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Big Sur


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Wow! Available light + a little help from S4's, Kino's, chinese lanterns, etc. + an Epic is (IMHO) absolutely nailing the look this movie needs. I think you're really breaking some new ground here.

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Thank you, David, for sharing your experiences on this film. It's always much appreciated. Do you have any more production stills or production reports for the last couple weeks of shooting? I'd love to see more :)

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Nice pictures, David! The first one looks really good for an "official portrait"!

 

(p.s. glad to see the camera in a non-Dslr configuration and on a 2D feature, rather than "trapped" in one of those 3D monstrosities rigs...)

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Week 3

 

We started shooting the day after Easter deep inside Bixby Canyon. About half the crew members were new at this point, for a variety of reasons – the main one being that it took three days to haul all of our gear up a narrow road/trail in small 4-wheel-drive vehicles, crossing a river eight times in the process, to arrive at the cabin location where we would be shooting for seven days. This required an entirely different grip & electric crew to prep and move the equipment while we were still working in San Francisco. A minor reason was that some of the San Francisco crew members didn’t want to work in Big Sur when they heard that, due to hotel shortages south of the highway closure, we’d have to double-up on hotel rooms. However, this problem disappeared a few days before we arrived with the re-opening of Highway One just north of Bixby Canyon, allowing us to use hotels in Carmel (I thank God and the road crews – we now had cell service, WiFi, restaurants, and bars after wrap every night…)

 

There is a steep dirt road leading down from Bixby Bridge that goes into the canyon, probably part the original highway before the bridge was built in 1932. It reaches a number of gates to private properties. We originally scouted the property that is linked to the tiny beach under the bridge, a very overgrown area with dense brush and oak trees. We think we found the actual cabin described in the novel that Ferlinghetti loaned to Jack Kerouac, though it was heavily modified and barely larger than an outhouse… but it had a tiny stone fireplace as described by the novel and two windows. The area near the ocean end of the cabin however was not particular scenic in terms of the plant life, just a creek and some bushes, and it was a hard hike to the ocean due to the overgrowth everywhere, which didn’t clear until you were just ten yards from the ocean. During the scout period, we asked one of the other property owners what it looked like deeper up the canyon and he said it was full of tall redwoods and an old wooden cabin, so we felt compelled to go and look at it.

 

After crossing a fast, turbulent creek eight times in a rental car while winding for twenty minutes on a narrow dirt & rock road surrounded by beautiful ferns and tall redwoods (we felt like we were in Jurassic Park) we got to this wonderful old wooden cabin with moss growing on the roof and a stone fireplace, large enough to stage the scenes inside (at times in the novel, Jack has nine people visiting him inside this one room) though we did pick some planks to be pulled on the back side of the cabin for camera portals when we needed a wider shot of the interior. It was something that would have been hard to recreate, the age of this cabin, and the surrounding redwoods, rocks, and ferns were very photogenic… but it seemed too production-unfriendly to get to this place for seven shooting days straight, with interior work and night exterior lighting being involved, so it was more than a simple second-unit size shoot. But our line producer, seeing the advantage of not having to build the cabin or having to break-up interiors and exteriors in multiple locations, felt that he could find a way of making the location work. But it meant that all our trucks had to be parked at the start of the canyon and everything hauled in using small vehicles piece by piece.

 

The main problem with this approach was that there was very little level ground around the cabin, boxed in by steep hills and redwoods, and I had to have a small mountain of equipment staged off to one side, plus pop-up tents for the everything to protect it from any overnight rain. So there was a grip tent, an electric tent, and a camera & sound department tent, though the assistants took the Epics back to their hotels every night.

But it meant that I was forever either framing out all of this gear, or throwing camouflage net over it, or having everyone move their stuff out of the shot every couple of set-ups, which was our daily challenge. Plus the cabin had three windows and enough gaps in the planks on the walls that I could see people and equipment outside even when I was inside the cabin shooting.

 

I also was determined to be able to haze the interiors of the cabin even though in the novel, it says that there was no glass on the windows, just wooden shutters. So I had the grips cut plexiglass to fit over each window on-camera to hold the smoke in the room (it still leaked out constantly because the cabin had too many gaps and holes in it – but at least the leaking and drafts were slowed down.) In a few shots, you sometimes saw a reflection in the plexi, but most of the time, you didn’t notice that I had sealed the windows because of the haze in the air.

