90 Minutes in Heaven

[David Mullen ASC]

In general, I found that I was turning off most of the overhead hospital lights and letting things be lit by the windows and lower practical lamps. I've also been shooting at 500 ASA most of the time on the Alexa instead of 800 ASA, it just looks a bit cleaner that way and I haven't had a problem getting to a T/2.8 most of the time. In fact, in the hospital patient room, because of how much natural light can come in there, I've had to use ND filters sometimes.

 

I bumped up to 800 ASA for that night scene and have gone as far as 1000 ASA for a couple of little low-light things, some of them inserts that I've shot with my LensBaby, which I usually leave with an f/4 iris slide because it gets a bit too mushy with no iris in it. I've only done one shot so far with the 24-290mm zoom I am carrying, for a zooming shot, otherwise I've been glad to just use the Master Primes for most everything, the sharpness of the lens works well with the light diffusion of the 1/8 Pearlescent or 1/8 Black Frost. I've also been using a light haze in the rooms sometimes, though most of the hospital area I'm not allowed to use a smoke machine.

[Stuart Brereton]

Lovely work, as always, David. I worked on a hospital drama for many years in the UK, so I can testify just how difficult it is to keep bedside scenes interesting...

 

Great idea to use a piece of glass to hide the unwanted parts of that corridor. I may well steal that idea.

[Justin Hayward]

Wow, this looks great, David. Thanks.

 

Can you describe your working relationship with Michael Polish? (when you have a free second, of course :) With this many films together, I imagine there's plenty of short hand, but all the movies have such strong visual imagery, yet all are very different in style and tone. I'm curious what some of your discussions about the look of the films are like when you first begin talking. Does he give you a very clear vision of what each movie should look like? Or is it more of a collaboration through discussion of the script? If there are storyboards, do you do them, or does he? And how close to you stick to the boards when actually shooting? How involved in those discussions is Mark Polish?

 

Thanks again, this really looks great.

[David Mullen ASC]

We completely storyboarded "Twin Falls Idaho", "Northfork", and "The Astronaut Farmer", and then there were partial boards on some of the others, and we've boarded the major stunt scene for this movie, but it really takes me about three weeks of solid meetings with a director to break down a whole script into shots in order to proceed to storyboards, and you generally are too busy in the final two weeks of pre-production for that, which means you need at least a five-week prep on a feature if you want to throughly storyboard a movie. Plus it implies that the script is 80% finalized and the major locations are known, or at least, that helps.

 

With the shorter, faster preps of today's movies, I generally find that I can only get the major sequences boarded, which is fine.

 

The things with storyboards, for me, is not that you have to follow them, it's just that the shot ideas you have when sitting behind a desk weeks before filming begins are different than the ones you have on location or in the set on the shooting day -- and neither is necessarily better or worse than the others, it's just a different part of your brain at work. You have the luxury in prep to imagine several radically different ways of approaching the coverage of the scene, because it's just your imagination at work free from time constraints -- on the shooting day, you have the clock running and you have the space sitting right in front of you, so you respond to the reality before your eyes. It's like the difference between being a street photographer and a studio commercial photographer, the second is more design-oriented, the first is more about using your eyes and being inspired by what's in front of you. And there are times when the street photography becomes more planned and designed and the set photography more improvisational.

 

The stories that Michael and I have worked on together vary quite a bit in terms of how much stylization is justified. You just have to use your taste and go with what the script seems to be telling you in terms of how it wants to be visualized. In this case, the story is based on a real incident and the settings (other than Heaven) are down to earth so to speak, so there is a base naturalism that should ground things but... and this is significant... the story is a spiritual journey, so we have to get inside the head of the main character, which suggests at times a more expressionist tone, a psychological reality rather than strict realism. A good example is the film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", which at times gets quite visually abstract and surreal in order to capture the experience of the main character suffering from a stroke. So even though a good chunk of this movie takes place in a hospital, there will be a lot of variety in how each scene is approached; we will be taking some creative license at times rather than be strictly realistic in a documentary sense.

