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The Love Witch


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Again, the word that comes to mind is "lovely!" I look forward to seeing it.

 

How'd the rear-projection shots come out? That's a big job for a stills camera. Was/is it standard to let the live action camera lens crop the background plate, rather than shoot and project the background plate to match the shot size?

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In this case, the background screen was never going to be in-focus (especially not at f/2.0) so I didn't think it was necessary to bother with shooting the plates in 35mm, I didn't need the grain and I didn't need the resolution. But since I hadn't done rear-projection before, the focal length of the plates was a question. The old rule was to use the same focal length as you'd use on the set, but I realized that this assumes that you'll shoot right up to the edges of the screen with no cropping, as soon as you crop within the screen, you've created a tighter view of the background. Plus it probably matters more if the foreground subject has some sort of obvious perspective to it, vanishing lines, etc. I knew that the worst thing would be to shoot the plates with too long of a focal length because the background then might look enlarged compared to the foreground, out of scale, and I think that would be worse than the other direction.

 

Now that I've done it, I don't think the old movies necessarily used a tighter plate for the close-ups because then they would have to move the projector closer to the screen to fill less of it -- that would have the advantage of being brighter and thus allowing them to stop down more, so it probably depended on how much they needed the extra light from the screen when they went in tighter. If they wanted to shoot at the same stop as the wider shot and the cropped background looked OK in the tighter shot because it was more out-of-focus, then they probably used the same plate as the wide shot.

 

But if they had to rack-focus to the screen on a close-up then they'd probably use a new plate with a tighter lens on it and the projector closer so that the image was sharper and less grainy.

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I didn't see any rolling shutter artifacts. The Sony was set for a low-contrast look so the dynamic range was OK, probably the same as in the old days of projecting prints for rear-projection scenes. I did however expose the plates on the bright side in case the projector was not very bright. But in that example I posted there is no clipping in the plate, the sky is just a little paler in the area near her head. If anything that plate could have been brighter but I didn't have a way of changing exposure in mid-shot, so I just sort of split the difference between the sections of the road that were in shadow versus in the sun.

 

It's tricky because I could have shot the plates with an even flatter contrast setting but I was worried about some loss of contrast due to being projected onto a screen.

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David.. in the shot with the guy crying in the chair.. was the big shadow of the practical light on the wall behind him.. a sort of homage to how lighting was done in those days.. a lot of the in frame light sources actually having their own shadow..

Look amazing of course.. must have been an interesting challenge to light in "an old style".. and do a lot of things that you would never do in the more naturalistic " modern style "..

 

Thanks for posting stuff..

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Thanks for the additional stills. How tight was the blocking on the set? Did you run into issues with actors hitting marks? Also, given that the rear projection scenes were on a different stock, did you take any additional steps to match the other scenes in the film?

 

It’s interesting that you didn’t need to change shutter angle for the RP shots, I was under the impression that 172.8 was a more suitable shutter angle for this type of work.

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As for that lamp shadow, I could have flagged all the light off of the practical and wall, then perhaps put a glow behind the lamp on the wall to suggest the lamp, but I wouldn't have gotten that pattern of the fringe on the wall, unless I hid a bright halogen bulb in the fixture, but being a period lamp owned by the location, I wasn't going to risk that -- plus I decided it was more interesting to have that pattern on that blank piece of wal from the projected 1K fresnel.

 

Old movies would often rewire lamps with heat-proof porcelain sockets in order to take bright tungsten movie globes or 500w photofloods in them when they really needed them to light something, but in this case, with ordinary practicals in theory not rated above 60w bulbs, I usually could get away with 150w if I were careful, otherwise it was often a 75w bulb.

 

The whole movie was storyboarded so for simple stuff, there wasn't much blocking needed, it was already planned out. But we had a number of crowd scenes where we needed to block to figure out where everyone would have to be in the room for the action.

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David, the rear screen projection setup looks very convincing. I have noticed in older films using this technique that the focal length used on the plate seemed way too long to match, so I guess you just explained that one for me! Did you use stabilizer with the NEX6 when shooting the plates or just hard mount? Any issues with bumpy footage?

 

Also, when you say you used a black net plus a Classic Soft 1/4, do you mean that you used one of your custom net filter frames, a net stretched over the back of the lens, or a glass filter like the Tiffen Softnet set?

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I have a thin black veil material from a fabric store that is glued to a 4x5 frame, it is lighter than any black pantyhose material I can find. It's sort of like a wedding veil weave in nylon or something synthetic, but it doesn't stretch. Fabric stores sell it in white, black, pink, a few other colors. Bill Wages, ASC showed me this stuff back in 2006. I guess a Tiffen Soft Net might be similar.

