90 Minutes in Heaven

[Miguel Angel]

¡Buenísimo! :)

[David Mullen ASC]

Thanks!

[Sean Simpson]

David, thanks for this thread! It was absolutely great to see amazing quality imagery paired with a candid walkthrough of your decision-making process and thoughts!

[Bill DiPietra]

I'd wanted to see this in the theaters, but it was in & out so quickly that I had to wait forever until it came to On-Demand. But I finally saw it last week.

 

Lovely work, David! I love the way you've perfected two very specific things: the color temperatures and your soft lighting. I re-read this thread to see exactly what you did you achieve the visuals and I was very impressed (as always) with the noticeable care you gave to every aspect of the frames. That's been evident in all of the films I've seen of yours, but - as I said before - you really took it up a notch with this project.

 

My favorite element of your work has to be the soft lighting. And I've always preferred the use of hard light. But I have to say that the way the light fell on the talent reminded me of that milky, soft glow that I've only seen from John Toll. Very beautiful.

 

At times, I did have to remind myself that this was a film for the faith-based Christian market (I normally don't seek out religiously-themed films.) A few directorial things that I wasn't crazy about were the voice-overs & overall story structure. I felt that the voice-overs were rather repetitious since the visuals told the entire story. I think it would have been a more effective film without them.

 

Also, I was looking for more of a classical story structure, like the conflict & resolution in a film like Born On the Fourth of July (1989.) But as I write this I am realizing that the Polish Brothers always go for a slightly left-of-center thematic style - and it was Don Piper's story. So I'm sure they felt a need to let it unfold they way it did in real life. Also, the idea of a "gradual healing" is much more realistic.

 

A few technical questions...

 

Towards the end when he is recounting what he saw in Heaven to his wife, how much of that was in-camera and how much was VFX? Also, one of my favorite scenes was the flashback of the car crash where you say it was shot at 60fps with some green screen. How difficult were those set-ups? The shots were so quick (and very effective) that it was hard to see how much went into the shot itself. So I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit.

 

Speaking of editing, I have to say I thought it was excellent - especially for the car crash. It went unnoticeable, just as it's meant to.

 

Anyway, thanks in advance for any further info, David. Great work!

[David Mullen ASC]

Thanks!

 

All the Heaven stuff was shot clean against a green screen and a vfx company did the work. In case they wanted to flash-cut to some Heaven faces without spending the money on vfx, I did a version (not used) of the faces against a day blue muslin with heavy backlighting, diffusion, and shot it on my LensBaby:

 

 

The green screen versions used in the film, pre-vfx work:

 

 

 

We had a short schedule so the problem was always how to shoot the two big set pieces of the movie, Heaven and the car accident. We had all sorts of interesting ideas about shooting Heaven in some beautiful location to be manipulated later in post, but it would never have worked for our schedule, plus at least on a stage, I can control the time of day in Heaven so that it always seems like late afternoon.

 

With the car accident, the problem was the complexity of the action, which we had to break down into pieces. We also knew we couldn't do the actual crash on the narrow bridge itself, it had to be done somewhere safer where we could build rigs, etc. We used a large parking lot and three 20x20 green screens end to end to create a 60x20. The accident was shot in sections -- the impact was one rig, the truck driving over the roof of the car was a second (requiring a steel ramp to be built inside the body of the car being run over) and the interior angles were another.

 

Here is the impact angle:

 

 

For the drive-over-the-roof moment, this was a B-camera angle:

 

 

 

To get the roof collapsing over the actor as the windows blow-out we lined up the angle inside the car looking up towards the roof and then pulled the seat and actor out, and shot the roof being crushed (with a forklift), then we lined up the same angle again with just the foreground seat and the actor diving onto the seat:

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I shot with a closed-down shutter for the accident, and most shots were also slow-motion, just because we see the crash a couple of times in the movie, as he remembers it, and we wanted the editor to have the choice of the images being normal-speed or slowed-down.

 

Probably the most amount of work for the shortest amount of screen time.

[joshua gallegos]

Saw the new trailer for 'The Love Witch' and it brought me back to the time when I saw 'How To Steal A Million' by William Wyler! It has the same feel and lighting of a color MGM movie from the 1960s, also mixed with way color was used in certain Vincent Price movies like The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Would you categorize it as a 'grindhouse' film? Blood and Black Lace also came to mind, it's a very unique look! Loved it.

[David Mullen ASC]

Partly by the nature of being a low-budget movie (i.e. it is hard to copy an expensive studio movie too closely), and partly by design, it visually straddles the line between glossy Hollywood studio fare and 60's B-movies and horror films coming from the U.K. and Europe. We looked at all sorts of movies from Hitchcock, Bunuel, Pasolini, Hammer horror, etc. though our main model for lighting was "The Birds" and "Marnie".

[joshua gallegos]

I was watching her films on vimeo and she reminds me of Bob Downey who made some pretty outrageous films! She has a wicked sense of humor, I think she's going to become one of my favorites. And she kind of looks like Tura Satana, she's hot! I loved this scene so much, I have to rent 'Viva'.

[joshua gallegos]

I used to review my favorite Grindhouse movies, was amazed at the authenticity. I found my old profile, brings old memories. Back when I was burning with movie passion. It's great that there's variety, I hate that all major hollywood movies look the same, there has to be more unique films out there. http://www.grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/User:Biohazard I remember watching George A. Romero films, and he was one of the most creative minds in the independent scene, wish there were more filmmakers like that who are completely audacious.