 

Michael and I discuss all of this and we pull up references from art and movies that we show each other to inspire discussion. Just the other day, Michael came across a hyper-real painting of water running down a pain of glass with the lights of a city refracting by the water, and the next day while shooting a scene of an ambulance pulling up to a hospital entrance in the rain, Michael and I realized this was an opportunity to create a shot like that painting.

 

In prep, my general approach on all movies is to get the office to schedule three hours in the morning every day for me and the director to talk through the script. I take a lot of notes, some of which become shot lists or not.

 

On the more stylized projects, Michael is more likely to have some strong overall visual scheme from the beginning before I arrive on the scene, like the gray pallet of "Northfork" or the brown one for "Manure", plus it was his idea from the beginning that all of "Manure" would be shot on stages even for farm exteriors. On those we have very rigid rules about what goes in front of the camera and how it can be shot.

 

On the more realistic stories, Michael obviously has been thinking about the visuals from the beginning, especially since he normally writes the scripts too, but the look will evolve and incorporate ideas that the production team comes up with, and how the locations inspire us, all filtered through Michael of course. The opposite of the chamber piece of "Twin Falls Idaho", which was very controlled and pre-planned, was our next film "Jackpot", which was very much a run & gun shoot where we had to make art on the fly. So our shoots can sort of be aspects of either of our first two movies.

 

I've said this before, but one of the reasons Michael and I work so fast together is that we have similar tastes photographically (and Michael has shot two of his own features, so can act as his own cinematographer) so I know that if I have an idea that I like, he'll probably like it too. But he always has the final word, all I can do is suggest things.

[Miguel Angel]

The frames look amazing!

 

I know this is something that you might have answered million of times (but maybe you have a wee time after wrapping up to post more updates).

 

With the Alexa (and digital in general) do you try to have the same contrast ratio (either the same way or with the light a bit softer, etc) by eye when going from a wide to a close up or you still measure the lights so you can get what you want and, are you worried a lot about matching wide and close ups nowadays?

 

Have a good day!

[David Mullen ASC]

Of course the wides and the close shots should match well-enough to intercut but in terms of fill level, I set that by eye. I usually set it by eye on film too, except for tricky exposure scenes. It's sort of a feeling you go with because when you soften the key light on a close-up, it wraps around the face more so you may not feel you need the same degree of fill as in the wider shots which had harder shadows.

 

When I was shooting for a photochemical print, I was a bit more meter-oriented because I couldn't adjust contrast in post, so I had to nail it in the original. But with a D.I., you know you can match things a bit better even if you don't exactly match fill levels.

[Miguel Angel]

Thank you very much for the kind answer.

One more day and the 2nd week will be completed!

 

Looking forward to reading your update! :)

 

Have a good day!

[David Mullen ASC]

WEEK TWO

 

We did our last day at one hospital at the start of the week and then moved to a second hospital for the rest of the week, finishing last night at that location. So starting next week, no more hospitals to shoot, we'll be in various homes and other locations.

 

In the story, there are three hospitals which we have created from two existing ones. The one we were at last week was more of a research center with an unused wing that we could take over for filming but the one this week is a huge, busy working hospital.

 

Rather than impose a single look for all the hospital scenes in terms of color and mood, we've varied things partly to match the shifting fortunes of the main character but also to avoid visual monotony, though one could justify that approach too in a hospital drama, that things are endlessly repetitive over months and there is no sense of time. But in this case, I tried to create some changes to suggest time passage, etc.

 

For example, we had three scenes at a pay phone on a wall in the hospital corridor and I lit each of them differently, you saw the one from last week where I had the warm sunset effect on the foreground, we followed that with a scene where I turned off the foreground light for a silhouette effect:

 

 

We also had three scenes in a waiting room outside the E.R. where one was at dusk (lit with very blue soft light out the windows), one was at night (single white overhead fluorescent on), and the last was at sunrise. Here are two frames from the sunrise scene. I used a 9K HMI with Full CTO to get the golden look (with the camera set to 5600K), there was some weak fill through the glass hallways windows on the left with a daylight Kinoflo. In the close-ups, I brought that Kinoflo closer and softened it more. That patch of bright light on the floor was the real sun peaking through so I had to raise some CTO gels high on stands to get it colored to what my HMI's were doing.