 

Another challenge that I had all through the Big Sur portion of the shoot was the amount of night work in the script, enough that every day we had to shoot some night scenes. This meant that our call times would never be at sunrise, but some time around 10AM, and often we weren’t shooting until noon. So not only did I never have a chance to shoot any scenes in morning light, I often started by day with a scene in high noon sunlight. Normally I’d start with the closer shots first and silk & light them, then shoot the wide shots later in the day, but with this show, we had too many scenes on the call sheet to shoot, by the afternoon we’d be shooting our third or fourth scene. Plus we were working too fast and in difficult locations with wind for me to fly silks overhead. And only in a few pre-determined spots did I have generator power (it was hard enough to tow the generator to the cabin, but anytime we were a certain distance away from the cabin, it was all available light only plus a few putt-putt hand-carried generators to run tiny things.) So this pretty much meant that I had to embrace hard overhead noon sunlight as part of the Big Sur look and experience (luckily most of the cast were men where I could get away with that harsh overhead light). That didn’t bother me so much as not being able to shoot any scene in morning light… because the cabin faced west, in the morning it would have been nicely backlit once the sun got over the high canyon walls.

 

The first day there we had overcast weather and some light drizzle now and then, which was nice photographically, but after that, we had clear weather for the next two weeks more or less. Most of the time, this was nice in the woods because I got shafts of sunlight once we fogged everything, but I had hoped for more variety while I was there, maybe some heavy fog or something one day, but it didn’t happen. However, being boxed in a narrow canyon full of tall trees, it wasn’t like I was seeing much of the sky, and the sun itself was blocked by the canyon walls by mid afternoon so it might as well have been overcast at that point.

 

In terms of weather, we got lucky when we finally moved out to the beach on the second to last day, so when it really mattered, the weather cooperated with us in terms of giving us a bit of visual drama. But more of that later.

 

Day exterior work for the next week was 99% available light with the occasional bounce card. Only a few times did I feel the need to bring out a big HMI. The interiors were lit with HMI’s coming through the window, soft and hard, mostly 1.2K’s and 4K’s, but for a few shots, I switched to a 5K tungsten PAR for a warm late afternoon or sunrise effect. What I like about the 5K PAR, besides being very reliable, is that I can stick it outside a window and point it right into the camera lens and as long as I hide the stand and power cable with some greenery, you just get the bright circle of the lamp, so it looks like the sun is in the shot. Inside the cabin, I first stapled a white bedsheet up into the A-framed ceiling to give myself the option of bouncing a Source-4 Leko into it to bring up the ambience inside the room (HMI Source-4 for daytime scenes and a tungsten one for night interiors). I also used Kinoflos and Woodylights inside there.

 

I would have liked to use more available daylight inside the cabin but being deep in the woods, there was hardly any available light to shoot by once you stepped inside.

 

The night interiors were interesting because there was no electricity in the cabin, story-wise, so either the room was moonlit or it was lit by the fireplace and kerosene lanterns. Most scenes at night in there were shot at 1250 ASA with the camera set to 3700K, at around an f/2.0-2.8 split on the Master Primes in order to get as much exposure from the real fire and kerosene lanterns as I could, then augmented with some tungsten lamps with Full Orange gel on them, knocked way down. Most everything was on some sort of flicker gag, either by using a flicker box (which I wasn’t completely satisfied with) or done manually with electrics playing with dimmer knobs (looked more organic to me, but was more manpower-intensive.) One of my favorite tricks was to bounce an orange-gelled Source-4 Leko into a white card and just have an electrician wiggle (or waggle) a finger or two randomly in front of the lens of the Leko.

 

Based on something I read by Roger Deakins about the fireplace scene in “The Big Lebowski”, I had the electrics make a three-bulb fixture that could be placed inside the real fireplace while it was burning. It was something Steven Poster had also once mentioned to me years ago, that quartz bulbs burn hotter than a real fire, so they won’t melt inside a fireplace (as long as the wiring is protected) – I just had to dim the bulbs way down to warm them up. But I didn’t use this device too often because the fireplace wasn’t large or deep enough to hide it from camera, so most of the time, I augmented the fire from just off-camera near the fireplace, often bouncing off of white or silver cards right along the edges of the fireplace.

 

In general, I went for a more extreme difference between the color of the fire and the moonlight – uncorrected HMI for the moonlight and Full Orange to Full + Half Orange for the fire. Normally this would be too extreme for my tastes, but with the level of desaturation I plan on doing, I needed to go this extreme to maintain some difference in color effect.

(cont.)

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Week 3 cont.

