Akeelah and the Bee

[David Mullen ASC]

We finally shot the climatic National Spelling Bee this week.

 

To get an idea of the amount of work we did, I think on Monday we did 75 set-ups and on Tuesday we did 83 set-ups in under 11 hours! Of course, half of this was with two cameras running.

 

On the first day shooting at the Hollywood Palladium, we had something like 150 kid extras and 800 adult extras, plus nearly 20 speaking actors. I think we averaged shooting 12,000 - 15,000' of 35mm stock a day but I'm not sure.

 

This sequence was all shot on 5218 (Vision-2 500T) rated at 320 ASA. We had a Mini-Lennie arm crane with our Panahead on it using Hot Gears to remote-operate it, which was a low-cost way around getting a remote head. Worked OK if a little limiting plus a little wobbly.

 

The filtration was a Tiffen GlimmerGlass #1 on wider shots and a #2 on close-ups.

 

After the more evenly lit low-con approach to the last spelling bee scene at the Venice High auditorium (lit with lighting balloons), which is a large white space, I tried to create a different look here. I wanted the feeling of a media event with lots of lights flaring the lens and lots of camera flashes going off.

 

The sides of this venue were dark and unlit, but it had a second floor balconey level on opposite sides on which I put 9-lights and 12-lights pointed into the lens, on dimmers with ND.60 gel frames to darken them when necessary to control the flaring.

 

In the back of the theater behind the audience's heads, I put two 24-light Dinos right in the shot, pointing into the lens, with an ND.60 gel on a frame, plus the whole thing on a dimmer to boot. Most of the time, it was set to a 30% level, still burning out on film but creating some warmth. I also had varios Tweenies pointed into the lens near some fake news cameras on a platform.

 

The stage itself was lit with Parcans -- I think throughout the venue we had 100 Parcans, some with Narrow Spot globes ("firestarters"). The person standing at the mic was lit with a single spot PAR and backlit with two spot PAR's. The 150 spellers in chairs on the stage were lit with two Spacelights (skirted) hidden behind a curtain in the ceiling. There were also a few 2K Zip lights here and there.

 

There were also 4 Data Strobes firing randomly through most of the shots to simulate off-camera flashes from press photographers.

 

Whenever I looked out into the audience, they were backlit with the Dinos and 9-lights and 12-lights. A few overhead Parcans added some front fill, but in the wide shots I kept the audience's faces about 1 1/2 to 2 stops under key. The judges and pronouncers in the foreground of the audience, closest to the stage, were backlit with the Parcans and lit from below by Kino tubes laid on their work tables.

 

Close shots of the main actors sitting in the audience were heavily backlit when possible (I added a 10K on full spot on their heads) and soft sidelit, in some shots with a 10K with a super large Chimera on it, but most of the time, with some 6-lights going through an 8'x8' frame of Light Grid Cloth, double-diffused (i.e. 4'x4' frames of Light Grid Cloth between the lights and the 8'x8' frame of Light Grid Cloth.)

 

I found having two 10K with large Chimeras, plus a 5K and a 2K stage light with large Chimeras on them, to be a great time-saver because I could just wheel them around the venue to light various areas quickly.

 

Because I was getting bored by the hard frontal keylight look when people stood at the mic facing the Parcans (which is how I lit the other spelling bees except for the first one in the daylight gymnasium) on this sequence, I often turned off the Parcan on the mic and wheeled in a 10K with the Chimera to replace it as the key. I sometimes added a third spot PAR to the backlight to get more halation when using the GlimmerGlass diffusion.

 

Since we started shooting on Saturday, I didn't see any dailies until Tuesday night after shooting for four days. My main worry was the amount of lens flares, which is rather unpredictable with Primo anamorphics, which are very sharp and contrasty but also pick up that blue line very easily (I almost suspect that the more you coat the front element with anti-reflection coatings to reduce veiling, you increase the strength of the blue line flare.) You can't really see how strong the blue line will be when looking through the viewfinder; perhaps the blue sensitivity of the film makes it more obvious than to your eye. I sort of set everything by eye in terms of how much to dim down or ND the multi-bank lights pointed into the lens. In other words, I was deliberately going for a flarey image but I didn't want to go so far as to obscure the actors' faces at important moments.

