brighter sky and smoke help to sell the depth along with the peatmoss crops, but even the foreground being filled in with full-size pumpkins lets me imagine more of the scene behind me. I'm saving these 2 frames for my notebook.

 

Thanks for the great posts and Happy B-day.

[Ram Shani]

the re shoot look great it's a learning processes to the one's that follow this thread?

 

just 2 Q:

 

1- do you use light meter on this shoot ?

 

2- how you control the pic on set do you have monitor next to you?(in case you do what kind?)

or you have video village that you have to go and check ? do you have technician that working with you to master all the manuals and look at the scoops?

how the director's watch the scene?

[David Mullen ASC]

The last three days were spent at DC Stages in Downtown LA, finishing up a lot of scenes in the Rose’s Manure factory labs, offices, hallways, etc. using modified existing sets.

A number of the standing sets were quite large. A library was converted into a lab/office for a number of scenes. We put two large industrial exhaust fans at the bottom of the two main windows of the room. For story reasons, there couldn’t be any safety cage over the fans and when we turned them on, we found that they were way too powerful to be standing near, not to mention shoot dialogue scenes around. Putting them on a variac dimmer just caused them to stop working. As we scrambled to find a speed control for that model of industrial fan, we took off the motors and fan belts to see if we could manually spin them. But after a few minutes they started turning slowly by themselves at the speed we needed.

 

Turns out that the huge amount of light I needed right outside the window to both burn-out the brown backdrop hung plus create shafts of light through the big windows, generated so much heat that the temperature difference on both sides of the windows were enough to cause air to flow and turn the fan blades. So we cancelled the plan to find a speed control for the fans.

 

In most scenes, I had a 20K coming through the main windows & fans, and the two side windows had a 10K each. Plus I had three 5K spkypans outside to light the backing, plus two mini-9-lights. In other scenes, I added a 5K Molebeam to create a stronger shaft of light.

 

On hiccup was last night when we did two night scenes in the lab/office, and the fans stopped turning without all that heat outside the windows. We had to manually spin them before each take and hope they didn’t slow to a stop before the take was over.

 

I wanted one scene to have a sunset look, so I switched the RED camera to 5600K balance, and used HMI Source-4’s bounced inside the room for fill, but left the tungsten light coming through the window and lighting the backdrop.

 

Perhaps our biggest pre-rig job for DC Stages was the main lobby area, a huge rotunda space with a big marble hallway connected to it. The center of the two largest areas (the rotunda and the end of the big hallway) was lit with a skirted 6K spacelight each, with dozens of Source-4’s spotted on various objects in the rotunda, which was a museum space in the movie. The large hallway was lit with a row of spot PARCAN’s.

 

I started using Kinos less and less for these tungsten scenes – the RED camera seems particularly sensitive to the green spike in these lights. In HMI-lit scenes, the daylight Kinos are fine because all the lights have some degree of green in them that can be timed out, but in tungsten-lit scenes, you can really see how off-color any other source is. So I mainly used bounced tungsten Source-4’s for fill, sometimes key, and bigger tungsten lamps through diffusion. I like bouncing Source-4’s around a space because I can quickly adjust the level by cutting the size of the pattern with the iris blades. And tungsten is the prettiest light I’ve ever seen on skintones.

 

As for the blue channel noise of the RED in 3200K light, I haven’t noticed it much generally, and truth is that this movie will be timed so warm and desaturated that I’ll probably be working closer to a 5600K balance in color-correcting when opening up the files and then taking down the saturation of the orange tungsten light, rather than trying to get 3200K light to look neutral. But I was playing around with some RED frames from the fake industrial documentary that we shot in the lab on both the RED camera (as a back-up) and on 16mm color negative 7219, and turned the RED frame to b&w to see how that would look (I lit the shot in a classic 1940’s style with hard tungsten light) and was surprised to see how much noise there was in some areas. I can see why you should stick to 5600K lighting for bluescreen work on the RED camera.