 

As for night exteriors around the cabin… the challenge here was the fact that we were in such remote and rough terrain that there would be no lifts or condors possible to get any moonlight source high above the frame. And I didn’t want to deal with lighting balloons when surrounded by trees and unpredictable wind, I’ve had them get blown into tree branches and get punctured one too many times on shows. I had this idea based on a number of things, my use of string lights for outdoor dance halls and recently the tire depot scene, and Kubrick’s use of ceilings of light bulbs for the African desert set in “2001”, not to mention the submarine pen in “The Spy Who Loved Me”, which was lit with Kubrick’s help by the request of Ken Adams (presumably the DP was stumped when presented with this floor-to-ceiling aluminum set – Kubrick’s solution was to install thousands on light bulbs in the ceiling.) Anyway, my idea was to take a 20’x20’ frame and cover it with a grid of string lights, but instead of 60w clear bulbs, I’d use small daylight compact flos. Then I’d use the tall redwoods to mount some sort of block & tackle system and haul the frame up in the air and get this overhead soft toplight for the moonlight effect. It was the only thing I could think of.

 

Anyway, on the first day of shooting in there, the property owner nixed us using a professional tree-climber and rigging something to the redwoods. So now I had no choice but to point to the rugged cliff-like hills surrounding the cabin and ask if somehow the electrics could scale them safely, hauling some big HMI’s and cable up there, not to mention, find some clear shot through the big trees of hitting the cabin area. Luckily, my electric crew was game and managed to pull it off, though it left those bigger lights up the hillside for the rest of the week rather than have me take them up and down each day. By the last day there, I was worried about the angle of the moonlight, and thus the camera, favoring the same direction on too many scenes, so I asked the electrics if they could take it all down… and climb the rough slopes of the opposite side of the canyon and do it all over again. Again, they pulled it off, which was great because I had no other way of lighting wide shots of the cabin in moonlight. On the first hill, they got a 6K and 4K HMI up there; the second time, it was a 4K and some 1.2K’s with medium lenses. I filled with some daylight Kinos around the property.

 

Adding some smoke into the air always increased the exposure dramatically, which was good because I was shooting so much at 1250 ASA or 1600 ASA out there. In post, I may have to darken the areas of the frame where the HMI light is too close to the smoke, making it too hot. For some shots, I used a ND.60 grad filter on the camera to darken the part of the frame closest to the HMI’s on the hilltop.

 

This brings up another issue, which is shooting dark scenes at high ASA ratings. Early on, I got fooled a bit by the fact that in low light, the LCD monitors on set tend to glow in the dark and make the image look brighter, particularly the shadows, which get lifted, giving you the false notion that you have less contrast than you really have. Combine this with the fact that even if you are rating the camera faster, the sensor isn’t actually any more sensitive. What this means practically is that you have to be honest about your underexposures, and you have to be more conservative with your exposures the faster you rate the camera. In other words, if you want everything to look two stops underexposed for a dim effect and you are at 1600 ASA, things may be fine but what if you accidentally exposed everything two and a half stops and end up lifting it back up by a half-stop in post? Then you didn’t really shoot at 1600 ASA, you were defacto shooting at higher than 2000 ASA. It’s similar to the issue of pushing film stock, the more you do it, the more accurately you have to expose, especially for your shadows, because you have less information down there to work with in post. For example, I set the cameras to 1250 ASA at f/2.0-2.8 split for one shot at night and once the smoke rolled in, the scene now looked a bit bright so I was about to ask the assistants to close-down by a one-third stop when instead I asked them to lower the ASA to 1000 instead of 1250. Which had the same effect of darkening the image on the monitor a tiny bit more but without actually underexposing the sensor more. This is what I mean about understanding exposure. It probably means more to me than to some other DP’s because in general I prefer low-key images and thus tend to light and expose on the moodier side, so I have to be honest with myself about what is going on with the sensor or the film stock.

 

As the week went on, it struck me that we were spending 25% of our total shoot at this cabin, which shows you just how much of the dramatic action takes place around it. In comparison, only four days of the entire schedule would be along the coastline, and only two of those four on the beaches of Big Sur. It just seemed strange for an entire week after we left San Francisco to drive along this amazing coastline down Highway One, only to turn down a dirt road and travel for another half-hour into the canyon to actually shoot something.

 

Once we arrived in Big Sur, we had a B-camera crew with us the entire time. My original plan was to break them off maybe 50% of the time to get footage (nature, weather, etc.) but due to the volume we had to shoot around the cabin, we needed a B-camera there most of the time, and even if there was a shot here and there with just one camera, I couldn’t afford to lose the B-camera crew down some nature trail for an hour or so. Towards the end of the third week, I finally had some time to send them away for a few shots.