 

Finally looking at dailies, I think I got the balance right although some shots are pretty over the top in terms of anamorphic flares, looking like a scene from the climax of "Close Encounters." But I was careful to flag or minimize the flaring in the close-ups so there is always coverage without lens flares to use. And the shots looking at the stage generally don't have any lights pointing back into the lens. I think there is one shot where maybe I went too far although it looks cool: I boomed down from a wide-angle shot of people clapping to the face of someone not clapping in the foreground. This meant I ended up in a close-up shot with a wide lens (50mm anamorphic) up close and at a low-angle with the Dinos framed right behind his head, causing all sorts of flares and some filter kicks.

 

Since I never knew when I'd have to go the the Primo anamorphic zoom (for anything over 180mm plus any zooming shots), I lit the whole scene for shooting at an f/5.6, which probably made my two focus-pullers happy.

 

I did one deep focus shot of someone at the mic with someone watching in the background by tilting the 90mm anamorphic slant-focus lens and lighting it to an f/8. It worked so much better than the few times I used a split-diopter filter at the other spelling bees -- there are no vertical lines on a stage of chairs to hide splits, plus I found at at f/5.6, the edge of the split-diopter filter tended to come into focus. So for one of those earlier shots, I put some ND filters in to shoot at f/2.8, which hid the filter edge better but made the focus shift more extreme, making the diopter shot more obvious again. So I also did versions with no split-diopters and just focus-racks.

 

However, in this one shot, the slant-focus lens and the small aperture was a much better way to create a deep focus shot.

 

Even though the days were not extra long, I'm exhausted at the end of this week from all that pressure to shoot so many set-ups per day. I remember one 360 degree dolly shot that started on an ECU of our lead actress' eyes, zoomed back to a medium shot while dollying 360 degrees to see the whole venue and all 1000 extras -- and being told I had five minutes to set-up the shot before the young actress left for the day. I pulled it off -- or to be more accurate, my crew pulled it off for me -- but it was not pleasant. I got two takes that were acceptable and then she was gone for the day. On another day, I had fifteen minutes to set-up two shots of another kid in two separate locations, one in an upstairs room and another in a hallway, before that kid was pulled for the day. The crews lit both sets simultaneously and I left B-camera to shoot the kid upstairs while I raced downstairs to finish setting up the shot with A-camera, and then they ran the kid downstairs to my camera and shot the second shot. And that was not an easy one: I had to pan 180 degrees with the kid coming down a hallway landing in a close-up of Lawrence Fishburn, and to get the shot in the narrow hallway, I had to dolly back into a doorway while panning. Two takes and the kid was gone, no third take allowed. So in fifteen minutes I lit and shot two shots on two floors of the Hollywood Palladium.

 

Not to complain, but set teachers and labor people in California are hyper-restrictive and by-the-book when it comes to minors. They will pull the kid out of the middle of shooting Take One if their working time is used up, so when I'm told I have ten minutes left with the kid and I have to get the another shot done, I know I don't actually have 12 minutes. Plus I have to account for schooling, which has to be in 20-minute blocks of time minimum. So if I've also waited many times for the kid to return to set after I've finished setting up. Hurry up and wait is a common thing on a movie set, but on this show, it's insane how fast I have to work and then how often I wait.

 

I couldn't have done all of this without the skills of my Gaffer Rich Paisley and my Key Grip Brad Heiner (and their crews), who did a lot of behind-the-scenes work, pre-rigging, ordering special gear, etc. so that it all came together. Also my two 1st AC's for that week, Dave Mun and Keith Eisberg, did excellent work, as well as the second AC's and the two camera operators, John Radzick and Chris Mosio.

[Jayson Crothers]

I can't imagine how you're pulling off 83 set-ups involving kids and that many actors in those types of hours.