 

Otherwise, tungsten light is too beautiful to be dumped just because the RED prefers daylight, so I’m hoping that Build 16 has improved that aspect. The Macbeth chart tests that someone posted is very encouraging. It looks like the whole color space has been improved with Build 16. I’m just not sure it will be stable enough to switch to for the next RED feature I start for the Polish Brothers in only three weeks, not to mention that we will be shooting pick-ups for this Build 15-shot movie over the next few months probably.

 

This brings up another issue. On our day off last Friday, some of the camera crew (operator Theo Pingarelli, 1st AC Marcos Lopez, digital tech / b-camera operator Conrad Hunziker) went out to a wild animal ranch to shoot some efx plates (thanks guys!) and had a giraffe kick one of the RED cameras, damaging the mattebox, follow-focus, and perhaps tweaking the camera. So we rented a RED from a small company for some 2nd unit bluescreen efx work on Monday rather than trust the kicked-by-a-giraffe RED that we had yet to send out for a service check. But the RED that showed up had already been installed with Build 16, and we were shooting bluescreen elements for scenes shot on Build 15 and where some elements had already been shot on Build 15. So the efx supervisor did not want to risk dealing with the color differences of having some elements in a shot using Build 15 and others using Build 16. The efx unit (shot by DP Patrick Cady on that day) ended up using the giraffe-kicked Build 15 RED instead since it seemed to be working OK (a good endorsement for the RED camera… it can be trampled by African wildlife and keep working…) But this brings up all sorts of issue with renting RED’s from different companies and keeping track of the Build level that was installed.

 

My gaffer Keith Morgan (who I have worked with a few times before, notably on “Solstice” in New Orleans) and my long-time Key Grip Brad Heiner have pointed out some of the changes in my style in lighting over the years, since I’ve been out of town a lot lately, or was on “Big Love” for seven months with a different crew – I keep learning by watching other DP’s (most particularly Bill Wages, ASC on “Big Love”, who I consider one of the best DP’s working today) and by talking to crew people. Philosophically, the biggest thing has been to learn to light large spaces so that I don’t have to do much relighting on closer shots (until I turn around to look the opposite way.) This is one reason I prefer sets with ceilings so I can retain the natural ambience from light bouncing all around the room. I’ve also discovered 129 diffusion, which is heavier than 216 (more like Full Grid Cloth) and use it a lot. But the main thing is that I mix things up, I am not always consistent about lighting each scene in a similar manner. I may use Chinese Lanterns for one night scene but bounce a Source-4 in the same room for another scene, just for some variations in look, or because the change suits the action better.

 

I think one advantage of shooting digitally is that certain things when lighting a wide shot of a room can be judged by a monitor that your eyes don’t always catch – mainly in terms of fall-off. It’s hard in a large room with 20K’s shining through giant windows, flooding the room with light, to see with your eyes that some dark wood bookshelves in one part of the room are going pitch black because they are not catching any light. But looking at an HD monitor, that becomes immediate obvious. Plus I’m constantly running two cameras in these wide shots, and sometimes I catch problems with the backing outside the windows on the HD monitors, like in a high angle, seeing a couple of feet of stage floor on the B-camera. Of course this is all stuff that any traditional DP can deal with when shooting film, by eye and with a light meter, and by looking through the eyepiece, but as I operate less and less these days, it becomes more important to catch problems that are only visible from the perspective of the lens. So HD monitoring is simply a great help in this way. If only I could get a high-quality HD image on a monitor while shooting with a 35mm camera...

 

On the next movie, we will be moving from location to location constantly with a small lighting and grip package, so I will be putting the RED through the paces of dealing with less controlled situations, lighting-wise – more available light, more day exterior light, more we’re-losing-the-light-but-keep-shooting problems, etc. This tends to be where color negative film really saves you’re a--- because you can’t always balance things. You may end up shooting in full shade with a background in full sun, something that modern color negative film handles just fine most of the time, but most digital cameras have a problem with. I’ve shot some HD movies in this manner and generally there are workarounds, so we should be fine.