 

Due again to the large amount of work to get done in a short period of time, the director and I had to improvise a lot, trying to find time-saving solutions to shooting scenes that were also creative rather than compromised. One example is a scene where Jack wakes up hungover one morning and sees his guests making breakfast, with some dialogue. We lost the daylight and this cabin had no curtains on the windows, so whiting-out the view to make it seem like daytime was going to look a bit surreal. We decided to embrace that look, making the room look distorted from Jack’s POV, with really hot windows. We also shot those angles on the Lensbaby to further enhance the feeling of the POV of a person with a massive hangover. So the whole scene was basically shot with one POV shot and a reverse angle on Jack. When it came to large group scenes, when Jack ends up having several visitors, we decided to shoot them in a looser, more verite manner, two cameras on long lenses, or the long end of the zoom, and just let the actors move about freely and grab whatever action we wanted on the fly. It fit the nature of the scenes while also saving us some time, though it did require that I light the shots more broadly and evenly. Though I’m not a big fan of zoom lenses, there was no way of making this schedule without putting the 24-290mm on B-camera half the time and letting them pick-off shots. For the interiors, it meant lighting to an f/2.8. For some shots, I replaced the kerosene lantern with an electrified one that allowed me to get the f-stop up in the room while making it look like a group of people were all lit by the one lantern (which many of them were.)

 

The terrain was so uneven, and the cabin so small, that we didn’t set-up a lot of dolly moves, just a few key ones now and then. I wish I had time to build more dolly track but I would have been killing the crew not to mention losing the light. I did get a 6’ slider for the Big Sur portion of the shoot, which allowed me to quickly set-up very short moves in difficult locations. The last, or maybe near last, shot of the movie is a slow dolly-in on Jack’s face in front of the cabin, reminiscent of a shot in a Sergio Leone movie or the end of “Godfather Part II”. It was always important that we shoot key moments like that properly and not rush them, and generally we did.

 

Week Three ended with a lot of day and night scenes with Jack’s visiting friends around the cabin.

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Some pictures, keep in mind that these Epic frames were manipulated by me in Photoshop, reduced, and compressed, etc. so don't draw any conclusions about the image quality, which by the way is amazing if you could see the original 5K files.

 

The cabin and surrounding area:

 

(Note the hanging pine branch in the f.g. and compare it to the night shot later.)

bigsur27.jpg

 

bigsur28.jpg

 

bigsur32.jpg

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Jack at the fireplace, with the quartz bulbs hidden in the back corner of the fireplace:

bigsur29.jpg

 

Cabin at night, lit with the HMI's lugged up the hillside -- because I couldn't get them high enough in frame, I took a cut tree branch and hung it on a c-stand in the foreground of the lens to hide the light fixture's hot spot from camera:

bigsur30.jpg

 

An example of putting the 5K tungsten PAR in the actual shot outside of the window to simulate the sun hitting the lens:

bigsur31.jpg

 

Using the 5K tungsten PAR as a warm backlight in a daylight scene:

bigsur35.jpg

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An example of shooting a POV using the Lensbaby, shot at night but lit for day:

bigsur33.jpg

 

The reverse angle on Jack, also shot at night (we also shot a close-up to tie into the POV):

bigsur34.jpg

 

Night interior dinner scene, the table lit with a light bulb hidden behind a real kerosene lamp, soft backlight from a Woodylight, and some ambience from bouncing a Source-4 off of the ceiling:

bigsur36.jpg

 

I would have normally played the room darker except for the table... however, two of the four people in the shot start the scene against the background wall before sitting down, with dialogue back there, so I had have light on the background.

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David, you're right about using that 5k PAR to simulate the sun, that shot coming straight in the window with all the of the flare is beautiful. What were you using for fill? This looks great, I'm looking forward to seeing the whole film.

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David, you're right about using that 5k PAR to simulate the sun, that shot coming straight in the window with all the of the flare is beautiful. What were you using for fill? This looks great, I'm looking forward to seeing the whole film.

 

That was a handheld shot that sees almost 270 degrees in the room as Jack packs to leave the cabin in a rush, so it was hard to light, hence part of my decision to have the light creating the sun inside the frame, plus I felt that the flare as he crossed back & forth across the window would add to the tension. I had some soft HMI light through two windows but most of the fill came from bouncing a HMI Source-4 off of the ceiling.

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One thing to keep in mind is that I'm doing this mild diffusion effect in Photoshop to the frames using a Gaussian Blur overlay method, but one result is that contrast is doubled (though I try to pull it back), plus I am already working with frames that have passed through a LUT for monitor contrast, so the RAW-to-Log frames have a lot more highlight and shadow detail.

