Eric Steelberg ASC

Hi Joshua, That's about it. Or you can try color balancing to daylight while using tungsten lights. That will also give you plenty of warmth without having to mess around with gel. Good luck!

I finally updated it after a year. Link below.

I had a great time visiting the students. They were very enthusiastic and had some smart questions, not what I expected from HS students. What a small world. I'm pleased to hear our visit was enjoyable for them.

Thank you Peter. Very kind of you. It's interesting you mentioned Virgin Suicides...that was a film Jason and I screened for camera movement and composition in house locations.

Job opportunity... I'm looking for a PA...really for me...to take lighting stills with my slr and print them to be sent in to the dailies colorist. I also need this person to do lighting diagrams of our setups as well. The bad news is that it is not a camera dpt position nor union, just an opportunity...and that it will only pay $10//hr. Must know how to use a digital slr and photoshop (camera raw). Job starts May 7th. If you or anyone you know are interested, please email me and let me know some background.

Job opportunity... I'm looking for a PA...really for me...to take lighting stills with my slr and print them to be sent in to the dailies colorist. I also need this person to do lighting diagrams of our setups as well. The bad news is that it is not a camera dpt position nor union, just an opportunity...and that it will only pay $10//hr. Must know how to use a digital slr and photoshop (camera raw). Job starts May 7th. If you or anyone you know are interested, please email me and let me know some background. Sorry to post this here...I'll put it in the appropriate section too.

As soon as I returned from WILL, I came back to LA having just been hired for a new film being shot in Los Angeles called 500 DAYS OF SUMMER. The director is Marc Webb. This will be his first feature but he's one of the busiest music video directors around. Smart guy and technically apt...we instantly hit it off. Our first conversation was effortless and made me feel at ease since communication, especially on a first feature, is critical. The film will most likely be categorized as a romantic comedy but is about a guy who falls in love with a girl who doesn't believe in love. The actors are Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon Levitt. We start shooting on May 7th for a very full 29 days, all locations. Adding to the challenge is a fairly lean budget but I'm glad to be back working with Fox Searchlight who I did JUNO with. We will be shooting 3 perf Super35 2.40 using Panavision. There are some fun sequences which call for use of 16mm black and white so I had a great time on Friday shooting tests at Panavision using color and b&w 16 and 35mm stocks on different cameras with different lenses...and all will be printed to 16mm b&w to see which looks best for us (the color reversal will be printed via IN so as not to project the camera original). Tomorrow begins our last full week of an accelerated prep.

All the camera crew were local and union (it was budgeted at about $20 million) except for my Bcam and steadicam op Jim McConkey. I took this film and left State of Play due to the fact that film had pushed repeatedly due to actor turnover and I could not afford to wait out a 3 month push in schedule. Below are the first couple stills. These aren't lighting references but show some setups. As David has mentioned, it is very tricky posting any images from set especially those which would give anything away or reveal the actresses and actors. This first one is one of our bigger grip riggs. We built a facade of a location in NYC that no longer exists in the parking lot of our offices/studio. Because the real place is in NY, I added a LOT of negative fill to replicate the tall buildings of the city which really only let in skylight. I only used the natural skylight and 12k par into an ultrabounce for the actors...all of which is hidden in this pic. Oh...the lights you see are work lights they turned on in the morning before the sun came up...they weren't used for shooting. Here is another of a dolly setup I'd never seen before. We almost always covered each scene with two cameras and this was one where the actors had to get out of a car and walk to a different mark about 20 feet away. In case it's hard to see, it's two dollys attached and one camera is on a slider. ... the wide of that setup...all supposed to take place late in the day so of course it was 4 pages and needed a full day to shoot and keeping the late day light look from morning till sunset was a bit of a challenge, hence the big gripping. I'll see what else is appropriate to show. The best shots have unfortunately have the actors in them...