 

The roads were bumpy so I basically shot the plates handheld with the camera resting on a rolled up furniture blanket for a little shock absorption. There are some occasional bumps in the footage. I think if I had the time and money, in the future I'd get all the footage stabilized before playback. Sometimes when a bump happened in the plate, I jiggled the 35mm camera shooting the actress so it felt like we had run over a pothole.

 

If I were attempting a more modern style where the rear projection had to be more convincing, I'd avoid an open-top covertible so that the view out the windows were smaller and you could justify having the background more overexposed.

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I have a thin black veil material from a fabric store that is glued to a 4x5 frame, it is lighter than any black pantyhose material I can find. It's sort of like a wedding veil weave in nylon or something synthetic, but it doesn't stretch. Fabric stores sell it in white, black, pink, a few other colors. Bill Wages, ASC showed me this stuff back in 2006. I guess a Tiffen Soft Net might be similar.

 

The roads were bumpy so I basically shot the plates handheld with the camera resting on a rolled up furniture blanket for a little shock absorption. There are some occasional bumps in the footage. I think if I had the time and money, in the future I'd get all the footage stabilized before playback. Sometimes when a bump happened in the plate, I jiggled the 35mm camera shooting the actress so it felt like we had run over a pothole.

 

If I were attempting a more modern style where the rear projection had to be more convincing, I'd avoid an open-top covertible so that the view out the windows were smaller and you could justify having the background more overexposed.

Nice, I have seen that material before. I guess some fabric stores refer to it as Tulle. A friend of mine, DP Mike Gioulakis shot a film where we used green, brown, and blue Tulle in front of the lens depending on the scene. It was an interesting technique that I had not seen before.

 

I wonder if using a hard-mounted Movi or Ronin as a poor man's Libra head would work better for shooting driving plates. I guess there's a chance the footage would have looked too modern for your project.

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I wonder if using a hard-mounted Movi or Ronin as a poor man's Libra head would work better for shooting driving plates. I guess there's a chance the footage would have looked too modern for your project.

 

I don't think the level of bumpiness determines how period-correct it looks, it's just a budget issue. Plus swerving around a mountain road, you'd have to wonder about systems that are sensitive to wind and acceleration forces. A Libra head would be the big-budget solution but the truth is that a bigger show would probably just have the footage stabilized in post if they had the turnaround time.

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Hi David, you said that you shot that late afternoon/morning sun flashback on an overcast day with the m90 creating the sun effect. I'm always afraid to cheat non sunny days as sunny as I have had problems with the background matching and it feelings like the foreground and background are lit different. Do you have any tips for getting this right, the shot is very convincing as a sunny day!

 

 

 

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Actually in that shot the sun finally came out in the far background... Since this was a flashback, it could look a little more stylized, but in general if it is overcast, it is easier to get away with a strong backlight than some other direction, and if you are in the woods or on narrow streets, you can imagine the sun breaking through on the foreground but not the background (or you can rake the background too, maybe spotted on one element to look like another patch of sunlight.) Shooting in shallow focus will take the curse off of the background... I once had to fake a close-up for day at night in a backyard and couldn't just put a wall behind their head so I basically blasted the background with everything I had, looked terrible to the eye but on a longer lens in shallow focus, it was convincing just being blobs of highlights.

 

The real problem in overcast is that it is hard to fake sunlight in wide shots unless you have some huge lights and probably a crane to arm them out into a backlit position. And even then the distant background won't be lit so there are limits, that approach would work better in the woods than out in a open plain.

 

In my case I had a hillside behind the actors so I could have tried getting the lamp higher up the hillside for a backlight, but luckily we only needed a medium shot and close-ups.

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Hi David! I've seen your posting on several sites and I wanted to begin by saying thank you for taking time to share your knowledge and experience.

 

I have two questions.. What types of diffusion were you using over the lights to create the hard shadows yet beautiful skin? I understand that the netting in front of the lens helps soften it all.

 

Secondly, what sources did you use most to fill your medium/close up shots? I.e. bounce from a back light or a dimmed/soft frontal source etc.

 

The images from this film are astounding and inspiring. Once again, thank you.

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Hi David! I've seen your posting on several sites and I wanted to begin by saying thank you for taking time to share your knowledge and experience.

 

I have two questions.. What types of diffusion were you using over the lights to create the hard shadows yet beautiful skin? I understand that the netting in front of the lens helps soften it all.

 

Secondly, what sources did you use most to fill your medium/close up shots? I.e. bounce from a back light or a dimmed/soft frontal source etc.

 

The images from this film are astounding and inspiring. Once again, thank you.

 

Almost all the key lighting for close-ups was a hard fresnel lamp, often a 1K tungsten fresnel more than anything, sometimes a 2K in larger rooms. A few shots on Day 2 used a 2K Zip light, which is semi-hard, but I stopped doing that after a day because I thought I was cheating in terms of not embracing the hard light aesthetic, though the truth is that even in the 1950's, some close-up key lights were softened with things like spun glass on the barn doors (and Zips date back to the 1960's). "Marnie" for example has some semi-softened lamps (maybe some were Scoops) mixed with harder lamps in the close-up lighting.

