Pilot I just shot got picked up

[David Mullen ASC]

Not necessarily -- I did "The Good Wife" pilot but the series was shot by Fred Murphy, ASC, who had bigger credits than me.

[Justin Hayward]

Looks great! What's the general process of getting a pilot for you? Did you pitch your take on the show to the director or were you their first pick? And what, if any, were some references you used in designing the look?

 

It's a fun show. My wife is on maternity leave so we're looking for shows to pass time holding a sleeping baby. Now we have a new one :)

[David Mullen ASC]

Pilot season is a bit odd because so many go into production at the same time, it's a bit chaotic to organize crew and key personnel.

 

Anyway, in this case, the first cinematographer hired had to leave early on in prep and the director and production designer both knew me and gave me a call.

 

As a reference, the director had me look at "The Candidate" and "United 93".

[Justin Hayward]

Interesting. I can certainly see "United 93" now that you mention it. Although I noticed in some of the more frantic scenes where you used some chaotic handheld camera movement, there were also lock off close ups and things intercut. In general, how many cameras were used at once on some of those busier scenes?

 

And did the director or producers or anyone specifically steer you away from other White House type dramas? Like, did anyone say, "This is not 'House of Cards' dark."? :)

 

Thanks

[David Mullen ASC]

It was mostly a 2-camera shoot, we had a third camera for the wreckage investigation night scenes, maybe the rave club, not sure about the war room. Our discussions were mostly about camera coverage and movement, I had to figure out how to light those (because often the cameras always ran from top to bottom of a scene in every angle, multiple locations, often seeing 270 degrees or more) but I had a sense of the director's taste because I had worked once with him and knew his other work. We did discuss using black lights for the rave party. Since the director liked the believability of the movies we referenced, I figured the lighting should be fairly realistic.

 

One interesting aspect was that the director had a set of uncoated Master Primes brought out from ARRI UK that we used a lot to get extra flares. We also shot some close-ups of our hero on a wider lenses at T/1.4 at 48 fps for an isolating effect.

 

We also got to use VER's LED environment system to do our car interiors when the motorcade races through the city, where the car was surrounded by big LED screens to provide both the backgrounds but also the interactive lighting and reflections. We shot the plates a week earlier using a system involving nine (I think) Panasonic GH4's mounted all around a moving vehicle.

 

It's interesting (meaning difficult) to light the Oval Office for any mood because the room is lit by a recessed ring of indirect lighting around the oval ceiling and the room has no desk lamp in real life, only two table lamps by the couches. So it gets very low-contrast in that round white room very quickly if the room lights are on. And all our scenes were set at night because of the story, so I couldn't light from the windows.

[Justin Hayward]

That's great, thanks. I really love the difference in lighting and color between the white house and his home life. It really emphasizes the difference of his two worlds. Really nice work, as usual.

[Phil Rhodes]

Quite interested in the way the video is treated for the LED wall backdrop effect. Do they spherically map it so that it looks right from any angle, or do you get a box of LED with the requirement to avoid the seams?

[David Mullen ASC]

The video walls are modular so you can build different sized environments. In our case, we had one video wall (about 19' x 9') that was the background, so if the background was the rear window, we'd run that plate, and if it were a 3/4 rear angle, we'd run that plate, rolling this big screen around where it was needed to fill the view out the window -- and the rest of the plates would be run on off-camera screens for lighting and reflections on glass (there is one screen suspended over the hood & front windshield for example).

 

So I suppose if one designed a camera move that needed to go from the rear view through the 3/4 rear and side plates, you'd have to get those plates mapped into one plate and create a large enough screen to cover all those views, or hide the gap between video walls with a piece of the car structure.

 

On the trailer I posted on the first page, there is a brief section with the process driving shots around 00:59

[David Mullen ASC]

I will have to say, even though shooting the plates took a little work because of traffic issues in Toronto, doing the stage portion was one of the easiest shoots I've had for a driving sequence -- the screens did most of the lighting and the background, and we could run them again and again, we could reframe them live if needed, I even had a strip of LED screens with just the image of red road flares running across the screens that provided that lighting gag of the motorcade passing road flares. It was one of the fastest shoots I've done for covering dialogue in a moving car, and the most comfortable compared to being on a camera car and trailer in real traffic (something that director Gary Marshall once described as "the root canal of filmmaking.")

[Guest]

Which American city was Toronto standing in for? Washington DC?

 

That's the great thing about Toronto, it has nothing unique about it and can therefore stand in for any American city you like. :huh:

 

R,

[Robin R Probyn]

You would have to lay in the gun shots though...

[Jay Young]

I saw the trailer for this at the cinema yesterday, looks interesting. I'll have to catch the pilot.

[charles g clark]

Hi David,

 

Just saw it , its on Netflix here in the U.K. - loved it, great work!

 

May I enquire what cameras and lenses and codec you used on the pilot?

 

and also, how many hours of footage would you generate on a prime time show like this?

 

Many thanks

[David Mullen ASC]

We shot on regular Alexas in ProRes 4444 Log-C, 1920 x 1080 HD. We had a special set of uncoated Zeiss Master Primes from ARRI UK, plus regular Master Primes, some lightweight Optimo zooms and the 24-290mm Optimo, but we mostly shot with the Master Primes. Occasional use of Classic Soft filters on a few close-ups but generally shot clean. I don't know how much footage / data we shot.

[charles g clark]

Thank you David, I'm going to re watch it keeping an eye out! Was thinking about trying some classic softs on my next project!

 

I'm interested if 4K origination was proposed with the current push- as a dop do you see 4K arriving as quickly as the tv manufacturers might like?

I'm a huge fan of the Netflix originals but I had to cancel my 4K subscription because I was fed up with telling guests to go right up to the screen to tell the difference- even sitting 7 feet away from a 55 inch screen I can't really tell!

[David Mullen ASC]

No, there wasn't a push for 4K origination on this project.