 

The last three days of the week were spent in the patient room, which faced west with a rooftop right under the windows. On this location, I wasn't allowed to use any haze machines, but I noticed that all of these hospitals have power plants that put out a lot of steam, so I was allowed to put steam machines outside the window on the rooftop (you can't see it in these photos.) It was particularly effective in the night scenes where I put some distant Dedolights with cyan gel in the background to look like industrial lights backlighting the steam.

The sun came into the room at 1PM every day until it set directly out the windows. We had clear days every day so the sun was quite intense when it came in, and with the height of the windows, at best we could flag the upper half of the window from the outside to cut some of the sun, otherwise I decided to incorporate it.

The first scene in the new room is supposed to be sad, and was shot in the morning before any hard sun came in, so I mostly used available light and set the camera to 4300K for a cold look. To augment the window light, we taped a bounce card hanging from the ceiling above the window and I bounced a Joker HMI Source-4 Leko into the card to increase the soft backlight on the bed.

After that, in the afternoon, I generally shot one scene at least with the real sun and mostly available light. I began one scene near sunset and managed to get a master off in available light only, but when I did the coverage, I had to recreate everything. I used a T12 tungsten fresnel with the lens removed to recreate the hard pattern of sunlight on the bed, and in the reverse angle I had to blast the wall scene out the window with an HMI, plus backlight the windows with tungsten. I just added a lithe bit of a dim key light on the nurse with a daylight Kinoflo:

Available light only (camera set to 6800K):

Reverse angle shot at night:

For the bit of window you see on the left, we stood a 4'x8' white board up vertically and hit it with an HMI to white out the view. Fortunately for the window on the right, there was a large wall we could hit with a light.

[Freya Black]

Okay, I didn't click that this was a period film until I saw this shot:

 

 

 

 

Which is really strange because there is little in this shot to give away the time period but I immediately wondered if the movie was set in the 70's but then I looked at the other shots with the silver telephones (that people are actually using) and the CRT TV and thought it must be set in the 90's maybe.

 

The whole thing comes across as being a bit indistinct in terms of time to me. It might be a good thing if it's not essential to the story as it gives that feel that it could be something that could happen now even perhaps. Although I note in your posting you said 1988.

 

I am very confused why the shot above would be the one that made me think that it was a period movie however as it's the one with the least cues in a way.

 

Freya

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, it's a period movie, partly because the real incident happened in 1988 and if we reset it in modern times, it brings up questions about why his car didn't have air bags, the medical procedures used would have to be modernized, plus everyone would be on cellphones to each other, so how news travelled would be different.

 

But it's also not important to the story that it be some elaborate recreation of the year 1988, the story isn't about the 80's. So it's better if the period element is a little vague and is not front and center. In fact, I generally prefer that for many movies even set in current time, to have elements of the past in there, older cars, etc. rather than have everything say what year the movie was made in. That way, ten years from now, the movie will seem less dated.

[cole t parzenn]

Ooh, pretty! Which frame lines did you end up using? Have you shot anything at T1.3, yet?

[David Mullen ASC]

I drew some frame lines over the uncropped original (not the log-c original) to show the advantage of the near common-top approach to 2.40 extraction:

 

 

As you can see, the full uncropped frame, if shown that way on TV (I still prefer that it be letterboxed correctly to the theatrical frame, as any DVD/Blu-Ray would be) would not need any re-framing for TV displays. If I had gone with a center crop for 2.40, then there would be a lot of odd-looking headroom in the medium-close shots (where headroom issues are the most obvious) and I'd have to zoom in to lose it, would would then mean losing the sides and having to do some panning & scanning. I can't say that every shot will work for TV just by not cropping and just showing what got recorded, but 80 to 90% of the shots should without needing adjustments to framing.