 

This is the part where I want to thank everyone involved with this movie. First, the fun cast – Billy Bob Thornton and Tea Leoni were a dream to work with, clever, inventive, but quick to jump in and get a scene in the can (so to speak) within a few takes, if not the first take. The rest of the main cast were wonderful too, all of them. My crew worked so hard on this one with (almost) no complaints and I’m incredibly grateful for that. Gaffer Keith Morgan and Key Grip Brad Heiner were organized and graceful under pressure, two critically important qualities in a department head. I want to particularly thank B-camera Operator / digital guru Conrad Hunziker and my prep-DP Jim Mathers (who brought Conrad onboard) for making this RED experience fairly painless and for doing my homework for me while I was in Canada shooting “Jennifer’s Body” right up until five days before “Manure” started shooting (so my body feels more like I’m on Day 68 instead of Day 26…) I was also happy to be working with my regular camera guys like operator Theo Pingarelli and 1st AC Marcos Lopez, plus 2nd AC’s Bianca Bahena (another RED shoot veteran) and Ken Tanaka, our data wrangler Eric Yu, and the B-camera focus pullers (alternating between Dominik Mainl and Tom Gleason). Thanks also to Jim Mathers and Patrick Cady for shooting some second unit stuff, as well as some inserts shot by operators Theo and Conrad.

 

Hats off to the producers, line producers, and production office folk for pulling this ambitious film off. I also want to point out the contribution of long-term Polish Brothers collaborator AD Andy Coffing, who is just as interested in how the movie looks as anyone else working on the show, constantly pushing everyone to do things better (not just do it faster).

 

The real tour de force work on this show was by Production Designer Clark Hunter, not just in terms of visual design and execution, but also achieving the impossible in terms of the number of high-quality sets built, struck, and built again, over and over and over again.

 

But primarily, I must thank Michael and Mark Polish for their amazing visual sense and imaginative screenwriting, and their dedication to artistic filmmaking no matter what the obstacles. I usually feel beat-up and exhausted by the feature filmmaking process, but at least when I finish one of their movies, I not only feel beat-up and exhausted… but I always feel I worked to my highest creative potential as a cinematographer, which is the most any artist/technician such as myself can ask for.

 

A few Nikon snapshots:

 

A courtroom, lit with 12-lights behind each window (this set had been built for some other show with only five feet of space between the windows and the stage wall, which is nuts...) I think we lit and shot this scene (three angles) in an hour total. I accidentally took this picture with the Nikon camera set to 5600K, but I like the warmth:

 

The lab/office (with fans turned by the heat of lamps...) with tungsten playing for late afternoon by switching the camera to 5600K:

 

The museum rotunda and great hall:

[James Steven Beverly]

Can't wait to see it. Got a release date planned yet?

[David Mullen ASC]

1- do you use light meter on this shoot ?

 

2- how you control the pic on set do you have monitor next to you?(in case you do what kind?)

or you have video village that you have to go and check ? do you have technician that working with you to master all the manuals and look at the scoops?

how the director's watch the scene?

 

Yes, I use a light meter, set to 320 ASA. I basically light by eye these days but based around a stop I want to achieve for the key. So I check to see if I'm in the ballpark with the key level by using my meter (let's say, f/2.8) and then balance by eye.

 

Then I set the RED camera to what I think the f-stop should be, again, let's say f/2.8, and go to the 17" JVC HD monitors we set up. I look at the balance of bright highlights to shadows, look for signs of obvious clipping, etc. If there are few highlights and mostly underexposed areas, I may open up a half-stop to reduce noise and capture more low-level detail. If there are a lot of hot highlights, I may close down a half-stop to preserve more highlight detail. In softer light with no hot spots, the camera seems to be more like 250 ASA.

 

I sometimes check the little histogram reading in the viewfinder too.

 

It may be different if I were operating as well, I may be playing more with the exposure guides that the viewfinder can generate. Trouble with shooting on location, especially in bright daylight, is that monitors are less accurate unless tented very well, which is not always possible. So if your eyes are used to bright sunshine, any monitor may look dim in comparison even when the image is correctly exposed, so if you are not careful, you may start overexposing simply to see the image better on the monitor.