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Sheesh, this looks really fantastic. With a twenty day schedule, what’s been your average page count and number of set-ups per day?

 

Thanks

 

I guess we have to average 5 to 6 pages a day, though this shoot was unique in that so many scenes were montages with voiceover, so it changed the nature of how many set-ups we needed, it was sort of piecemeal at times, bits shot over weeks.

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Final Week

 

The big news was that we added a day to the schedule, making it now 21 days, and making our last week six days long. The reason was the wrap from Bixby Canyon. The original plan was that we had a day of scenes on the highway as Jack hitchhikes and cars drive by, etc. so the hope was that half of the crew could get the gear out of the cabin end of the canyon while the rest of the crew did the highway shots. But considering it took three days to get the gear into the canyon in a prep week, the idea that it could be taken out in a half-day of working light (since we were starting at midday every day due to night scenes on the schedule) with a partial crew while somehow getting enough gear out at call time to shoot the highway scenes… well, it was clear that this was too ambitious. So our line producer got permission to create a wrap-out day in the canyon and free the director and I to get more shots of Jack hiking through the woods with a small run & gun crew.

 

So Monday saw us still shooting cabin scenes, including the final shots of the movie, ending with lighting the cabin exterior again for moonlight, but now with the HMI’s on a different hilltop so I could get new angles. We had to drop one scene involving Jack running into another character at a creek in the moonlight because we didn’t have time to move to a creek nor was there available power to light the shot if we got too far from the generator by the cabin, and I didn’t feel confident that I could light a river with a putt-putt generator and a 1.2K HMI.

 

Tuesday was our wrap-out day from the canyon. Our plan for this splinter unit was first to have the B-camera crew work on the wrap-out to the camera truck back at the canyon entrance, and once they were done, join our little unit running around the woods. By this point, the whole area in our minds was divided by the eight river crossings that we had to make every day to get to the canyon. We had already spent some time shooting the creeks closest to the canyon so we started in the middle at crossing #5 and planned on working our way back to base camp at crossing #1, an area that had a wonderful grove of redwoods with nothing growing underneath, which was very moody.

 

The first problem was that our little crew got a bit big because we needed a 4-wheel gator for the camera gear and a pick-up truck for small grip items, plus a Jeep for the director, me, the AD, and actor, and another Jeep for the wardrobe and hair people (because of all the costume changes), plus room for the camera crew, two grips, and the props person doing all the smoke effects. Compound this with a one-way narrow road to and from the cabin to base camp that the rest of the crew had to use to get the gear out, meaning our unit had to find the few spots we could pull off the trail for vehicles, not to mention half the camera angles required putting the camera on the road. It was a tight squeeze. At some point, as it became clear that even this one wrap-out day was not enough to get gear that took three-days to get into the canyon back out of the canyon, we got asked to cut out small crew and vehicles in half so that they could contribute to the wrap-out. Now since the next shooting day involved all those highway hitchhiking scenes, I wasn’t too worried about the wrap-out because it could be finished the next day. But we scaled down our small crew even further, basically just taking the 6’ slider around with us, getting rid of the rest of the grip gear and putting the camera gear into the pick-up truck, freeing a gator for the wrap-out. By the end of the day we reached the grove of redwoods and got some nice shots by smoking up the woods and having shards of late afternoon light stream through. Meanwhile, I sent the B-camera crew to explore the stream that led to the beach underneath Bixby Canyon Bridge, a place I hadn’t been too since early prep more than a month ago. Turns out the river was more swollen and of course the woods had exploded with greenery with the coming of spring, so they had quite an adventure crossing rivers on fallen logs with the camera trying to reach the beach.

 

Wednesday involved the highway scenes. Now that we were out of the shade of the woods, so to speak, I started realizing how frustrating it was to have an 11AM call time every day because it meant that the first scenes were always shot under overhead noon sunlight, which was quite harsh. But there was no clever way around this because we had so many short scenes to shoot while the sun was up, and it was too windy to think about putting 20’x20’ silks over the actors. So I had to live with the hard sun as part of the look. We shot Jack hitchhiking along the Highway One, the main challenge here was traffic control (luckily the CHP was quite excellent at this, and very cooperative) and getting our period cars to keep running.