 

No, I haven't yet shot at T/1.4, I guess it's hard to break habits, I'm just not comfortable with the focus gets too shallow. But I'll find some moments later for that. I have shot at T/2.0 for a number of shots, and I good portion has been shot at a T/2.0-2.8 split. When the focal lengths used get longer for close-ups, then I often pull some ND off (if being used) and stop down a little more because the backgrounds are soft anyway and the focus-pulling is easier and the lens sharpness is better. Where the shallow focus looks the most interesting is when you are closer on a wider-angle lens. On long lenses, it doesn't look much more shallow anyway and on wide shots without foreground elements, it is hard to see the shallowness of the focus so you might as well use the lens at a more optimal stop for sharpness, so it's mainly when I find myself closer and more wide-angle where I employ the wider stops.

[Scott Pickering]

I've actually read this book and I'm very curious as to how this film will turn out. The last faith based film I saw was rather poorly done, and didn't seem to be in the spirit of the book. I wonder David how the Heaven sequence will go. I assume this is what the green screen use will be for.

[David Mullen ASC]

WEEK THREE

 

No more hospitals. We started the week at a rec center in Tucker, GA that was originally a school built a number of decades ago, so has classic tiled hallways, classrooms with big windows, and a great gym / auditorium space full of light. I mainly used available light in that location, mixed with a little soft HMI lighting.

 

The rest of the week was spent at the two houses in the story that the main characters live in, plus a brief scene at a grandparents' house. Since we had drifted into a later call time by mid-week, I generally had some scenes shot at night that had to be lit for daytime. Most of this shoot has been under clear weather, but by the end of the week, we had pretty heavy overcast with some light rain or snow flurries, but luckily we were mostly inside the homes.

 

As we got near our night scenes, I switched to tungsten lighting, and if another day interior scene was scheduled at the end of the night, I just switched the camera's color balance to tungsten if I wanted a neutral white light for daytime.

 

I pulled three frames.

 

The first one was an evening dinner scene with the grandparents and their grandchildren. I lit it for sunset rather than dusk or night, even though it was shot at night. Since a number of hospital scenes have a cool tone to them, I wanted to find opportunities for the house scenes to be warm. I used a 12K tungsten back off out on the lawn for the sunset effect, gelled with 1/2 CTO but with the camera set to daylight color balance, so it was like using a Full+1/2 CTO. The kids were a bit out of the direct beam but got some light from how the 12K hit the sheers in the window, but to wrap more light onto them, I had a 2K tungsten (no CTO) through a 4x4 frame of 216 right outside the window. I also had some weak fill, mainly for the grandfather who has his back to the light - I used a daylight Kino off of frame right plus a tungsten Source-4 Leko bounced into the ceiling with Full CTB on it. There was a 1/8 Schneider Black Frost on the camera; I think this was a 25mm Master Prime. Luckily I was able to back up the camera to get the wide shot without having to use a shorter focal length, which helps keep the lines of the set straighter.

 

This was a day scene -- it was overcast outside so I didn't have a problem with the background being too hot. I used a tungsten Source-4 Leko to create a slash of warm sunlight on our actress, plus a second Source-4 in the background room to put a square of light on some furniture. To create the cooler soft window light, I bounced a 2' 4-bank daylight Kino into a white bed sheet next to the Source-4 Leko, creating a blend of cool soft light and warm sun bouncing off of the table into her face. There was a 1/8 Tiffen Pearlescent on the lens, which may have been the 25mm or 32mm Master Prime.