 

We set the monitors to color bars, but we don't have scopes or a DIT.

 

I learned early on that I must sit dead-on to the JVC HD monitors, which are LCD's, because they look a stop brighter when viewed from a slight side-ish angle. Some of my early shots may have been exposed a little darker because of that problem.

 

I do have a few clipped shots, hopefully they won't make it into the final film -- they were shots that other people shot for me on the fly when I told that that the stop was probably "x" but rather than meter it themselves, they just followed my guess. In retrospect, in the future I have to train anyone shooting for me to understand exposure better.

 

Not to say that I never have clipped areas in my frame -- I often add them myself for various reasons, like to burn out that beat-up brown backing outside the windows to near white. You just want the clipped areas to be small and non-distracting, but generally a shot with no hot highlights can get a little boring.

 

The director either watches on the 17" JVC monitors at video village with me, or has a smaller LCD (I think it is an Apple) on a stand that is placed on set near camera. I can't make exposure decisions looking at that monitor though and it never seemed set-up right for brightness and contrast.

 

No idea on a release date since the movie was independently produced, so the next step is to cut it and find a distributor.

[Kevin Zanit]

Great stuff as usual David. Congrats on finishing another one! This has all been really interesting; today I got a nice Red demo from Cliff over at Sim which with your updates and his information has been very helpful in my own prep for a project coming up.

 

Thanks,

 

Kevin Zanit

[James Steven Beverly]

No idea on a release date since the movie was independently produced, so the next step is to cut it and find a distributor.

 

Yeah, I kinda figured, being an indy but I was thinking that because it was a Polish Brothers project, they mighta opted to pre-sell at least several foreign territories based on their reputation alone to help offset production costs 'course maybe the producers wanted to wait and secure domestic so they could make a better deal if the project grows any kinda legs. One thing's for sure, it shouldn't be too hard for a Polish Brothers film to find distribution.

Edited July 3, 2008 by James Steven Beverly

[Travis Cline]

David

 

Thank you very much for the posts. I was wondering if you might give more details about the things you say you have learned recently. Specifically I was intersted when you said you have learned to better light wide shots so that you have less lighting to do for CU's. I'm interested to know more about how you do that and what you do differently. Anything else you have learned to would be great to read. Thank you David.

 

 

Travis

[David Mullen ASC]

It's a bit too subtle and complicated to explain in a post. The key to all lighting is to exercise your imagination and see the space lit in your mind first, so in some ways, getting better at lighting wide shots is about imagining how to light it better. But it is also a function of budget -- bigger lights farther away and higher, or designing the space with practical illumination in mind, or being able to rig lights to high ceilings, etc.

[Conrad Hunziker III]

BTW, David, did the hot swap arrive and work OK?

 

I hadnt been following this discussion group, so sorry if this reply comes a bit late.

 

We decided not to use the hot swap adapters for the following reasons:

 

- The design of the hot swap adapter and the red batteries make it impossible to see the charge status of one of the batteries.

 

- The current version of the Red Camera software still does not have a battery charge indicator for batteries other than a single Red battery. This is because the Red Camera uses a 2 way communication with the battery to determine the percentage of battery life remaining. The camera cannot talk to 2 batteries at once (at least in the way its wired with these hot swap adapters).

 

- It seems that the design of the hot-swap adapter is setup to use both batteries at once, in series. So if you pull one battery and the other battery doesnt have enough charge to hold the camera - the camera will abnormally power off.

 

So if the camera does not power down gracefully, there is the significant chance that the red could loose all the shot data currently on the drive. Loosing any data is not an option. We never had more than 10% of the drive full, which equates to about 15 to 20 minutes of shooting - so we never would have lost much. But anything is too much.

 

For the record, even with the one Red Drive failure, we did not loose one bit of data on the show.

[Felipe Perez-Burchard]

David,

 

I had been a bit busy and had not yet had time to read this wonderful thread.

 

First of all Thank you!

Sometimes one is thinking about the whole life/career thing, and seeing your great work, determination and attitude is truly inspiring!!