 

Some some fresnels are harder than others depending on the size of the face of the lamp and the distance to the subject. Also, the LED fresnels that I used from Mole-Richardson when I needed daylight-balanced units are not as crisp as a tungsten fresnel. And the large ARRI HMI's like the M40's and M90's do not project a very crisp light either. I mean, they certainly are hard lights but the shadow patterns are not sharply focused.

 

It's funny how once you start lighting with hard lighting, you notice how some hard lights are harder than others.

 

In terms of fill, that just depended on the space and how much I wanted to focus the fill. When I didn't want a lot of spill, I sometimes used the 2K Zip as a fill light, though often with only one globe on. When I needed more general ambient fill in a room, I'd bounce a 2K or 1K off of a 4x4 beadboard. In smaller spaces up close to the subject, the fill on a face might be a 150w fresnel under the lens, or a 1x1 LitePanel LED. I did so many ECU's and eyeball inserts that I found after some trial and error that it was better to fill with the 150w fresnel because it only created a tiny reflection in the eyeball rather than a larger square reflection like the 1x1 LitePanel did.

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Anna Biller said I could post a few frames now online. I pulled a range to give you a sense of our non-contemporary (i.e. classic Hollywood studio style) approach. Besides directing, Anna did the sets and costumes, which is a huge part of the look of this movie.

 

 

lovewitch4.jpg

 

This really makes me think of old British folk horror movies. I know it's called "Love Witch" but is there an old school horror aspect to this? Whatever the scene is it's looking good!

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I'm shooting an indie film called "Love Witch" for director Anna Biller, who has posted on this forum in the past about classic studio cinematography. We met back in film school at CalArts and I shot a short film for her in the mid 1990's in 16mm in the style of an old Technicolor movie. She asked me to shoot her latest feature in a similar hard-light style, modeled somewhat on 50's-60's color movies such as "Marnie". Anna is also doing the production design, costumes, and later, the editing.

 

 

Okay I remember Anna Biller from the experimental film scene back in the day.

She was always killing herself making complicated shorts with elaborate sets and costumes.

I can imagine everyone was just a bit like "ooh it's a bit narrative isn't it?"

Honestly f*** that s***.

It was actually all the more rebellious filmmakers like Anna and Ben Rivers etc who were doing the stuff on the edge of narrative cinema because the whole scene was really closed minded. Taken over by academics on some weird trip.

 

Anyway I'm glad to see she has now shot an elaborate feature film. It's looking great.

I'm curious about the fact you shot 4perf. I was like "What's that about?" given it's 1.85?

It suddenly hit me tho. She isn't planning on making a photochemical print is she?

You talked a lot about print stock here too...!!!!

Wow!

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We shot 4-perf because we cut the negative and are striking a print, though it's been a bit tough doing the answer printing. For one thing, Anna is a stickler about color and though she has done this before (she made a 35mm movie about nine years ago, finished photochemically too) I think it's hard for her to be limited to adjustments with RGB printer light points, sometimes we and the timer are talking about whether a single point correction is going to be too much to shift some color.

 

Also, it seems to us that standard Vision print stock has gotten more contrasty ever since Kodak got rid of their higher-contrast Premier stock. I know I overexposed the negative so that the movie is printing in the low 40's instead of the low 30's, but the contrast in the print is extremely high. On the plus side, the blacks are bulletproof and the color is super-rich, but it's a bit much sometimes considering how flat the 200T negative stock is, there is a ton of shadow detail in there that the print just buries.

 

Also, since it turns out that getting black leader for A-B rolls has gotten very expensive (you basically have to make it, which means burning through some film stock) we had to get the optical transitions (fades & dissolves) done digitally and then laser-recorded out to film. And since they were done to LAD standards, they are printing in the low 30's like a normally-exposed negative would, so they are flatter-looking than the rest of the footage. I've had the same problem in the past with optically printed transitions delivered on dupe negative stock though, it ends up at normal densities while my original footage is generally very dense. In the past, I've tried to compensate by picking wedges that were on the bright side but you run the risk of highlight detail getting lost.

 

It's interesting that the heavy net diffusion I used looks very subtle due to the high contrast of the print. I had noticed this when I did the testing in prep, but after months of video dailies, I was worried I went too far with the diffusion, but in the print, it looks correct like it did in the projected tests.

 

Of course, now that I am projecting a print, I am noticing some focus issues I didn't catch while operating, one of the downsides of shooting film and judging focus through a groundglass. Minor stuff mainly, actors leaning slightly forward of their focus while talking now and then, etc. I think I'm also noticing that the 28mm Zeiss Standard Speed is not quite as sharp as the 25mm Zeiss Super Speed, at least not at f/2.8.

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