 

I had to keep the 24-290mm zoom on B-camera a lot of the time on this later part of the week because we had to work so fast shooting uncontrollable elements; plus with all the wind and blowing sand, it seemed safer to minimize the lens changes on at least one camera. And it’s the only lens I had that went longer than my 135mm Ultra Prime. But it’s not my favorite lens, being 24lbs or so… when doing one long-lensed shot of Jack on the highway, the focus was always too deep on the approaching cars when I wanted it on Jack in the f.g. – turned out that the front bracket supporting the zoom wasn’t tight enough and the lens was “sagging” in the mount. Once we lifted the lens and tightened the bracket, all our focus marks were now off but my focus-puller nailed the 250mm shot in one take once he got new marks. This is not the first time I’ve had this problem with the weight of the lens. And shooting into bright skies or glaring oceans just shows how much lower in contrast this lens is compared to the Master Primes (but then, what lenses aren’t lower in contrast than the Master Primes?)

(cont.)

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When we scouted the highway for these shots, it was still closed immediately north of Bixby Bridge, but now that we were shooting these scenes, it struck me that we should also shoot some shots north of the bridge since in actuality, Jack was hiking to Monterey. So by the afternoon we ran north somewhere near Rocky Point Restaurant and did some shots where Jack stops along a fence to take off his shoes after hiking all day. The dramatic view was looking south so I found a camera angle where the Rocky Point Bridge was obscured by a hill, otherwise it would have looked like Jack had only hiked two miles before giving up, the bridge being such a distinctive landmark. Things were working out in terms of shooting the sequence in order so that the last shots would be at the end of the day, since we had already shot Jack being dropped off at a bus depot in Monterey while we were in San Francisco, at night. So I wanted a near sunset shot to create a transition. However, we needed to get back to Bixby Bridge to shoot a dusk-for-night shot of Jack being dropped off by a cab at the bridge for the first time. So the final day shot, where Jack gets picked up by a truck, had to be in the vicinity in order to not miss magic hour on the bridge. Again, we got lucky, there was only a small spot south of Bixby Bridge between where our equipment trucks ended and the temporary traffic lights began for the one-lane section that passed through the former landslide area between the Bixby Canyon and Rocky Point Bridges. I literally had something on each side of the wide shot to frame out but luckily the view looked right out on the ocean with the late afternoon sun glowing on the water. I tossed in a B-camera angle on the 135mm prime that turned out pretty well too, getting a nice silhouette shot of the truck and Jack climbing in.

 

The day ended with this dusk shot of the cab pulling up to the bridge and dropping Jack off.

 

Originally we were supposed to end the day getting a shot of Jack’s friends dining at Nepenthe restaurant in Big Sur, but even though this was a night scene, I felt we had to shoot it at magic hour or else there was no view from the restaurant porch, the most dramatic feature about the restaurant. At night, the background would be pitch-black. But I also needed to shoot the cab drop-off at Bixby Bridge at magic hour because there were too many restrictions with lighting the highway at night due to safety, plus it was often too windy there to raise a condor up anyway. So the Nepenthe scene was moved to Thursday when we planned on being south at Anderson Canyon.

 

So Thursday saw us the farthest south of Big Sur that we would ever shoot, just north of Eselen Hot Springs. Actually the scene we were shooting at a private home on the cliffs above Anderson Canyon were supposed to take place at Eselen, back when it was Slate’s Hot Springs. But the actual place had been too renovated over time to match how it looked in the 1950’s. As we passed Nepenthe on the way to Anderson, I began to get worried about the distance between them, having to race back up the highway at sunset for a half-hour drive at least to get a magic hour shot at the restaurant with nine cast members. It seemed a bit risky, especially with company lunch falling just an hour before sunset, and there is always time lost after lunch getting everyone back to speed. We decided that the cast should be treated to a dinner at Nepenthe at sunset so that they would already be there when the crew arrived. I sent some guys in advance to prelight the shot. Since the restaurant was open for business, I couldn’t be disruptive, plus I would have a generator there, so I went with hanging three Chinese lanterns off of trick line hung between two combo stands as the general lighting mixed with magic hour. I added a bit of edge lighting from a Woodylight in each corner and some weak fill from bouncing blue-gelled Source-4’s off of cards above the camera, so that as the twilight faded I could maintain some weak blue fill on the actors for a few more minutes.

 

So we shot some daytime canyon scenes, the hot springs scene, raced north the Nepenthe for the restaurant scene, then had to go back to Anderson Canyon because we owed this night creek scene where Jack runs into one of his friends in the middle of woods while the friend was fishing for dinner. The river running down the canyon was quite dramatic, bouncing over boulders between redwoods, but it was very rough terrain to do a night scene. I managed to light the canyon again by having the electrics climb the steep sides with cables and HMI’s in the daytime, but after we got the wide shot at night, my two crew members were injured when they slipped off of a wet boulder and fell into the river, sending them to the hospital accompanied by the set medic. We decided to shut down since it was only going to get worse, plus now we had no medic on set. But we never got the rest of the coverage of the scene, only the wide shot. We left most of the gear behind in the dark, feeling it was safer to send some crew people back in daylight to wrap it.