 

Kudos to you David!

 

How many more weeks of shooting do you have?

[Felipe Perez-Burchard]

When can we see pics?

 

:)

 

Congratulations to you and your crew, that's what I call efficiency and good planning.

 

-felipe.

[David Mullen ASC]

We have two weeks left to go.

 

I don't have any good photos that show how the lighting looked on film, but here's some. The first shows the storyboards I drew for the final bee, based on the director's notes; they were xeroxed and put on a big board (the director storyboarded the rest of the movie). We clumped them by shooting day with a black line separating them, crossing out them as we shot them and moving them to other days when we missed them.

 

 

Here's Brad the Key Grip with our dolly grip Keeper with our mini-Lennie. Stacy the boom op is under the crane and you can see B-camera set-up beyond the crane. Basically we were shooting two angles of audience reactions, one from the crane and one on a long lens.

 

 

Here's a wider shot of the venue as we are setting up, looking from the stage towards the audience area. You can see the ND gelled Dino 24-light in the background and a 12-light on the second floor balconey.

 

 

This show us shooting that 360 degree dolly move that zooms out from an ECU, set-up and shot in five minutes. Some of the lights had to dim on cue so as to not have a camera shadow.

 

 

Here's a sliver of an actual frame of dailies (I hope cropping it so severely will keep me from getting in trouble for posting them!) just showing the lights flaring the anamorphic lenses at the top of frame, one of the more dramatic levels of flaring (most of the shots it's minimal.) This is an angle looking from the stage at the judge and pronouncer in the f.g. with the audience in the b.g. GlimmerGlass #1 diffusion on the lens (which I believe is a 75mm Primo anamorphic in this case.)

 

[Jonathan Spear]

Nice work David. The anamorphic lens flares look perfect -- they make the spelling bee look like more like an intense boxing match. IMO it is a wonderful finale and the flares and bright lights really show what those kids must feel like on stage.

 

Very, very cool.

 

B)

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I notice some horizontal striation in the right-hand flare. Is it seeing multiple elements of the light (Is that a Dino or something) which are hidden by the glow, or is that some strange characteristic of the lens?

 

Phil

[Guest fstop]

Oh no- look at all those white t-shirts!!! :o That must have been a nightmare, given the contrasty lighting design and afro-american principals combined! This looks stunning! WHAT an achievement! :)

 

David, was Northfolk your first experience with animorphic?

[Landon D. Parks]

David, if you don't mind, and if you can for that matter, what is the budget for this film?

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, the multiple lines are from the multiple bulbs in the 24-light Dino.

 

"Northfork" was my first feature in anamorphic. I shot two short films in anamorphic before that. I shot "Shadowboxer" in anamorphic last year so this is my third feature in anamorphic -- all three with Primos mixed with a few E-Series (135mm & 180mm) plus some C-Series (40mm & 60mm on this one, for Steadicam & handheld shots.)

 

The first short used the small Clairmont anamorphics -- this was actually a short film shot by Dave Klein that I just did pick-ups for. Then I shot the short film "Stuck" for Jamie Babbit using C-Series anamorphics.

 

I believe the movie is being made under the low-budget IA agreement for films in the 3 to 6 million dollar range but I don't have any hard figures.

[Guest fstop]

Excellent, David!

 

BTW- when are you going to shoot the sequence in which James Brown appears at the Bee singing "Livin' In America"? ;)

 

Edited March 11, 2005 by fstop

[Michael Nash]

Thanks for the diary and pics, David.

 

Say "Hi" to Brad and Stacy for me, I was just thinking about them the other day. Is Rick Young on the show too?

[Marty Hamrick]

Amazing stuff, David.I shoot in media events all the type like this.Political rallys,sporting events and such.The frames I've seen adds a very dreamlike quality to the hyper realism of a reality type event like this.Excellent work.

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, Rick Young is the Best Boy Grip. This is the fourth feature Brad and Rick have worked with me on -- they're top-notch. I feel I'm finally putting together a regular crew I really like in all departments.