 

This last example was written as early morning -- the emotional tone had to be a bit dark, so though I used a bright light for the morning sun (again, a T12 tungsten with the camera set to daylight-balance), I put up a black floppy opposite the windows so that the white walls wouldn't bounce all of that light back onto the couch. Instead, I used a 2' 4-bank daylight Kino for a dim key on her face. I tried also creating a second shaft of light by hiding a Source-4 Leko behind the small wall in the background (where the front door is, which I left closed to keep the haze in and the sound out) but I couldn't get the beam to look parallel enough to match the T12, because the tip of the Leko was so close to being in frame, so I flipped the Leko to the opposite side of the room and put a square of light on the ground to add a little weak ambience to the background. I also put two doubles in the Leko to knock it down. Upstairs I had a single 2' Kino tube on to bring up the stairwell a little. Because this was shot at night, I was planning on trying to light a white card for what you see through the window, then break it up by pulling the sheers closed over that spot, but I noticed a big magnolia tree outside and hit it with an 18K HMI instead, but to take the curse off of that, I put an ND.6 in the camera so I could shoot at T/2 and let the background go softer in focus. Again, I used the 1/8 Tiffen Pearlescent on a 25mm Master Prime.

 

So all of these examples were shot at 500 ISO with the Alexa set to about 6000K.

[David Mullen ASC]

Outdoors I've been gravitating towards longer lenses when possible, but with our hazed interior scenes, I've found (after some discussions on focus after the take with my gifted 1st AC Joe Thomas) that if you shoot on a lens above the 65mm length you start to lose some focus/sharpness looking through more smoke, so I decided that either I have to pull the diffusion or bring the cameras closer and shoot close-ups on the 50mm lens if I want to keep using the 1/8 Pearlescent. For the non-smoked scenes, it's not an issue. Also, it seems mainly an issue in soft light, if the lighting is more dramatic and contrasty, it creates natural visual edges that gives the impression of greater sharpness, so in that case, I can get away with the diffusion. I think this is one reason why Kaminski can get away with using heavier Classic Softs and nets for diffusion -- he generally keeps the lighting fairly contrasty.

[Justin Hayward]

Looks fantastic. How long do those night for day interiors take to set up from the point the camera and blocking are set to rolling camera?

 

Thanks, this is all a really great read.

[David Mullen ASC]

Depends on my much you planned on using available daylight in the first place, if the plan was always to shine some HMI light into the room anyway, then it can just take a little longer to light some sort of large white or Day Blue unless the light hitting sheers is enough to blow-up the view. It gets more complex if you are seeing more clearly through the windows, like through cracked blinds, and it gets even more complex if there is camera movement, unless you can get away with just papering the windows, blowing them out, and closing some blinds halfway to break up the whiteness. But if the camera moves a lot and you need to see white where the camera points but have a clear shot at a hard unit creating sunlight, and you also need to recreate soft overhead light, it can get rather complicated, you are basically turning the location into a soundstage. You spend a lot of time making it look like daylight outside the windows, and that doesn't count the time spent for the interior.

 

I remember once on a low-budget film spending an hour to light every room of a house for daytime in the middle of the night for a long steadicam move, when I could have been ready in ten minutes if we had just scheduled it for shooting in daytime. But that's what happens on a short schedule like on some 18-day movie shot in the winter, if the script has a lot of day interiors but also night exteriors, you can count on shooting half of the day scenes at night because of your call times, which get later each day of the week, or you may get a day location that can only be scheduled at the end of the week when you are into night shooting already.

[Satsuki Murashige]

These frames are gorgeous! Thanks for taking the time to do these write ups, David. I don't know how you have the energy to do them, I would be wiped out by the end of the week.

[Miguel Angel]

Absolutely fantastic articles! all the images have a very pictorial (hopefully that's the word) effect.

 

How are you finding the pearlscents filters if you don't mind me asking?

 

Thank you very much!

 

Have a lovely day.

[David Mullen ASC]

I like the look of the Pearlescents very much, you get this nice glow but with less of the "noisy" effect of a ProMist. I just wish they made a 1/16 version because I'm finding the 1/8 Pearlescent to be halfway between a 1/8 and 1/4 Black ProMist in terms of softening, so when I go wider, I've been switching to the 1/8 Black Frost.

[joshua gallegos]

I love the dinner scene brings memories of Fanny & Alexander!

[Miguel Angel]

Thank you Mr. Mullen,

I'm going to ask for them in Panavision next time I'm there so I can test them.