 

So now we had reached the final two days of the shoot, both at Rocky Point Bridge and the canyon and beach underneath, a place standing in for Bixby Bridge, the next bridge immediately due south just around the bend. The reason was the simple fact that there was hardly any workable beach under the Bixby Bridge, and we could get vehicles a bit closer to the beach under Rocky Point. But also, creatively, there was a lovely meadow below Rocky Point Bridge, creating some dramatic views with the bridge above and the ocean beyond, whereas there were too many trees and bushes under Bixby Bridge to see it from any distance as you walked down the trail to the beach. Friday was the last day with the full cast, who walk to the ocean and party into nightfall, when they build a big bonfire. We also had two other dramatic scenes, one involving a chat between Jack Kerouac and Carolyn Cassady as Neal Cassady plays on the beach with his kids, the other involving Jack watching Neal’s mistress Billie wander out into the dangerous waves. Then we ended with the bonfire party.

 

The two weeks of unending sunshine were finally relieved on Friday by an incoming cold weather front, bringing some moody skies finally, but also an arctic wind blasting the beach. The sky was particularly great for the scene where Jack watches Billie along the shore since his voiceover at this moment is full of dark thoughts. At night, the only problem was that the strong wind turned the bonfire more into a blowtorch, burning so fast and hot that after I got the wide and medium shots with the cameras, we had to pick them up while rolling to get closer angles before the fire was gone, and then do it again, a mad scramble while the fire was raging. So it was a bit of craziness that was over very quickly. Besides the fire, I had an 18K HMI on the cliff above for a backlight; I was worried that it would be too dim at that distance but in truth I ended up dropping two doubles in it just to make it dim enough for moonlight relative to firelight. I probably overexposed the fire more than I should have but with unscripted action, I had no idea how close or far the actors would get from the flames, and I didn’t want them underexposed if they wandered away from the fire. As we grabbed the cameras and went in tighter, I stopped down more and more, probably ending up at an f/4 at 1000 ASA or so.

(cont.)

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The last day involved just our lead actor at the beach; there were a lot of pieces to get and I had to shoot one scene day-for-night in full sun just because he describes everything around him – the waves, the cliffs, a house on the hill, etc. – and there would have been no way to see any of that at night, so it seemed like a good scene for day-for-night, though he’s also supposed to be writing this stuff down, which implies he wouldn’t be doing this by moonlight. It was sort of a conundrum to me because if I had shot him at night, he would have been surrounded by pitch-black backgrounds – at least with the day-for-night, I could show the bridge looming over his head.

 

We also had to shoot a lot of pieces of his wandering down trails for a number of scenes, some with a lantern, some without. We only had time to light two areas at night, a section of woods and a trailing leading to a gate, we never had time to light a meadow as well, which we needed (when he first arrives, he leaves the cab at the top of the cliff on the bridge, walks a steep trail in the fog, reaches a gate, goes under the gate, finds a meadow, and falls asleep. And it all had to be heavily fogged. As it was, we only got some light artificial fog on the bridge for the cab scene, so some post augmentation may be needed. We managed to fog the woods though.) I had the electrics make a prop lantern with a brighter bulb, powered by a cordless drill’s battery pack hidden inside his rucksack. We ended our day work with the scenes that take place at dawn when he wakes up in the meadow, wanders to the beach and meets a burro, and then hikes to his cabin. We shot it in late afternoon because our call time was 11AM again and I didn’t want to shoot a dawn scene at noon. But by late afternoon, it had totally clouded up so I played it as more of a pre-dawn light. The last few shots were made at late magic hour, shot wide-open, and I had to light his close-up on the ground at night, by bouncing an HMI into a 12’x12’ day blue bounce over his head. I tried a trick I heard about from the Jack Cardiff autobiography; when asked by Michael Powell for a transition shot to the beach in the morning after the opening sequence of “Matter of Life and Death”, Cardiff leaned over and breathed on the lens, so the first shot in daylight starts fogged and clears up. I did that for Jack’s close-up as he wakes up in the morning, had my 2nd AC Alex Worster lean over and breathe on the lens just as we called action. To make sure that the fogging cleared up completely and quickly enough, Alex used his canned air to clear the lens. I would have preferred to enhance the effect with a bit of orange backlight flaring the lens – and had a tungsten PARCAN standing by – but with all the wide shots having been done in heavy overcast, I decided to let the close-up also just be soft-lit or else it might have seemed odd to have orange sunlight on his face in his close-up only for him to stand-up into an overcast wide shot.