The best thing to do is get a test role of it and shoot some test footage. You'll find that the 29 is noticeably grainier than the 18 but does have a softer color rendition and sees a bit deeper into the shadows. If the grain is too much you may want to consider Fuji Eterna 500 which has the grain of 18 but is a little softer like the 29....it's actually somewhere between the 18 and 29. I find the Kodak screenings not very helpful, especially for students/indie filmmakers, because they are usually shot with Primo lenses or similarly higher end lenses which students/indie films can rarely afford...and the lenses are a large part of how a film stock can look. So it's best to just get some film and shoot with the camera/lens you'd use. The look of JUNO, for instance, came just as much from the 29 as it did the special set of low contrast lenses Panavision assembled.

This is about 4 months late so I'll try to make up for it. On December 26 I got a call from my agent saying that WILL, a film I had met on about 7 weeks earlier, had got greenlit on the 24th and they wanted me to do it and leave in 5 days for 3 months in Texas. At the time, I was already hired to do 2nd Unit on STATE OF PLAY for Rodrigo Prieto and had had meetings and seen some tests. Faced with that films questionable timeframe, I had to back out to do WILL...a very very tough decision as I greatly admire Rodrigo's work. Less than a week later I found myself in Austin prepping. WILL was written and would be directed by Todd Graff who as a former actor was best known for his role as Hippie in the movie THE ABYSS. WILL is a story about an awkward high school kid (Gaelen Connell) who comes to a new school, is befriended by a similarly unpopular girl (Vanessa Hudgens), and gets drawn in to managing a school band headed up by a popular girl (Aly Michalka) when she realizes Will has a gift for music. He's enlisted to manage the band, create a better sound, and get them to the regional battle of the bands show which is an event as big to the schools in the local area as football is in Texas. The story takes place in New Jersey over the course of a school year which means weather changes, but not the kind one finds in Austin. Fortunately, we were a mostly interior film. My biggest challenge, and one of the reasons I wanted to do the film, was this battle of the bands concert called Bandslam. I've never done anything like that before and looked forward to the change to light big. I should mention that this film is largely musical...rock musical. Not a musical where people bust out into song and dance in the middle of dialogue, but where the actors play and practice live. Every one of the actors was an accomplished musician or singer so we shot much about half of the music as live performance with the rest being pre-recorded. All were excellent performers. During the musical performances we usually shot 3 cameras, at times a 4th if we found a place for the steadicam. Speaking of which, I had the legendary Jim McConkey on steadicam and B camera. All of my crew were fantastic and some of the best I've worked with. A camera operator was and Austin local Jimmy Lindsay. The were supported on focus by PK Munson and Sebastian Vega. These guys kept it sharp when we were flying around on a technocrane at the long end of the zoom or on a long prime 'fishing' on the steadicam. That leads me to the technical. WILL was shot on Panaflex's out of Dallas. I had a Millenium, an XL, and a lightweight for steadicam. The lens package included 2 sets of Primo primes, 11-1 zooms, a 17-40 Optimo for steadicam, and a 3-1 for the concert. 2 cameras almost always covered every scene. It was a long script with a 38 day schedule with a LOT of music to cover. We shot 2.40 in 3 perf. I had a camera PA taking reference stills for dailies and doing lighting diagrams. I sent the stills every day with the film to the dailies colorist. We used Fotokem so there was a bit of delay in seeing footage. I personally got HDCam dailies which I watched in my apartment where I had a JH-3 and a 24 inch HD monitor set up. It really made the difference for me. Night and day compared to the dvd dailies everyone else got. The shoot was mostly location work but also had its share of sets. We spent our second week on stage shooting a beautifully done garage interior where the main band gets together and rehearses. This set was interesting in that I lit most of the actors using $2 clip lights with bare bulbs of varying intensities. We had a few different sizes fixtures. They were absolutely beautiful on faces and could also be photographed as practicals. Those were supplemented by 3 4x4 kinos in the rafters as well as 2 custom overhead softboxes with 6 redheads in each, all patched into a dimmer console. The garage doors had tiny windows on each so outside those were about 6 5 and 10ks coming straight it. If I ever needed a hotter slash, we fired up a par can with a firestarter and some full CTO. There is much more to share and I actually took more pictures of the setups this time. I'll post some later, I just need to make sure they don't show anything as the studio is very sensitive about stuff getting out. That's it for the moment....