 

Regarding Post Path -

I've done a number of RED shows now, and one of the main things that I think we havent quite been able to get right is managing the "Look" 100% through dailies. Was this at all a concern for you (given there were no studio execs looking at your work) or did you figure out a good system?

What I mean is that usually if a very specific post look is desired and created by the DP, it is not usually kept for editorial even though its an "offline" (for TV people are also starting to deliver ProRES as the final format) so as to preserve as much info in that part of the process (makes sense, but the issue of getting used to the incorrect image arises).

 

Regarding NDs / IR ; I finished a small film shot all in the desert back in May ... we used Panchro HM-IRs to be at around 10 ASA instead of 320 (with pola) -- they were great for IR -- the images were wonderful, the only danger was that you can't stack these kind of NDs because of heavy Double-image problems; luckily, they make them in more steps than regular NDs... I hear Tiffen now has a set that goes up to ND2.1.

(By the way, the 1st Ad on that was Mark Mathis, who I think you might have worked with recently -- great guy).

 

The Re-shoot shot you posted is quite educational about how lighting is about emotion... the one from day 20 feels like a storybook americana "smile" (which is obviously what you were going for) while the first pass feels much more gloomy and foreboding; despite the fact that the sky itself is the same, the density of it drastically alters mood. Thanks for that little example.

 

Anyway, good luck on the next shoot!

I hope your hours change a bit though...

 

Best Regards,

[David Mullen ASC]

Looks like "Manure" will be a Premiere screening at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

 

I'll be doing the D.I. in late December for that one so I'll keep you posted on how it is turning out.

[DJ Joofa]

Looks like "Manure" will be a Premiere screening at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

 

Congratulations.

[John Allen]

Sorry if this is kind of a late question, but I was just wondering about what kind of lights you used for the courtroom scene? I see you said you had 12 behind each window, but were they HMI's(big or small units), or something else? Anyway, amazing post and I can't wait to see the film! :)

 

-John

[David Mullen ASC]

They were 12-lights, which is a single unit with 12 tungsten globes, like a MaxiBrute. In this case, they were HPL globes like the ones used in Source-4's, as opposed to PAR 64 globes. I had one 12-light per window.

[Tim Tyler]

David,

 

Are you doing Q&A in Park City at any of the Manure screenings?

 

I won't be at Sundance, but I know others who would be interested.

[John Allen]

They were 12-lights, which is a single unit with 12 tungsten globes, like a MaxiBrute. In this case, they were HPL globes like the ones used in Source-4's, as opposed to PAR 64 globes. I had one 12-light per window.

 

Ah ok, thanks for the clarification. I was actually going to ask if it was a MaxiBrute, but I had only heard of maxi's having 9 lights or less. So yeah that's cool, they definitely look like they worked well from the stills.

[John Allen]

Oh one more question, and I apologize if I'm taking up your time. When you say you used tungsten globes, did you leave them uncorrected and had the camera set to 5600k for the warm look? Or did you gel them to daylight, and then still keep the setting to 5600k?

[David Mullen ASC]

Oh one more question, and I apologize if I'm taking up your time. When you say you used tungsten globes, did you leave them uncorrected and had the camera set to 5600k for the warm look? Or did you gel them to daylight, and then still keep the setting to 5600k?

 

I used them for a warm look in daylight-balance. My fill came from daylight Kinos.

 

For other scenes, I used an 18K HMI instead of the 12-lights when I didn't want as much warmth from the sunlight key, but even then, I usually had a 1/4 CTO or 1/2 CTO gel on it.

[John Allen]

Sweet, thanks David. :)

[David Mullen ASC]

One review from Sundance that mentioned my work:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/festiv...003933015.story

[John Allen]

Congrats on the good review on your lighting! What did you think about when they complemented you on your stunning sunset? I recall you said you quickly set the lighting up for that, so were you surprised when the journalist mentioned that as one of the shots that stood out to him?

[Matthew Buick]

Credit very well deserved David! :)

[Tom Lowe]

...the cinematography by M. David Mullen (who also shot "Northfork") is consistently stunning

 

Bravo, David!