[Guest jake richards]

Thanks for posting all the information David.

 

I don't understand all the references, but it helps to hear a pro talking about real projects.

 

Jake R.

[Guest]

David,

 

What is the final destination for this film?

 

Is this film funded by one of the Hollywood studios for theatrical release?

 

Is this an "indie" project being made on spec?

 

A made for TV movie?

 

Thanks

Richard

[Marty Hamrick]

Yes, Rick Young is the Best Boy Grip.  This is the fourth feature Brad and Rick have worked with me on -- they're top-notch.  I feel I'm finally putting together a regular crew I really like in all departments.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

David,

Do you generally work with the same crew on all of your films?Or do you customize your crew to the specifics of a given project?

 

Marty

[David Mullen ASC]

Because of some of the budget restrictions, sometimes I either can't bring my regular people to work on a project... or they don't want to work for those rates. It's the nature of low-budget filmmaking that you go through a lot of crews over the years. I asked Sean Peacock, who gaffed "Twin Falls Idaho" and "When Do We Eat?" to do this one but he's on a TV show or something, so I met Gaffer Rich Paisley through the line producer. He's a young guy but his last job was gaffing for Victor Kemper on "American Pie 4" and Victor was very complimentary about Rich's work.

 

I met Key Grip Brad Heiner through the line producer on "D.E.B.S.". It's not an unusual way to meet new crew members -- when the budget is tight, the line producer often has people they have worked with before who are willing to work for those rates.

 

Same with my First AC Theo Pingarelli -- I met him years ago on some straight to video feature because the UPM recommended him to me.

 

On my out-of-town shoots, I mostly have to hire locals because the company won't spend the money to bring in my regular crew. Most of the crew on "Northfork" were from Montana, except for the camera and sound department.

[Landon D. Parks]

Not that I'm trying to answer for David, but Richard, a simple IMDB search would tell you the following:

Production Companies

Spelling Bee Productions Inc. [us]

2929 Productions [us]

Cinema Gypsy Productions [us]

Lions Gate Films [ca]

Out of the Blue... Entertainment [us]

Reactor Films [us]

Distributors

Lions Gate Films Inc. [ca] (2005) (USA) (theatrical)

Lions Gate Films Inc. [ca] (2005) (worldwide) (theatrical)

 

So from the look of it, Lions Gate Films is the main player here, and probably the one who fully funded the film. I image it will have a Theatrical release, since IMDB list's Distributors as Lions Gate Films (Theatrical) and Lions Gate Film (Worldwide Theatrical).

Edited March 14, 2005 by Landon D. Parks

[David Mullen ASC]

It's intended for theatrical release -- if not, I wouldn't have pushed to shoot it in anamorphic 2.35! I think that's a format really designed for projection, not straight to home video.

[Matt Pacini]

I want to thank you David, for putting this info on the site.

It's a great help for us lowly bottom feeders out here!

 

When you use local crew, (like on twin Falls Idaho), what's your opinion of their level of expertise?

Have you had good luck so far, or do they generally lack experience, or have non-standard methods, etc.?

 

Matt Pacini

[David Mullen ASC]

"Twin Falls Idaho" was shot in Los Angeles.

 

I haven't done too many features out of town, but they are:

"The Clean and the Narrow" (Texas City, near Houston) & "Dot" (Austin)

"A Foreign Affair" / aka "2 Brothers & a Bride" (St. Petersburg, Russia & Casa Grande, Mexico)

"Infested" (Long Island, NY)

"Northfork" (Montana)

"Shadowboxer" (Philadelphia)

 

My experiences have been mixed but it's mostly a budget issue, not a local crew issue -- on the really low-budget films, it's hard to get experienced people. Some places like Montana have a certain amount of regular commercial work coming through, plus the occasional big feature, so you can find experienced people willing to work on small features between the commercials season.

[Mark Sasahara]

Thank you David, for all the great postings and pics! I'm amazed, informed and inspired.

 

The child labor people would have driven me crazy with frustration, your tongue must hurt from having to hold it so much.