JUNO came out on DVD and Blu-ray last Tuesday. While I haven't seen the Blu-ray yet (player being fixed for 2nd time) they did a pretty good job on the standard dvd. One of thin things I'm most happy about is they kept it 1.85. Typically, a studio will just make a 1.85 film 16x9 in order for the film to perfectly fit HDTVs. The special features are pretty good as well including an insightful commentary by Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody as well as a bunch of deleted scenes, out takes, and a cast and crew "jam" (see if you can spot me). The transfer itself was made from the DI files at EFILM. I can't believe the marketing machine behind this thing. Starbucks is selling it at their registers in their own packaging and colors (green stripes instead of orange).

Yes, phew! Doesn't matter though, no one is more critical of my work than me. Watching my work is like listening to my own voice. It usualy takes me a year or two before I can watch something I did and feel "hey, that wasn't bad. I wonder how I did that?"I briefly had that last night. We were shooting on stage and I walked by the mixer and a couple grips watching the screener of JUNO on a computer and I stopped and looked for a minute and thought "hey she looks good there. What was that lighting..." Regarding the hatred of the film...it just shows far it's penetrated society and how many people have seen it. Any kind of emotional response, good or bad, is interesting to see.

Jean Marie, wow, that was a long time ago I posted those! I'm glad to hear there were such long lines. I will see if I can dig up the stills. I backed them all up to disc but that disc is at home in California and I've been in Texas for over three months on a new film. I return home Monday so I'll see if I can then find some to post. My lighting plan was simply to eliminate hard light and have the illumination seem environmental. I didn't want it to feel as if I was lighting the actors but rather the rooms, etc. Some locations I was able to do that better than others. The problem is that sometimes you need a little bit of a harder light to help define faces (cheeks and jawlines) particularly on the ladies. JUNO was difficult in that I frequently didn't have the space in a room to set light AND it's diffusion and I didn't feel like Kinos were always the right way to go for soft light. In fact, Kinos were considered my hard light! I remember the scene between Bleeker and Juno in his bedroom was challenging. That was a real room on the second floor of a house that was tiny. To get the backlight on Bleeker for instance I had the grips tape a bounce card to the wall up behind him and I put a source 4 across the room on a dimmer bouncing into it. But then of course I had to come in a flag the heck out of it so it wouldn't bounce everywhere.

Thank you Georg! Max is not the first person to have his criticisms and will certainly not be the last. One thing that has been strange to me about JUNO is that people either seem to really love it or fiercely hate it. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground.

Good luck and enjoy my crew! They were all wonderful. You're in very good and capable hands with Dave and John. Clothier has a deft touch with the camera. Please tell them Hi for me. I believe Steve Maier also came out a day or two. Very good.

If anyone is interested, there is a public radio interview Jason just did with critic Elvis Mitchell that you can listen to here: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt/tt080213jason_reitman In it he talks about the visual approach we took to the film. It's about 30 mins but a good listen.

Thanks guys. Yes, happy accidents tend to be those ones that can really add texture and character to a film.

Congrats David. I'm glad it worked out. Those guys are some of my closest friends. You'll have a great time with Dan and Jason. Keep us updated.

Finland, wow...I didn't know it would be there so early. I also noticed some soft prints, must be something in the release printing. God I hate release prints. I wish I could get every print out there to be a show print. Thanks James. Yes, it's been an incredible last year. Where before I would talk about films I had shot and would get an occasional "oh yes, I heard about that" whereas now it's "you did JUNO??!?! I LOVE that movie. I've seen it twice!" It really blind sided me. Glad you enjoyed it!

Everyone involved is pretty elated. I never thought I'd be at this point so early in my career. Reitman and the others nominated really pulled off something special that seems to connect. I'm almost just as suprised that the $100 million domestic BO is right around the corner! I don't know what I'm going to do once the pregnant teenager scripts dry up! Regarding Rodrigo's film, yes he had hired me and I was on it for a while, but unfortunatey due to the repeated delays and pushes, I had to bow out of shooting 2nd Unit for him. It really broke my heart to do so as he is one of my favorite cinematographers and the nicest person I've met in this business. Kevin McDonald was also very gracious and really seemed to know what he is doing. I'll be the first in line when it comes out. I'm now prepping in Austin on a new film I'm really excited about. It's called WILL, dir. Todd Graff. Back to the Oscars, I couldn't be happier for the surprise nomination for Jason. I've known him since high school and have been at his side watching his rise to the top. I'm really impressed that his fellow directors chose him to be nominated.