 

The night ended with the trail in the woods that I lit with the 18K HMI on the far hilltop above the canyon, plus a few Kinos for fill. For a handheld close-up, I also had my little Micro Litepanel on the camera for a weak amount of fill. We ended the night with a few shots done with my lensbaby on the camera, for a nightmare vision that Jack has while wandering in the woods.

 

One thing I want to mention is the B-camera and splinter unit work. While in San Francisco, we only had one afternoon where we split up the crews and I had my A-cam operator Theo Pingarelli shoot that stuff. We didn’t have a B-camera crew on the whole time anyway in San Francisco, but we did in Big Sur. My other operator from L.A., Chris Squires, came down to operate B-cam; he can also shoot, as can Theo, and Chris was able to go out a couple of times while we were at the cabin and get a few nature shots, but then Chris got a call to shoot a feature and had to leave. He asked his friend Josh Bleibtreu to replace him – Josh is an experienced 2nd Unit DP, having done many big projects like the “Pirates” and “X-Men” movies and “Apollo 13”, so I was lucky to have him on B-camera for this little movie. He and his wife also grew up in the Big Sur area and he had a home up there, so he was happy to be a part of a production about Big Sur. He’s also one of the nicest persons in the world, no attitude, very positive and very creative. I brought up someone I’ve known for years to become the A-cam 1st AC, Dave Mun; he did a great job until he got knocked off that boulder in the middle of the night and went to the hospital; our 2nd AC Alex Worster replaced him for a day and did a great job. My main operator, Theo, was my 1st AC over a decade ago on a number of low-budget movies before he moved up to operating; he’s also an old-fashioned stop-motion animator, working with a Mitchell in his basement with a rear-projection set-up. We share an obsession with “Space: 1999” though he doesn’t get my interest in “Star Trek.” I was also happy to have my longtime Key Grip Brad Heiner and Gaffer Keith Morgan with me, along with some familiar faces in their crews. All the San Francisco crew people were fantastic to work with, in particular 1st AC Paul Marbury and 2nd AC Annie Lee, plus the various B-camera people that came onto the show to help out. I also feel very lucky to have hired Dane Brehm to be our DIT; I needed someone with his experience dealing with a new camera like the Epic, and for figuring out our dailies workflow and data back-up & storage issues.

 

I want to express my gratitude for all the support I got from Jim Jannard and his team at Red, and Tonaci Tran for renting his Epic to us; it worked like a dream. I also want to thank all the producers for making this happen, but particularly those on the front lines with us every day: Sean O’Grady and line producer Mark Mathis. And also the people at LightIron for coming onboard, and the ColorFront people as well. And just as I am writing this, Tom Lowe has just arrived in Big Sur, shooting some stuff for his own movie but also something for ours, which is very exciting.

 

Finally, if this little movie turns out well at all, it would have to be due to director Michael Polish, for his visual imagination, good taste, and hard work at pushing all of us to work and create at a higher level. I think people will be impressed with what we did in 21 days with a tiny budget. Sure, I have some misgivings about what we did and didn’t get in our short time frame, but then, I always feel that way about everything I shoot, but I’m very excited about the project as a whole because I think it is a very cinematic, visual approach to an important novel that was very hard to adapt.

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Here is a shot from the last night shooting at the cabin, when I put the HMI's on the other hillside of the canyon to light the cabin from the opposite direction. The lights were high enough that I didn't need a tree branch to hide them but when the smoke drifted up to the top left corner of the frame, it got a bit hot, so I put an ND.60 grad in the camera to darken that corner of the frame:

 

bigsur38.jpg

 

There was a 4K HMI on the hill with two 1.2K HMI's, and on the opposite side, an Image-80 Kino raked the side of the cabin, besides the fire there was a 2'-2-bank Kino on the ground in front of the fireplace with orange gel on it. Inside the cabin were some orange-gelled 1K's on flicker boxes.

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From our day shooting along Highway One:

bigsur45.jpg

 

bigsur46.jpg

 

Getting near the end of the day, now north of Rocky Point Bridge, which I hid by picking a camera position where the bridge was blocked by a hill, otherwise it would have looked like he only walked two miles total...

bigsur47.jpg

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