 

You can see that lovely glow very well in some of the strong highlights in the pictures that you have been posted, very nice indeed!

 

Best!

[David Mullen ASC]

WEEK FOUR

 

When we finished Week Three, we had nine days left in the schedule, which meant that the last week was only four days for 24 total. This week was scheduled to be the bulk of our day exterior work dealing with the crash on a bridge and the aftermath involving the emergency crews. There are only two road bridges with an overhead metal structure in the area, both north of the city, and one is too busy to allow any traffic stoppage for filming. So we were at one that ran through a state park and small community area, but even that was busy enough to only allow intermittent traffic control (ITC).

 

Due to icy weather and dangerous driving conditions in the area, we had to postpone shooting for three days, then work three days, taking only one day off (today) and then finishing the movie in six days next week.

 

We still have one day left in a parking lot to shoot the major angles of the car crash stunt against a green screen, otherwise we finished the accident and aftermath sequence, which was a major accomplishment since it turned out that having to let traffic flow past us on the narrow two-lane bridge intermittently cost us a large portion of the time we could be working.

 

We started the day in a side parking lot next to the bridge next to the working trucks and base camp -- since the wrecked car was covered with a plastic tarp by the emergency workers, we could shoot under the tarp with the wreck parked somewhere off of the bridge. We had this idea to shoot some of the shots of the police and emergency workers talking from inside the car looking out through the plastic. I switched from the 6 mil plastic sheet used over the car to a 3 mil sheet for the camera to look through. Since you could still make out the pine trees surrounding the parking lot, when you would have seen the open sky above the lake that the bridge passes over, the grips put a 12x20 Day Blue behind the actors. It was too hot when hit by the sun, so we clocked it until it became shaded.

 

Then we moved the wreck onto the bridge and shot a scene where a sheriff looks around the wreck for signs of life. Since this scene was proceeded by one of our scenes in Heaven, I had the sheriff start by flaring the lens with a flashlight, and I sprinkled water on the lens. We can use the bright light to create a transition in editing.

 

After the winter storm that delayed us, now I had partially sunny skies to deal with on the bridge, which runs east-west. So besides breaking the shots into whether we had to look towards the east or west end of the bridge in terms of trying to stay in backlight when possible, that also helped us in terms of equipment since everyone had to park their gear along one lane of the bridge, behind camera, and then flip everything to the other end of the bridge when we turned to look the opposite way.

 

We got a Technocrane for one day in order to shoot a shot where the camera cranes into the air away from the wreck, so I also used it for a low-angle push in onto the wrecked car just moments after the crash. The telescoping arm allowed me to float over the broken debris on the ground and end up on the steam rising from the cracked radiator, which gave us another transition point. I shot this at 60 fps with a 90 degree shutter angle to make the rain drops more crisp.

 

In another short dialogue scene between a police officer and an emergency worker, we shot it as a reflection in a car mirror lying on the ground. It just seemed better to keep elements of the aftermath feeling a little surreal, which is why on some shots I sprinkled water on the lens, which not only reminded you that it had just rained but it also gives the impression of broken glass.

 

We created a second LUT for this section of the movie that was a little harsher and desaturated.

 

The third and final day of the week was mostly spent on a process trailer doing the driving scenes before the crash, plus another driving scene.

[Miguel Angel]

The sequences above mentioned (on the bridge) have me intrigued, I love the images and I can't wait to see it edited to know how you transitioned between the shots, specially the one with the flares and the one in the car mirror.

 

Did you choose to have it desaturated because of the scene in Heaven or it was a stylistic decision if you don't mind me asking?

 

I always forget to say something about ARRIRAW. In the movie I'm working on at the moment we are shooting on ARRIRAW crop mode and apparently it is easier to handle and a bit cheaper because you don't need a lot of cards so maybe you can explore that path for your next movie!

 

Have a good day and congratulations (almost!)!

[Rafael Rivera]

David, where can I send you a case of wine for generously sharing your wealth of knowledge? I still remember following all your posts on Manure...