Thank you Jason. Those other types of comedies just aren't my style or taste. I need something in the film other than jokes to have enough of an emotional response to be able to light. I know that sounds really annoying and arrogant but I promise that is not how I mean it. I don't even think I could do one of those comedies if I tried...I don't know how to light unless there are motivated sources in the scene. I just can't light actors. wherever. I need to justify it in my head. I really like the exteriors too. I think the biggest contributing factors to those were the time of year so far north where the sun is basically perfect by being low on the horizon all day long, and the lenses. Some of my favorite exteriros didn't make the cut, but I really like using high speed stock (18 or in the case of JUNO 5229) outside during the day. It just takes the edge off the transition from light to dark. One drawback from doing that of course is the increase in grain but for me, the texture it provided really worked towards the tone of the film. Oh and I'm glad you liked the magic hour shot of her and the chair cause it was faked! The first shot on her face was courtesy of 2 Maxis and a Dino; the chair shot was done about 10 mins after sundown with almost every light working to recreate the sunset and ambience. Brad- I wouldn't say swamped, but there has been a measurable increase in script flow. The problem though has been that most of the scripts have been of the bright and slick comedy variety Jason just mentioned. There really hasn't been more than one or two dramas. There was one drama I really liked, pretty low budget, that lost it's financing the day after I accepted their offer. It's been somewhat depressing how bad some of these scripts are. Almost all are studio in the 10-20 million range, a few more than that. It's amazing how much will be put into a bad comedy, how little into a really well written dama with great characters. The dramas have been indie. And yes, JUNO was my first studio experience. "and I'm very curious how the financial and critical success has/will affect your future offers." Me too! Coincidentally, I just arrived in TX to begin preproduction on my next film, a studio dramady that I got offered 4 days ago which I absolutely love. More on that to come...

Wow, Tommy...thank you. It was really important for me to try to make it transparent yet help the story tonally.

Robert, I think you are referring to the early evening shot before she tries to hang herself...if so, no there was no enhancing filter. There are a couple of reasons for the saturation. The first and biggest reason is that the shot is underexposed about a stop to a stop and half. I shot it without a color correction filter on 5217 so amongst the prevailing coolness of the image, the red sweatshirt on Juno and the amber foliage really seem to jump out. I even think I dialed back the overall saturation just a bit in the DI because I thought it was too much. Right after that scene, the rest of the film is on 5229 Expression exclusively, so that beginning shot amid a film on a lower constrast/saturated stock would tend to jump out a bit. And the reason I chose 5217 for the opening was to get a bit more color since I knew that's when were were going to be seeing the warmth of the fall foliage.

I was at this demo with David. In my opinion, there is not enough of a visual improvement to warrant going from Vision 2 to Vision 3. Yes there were the improvements already mentioned. But for me, someone who has to sell the more expensive stock to a director and producers, usually with tests, I don't think there is enough to show. Also, what we were seeing was a print made from a 4k DO (digital original) neg lensed with the insanely sharp Master Primes (the technical best of everything, not exactly real world scenario), so when the stock goes through IP/IN the benefits will be even less attractive. This is the business side of being a DP which can't be ignored. However... I'm going to be shooting the 2nd Unit on Rodrigo Prieto's upcoming film and have seen the tests he has done with the 19 (which we'll use a lot of) with the stock pushed a stop, and it looks spectacular (the tests were also in anamorphic). In my mind, Kodak should be selling it as an 800 speed Vision 2 stock. Personally I would like to see a new print stock from Kodak. They made the 5218 so good, that I think improvements from here on out may become smaller and smaller.

Juno and Paullie are actually quite sharp in that shot. What you're seeing is a loss in resolution of the original due to the nature of a release print and the fact that they get so small in frame...the print just cant resolve enough detail to make them appear sharp. It was shot at the wide end of an 11-1, probably at about a 5.6-8 on 5205...so even if the AC was a few feet off (wasn't) they'd still be tack sharp. Thanks for the note about the 'unselfishness.' What is BAM?