Northfork question

[kaos1000]

Mr. Mullen,
Thank you for your time energy here on the forum.
I just watched (and enjoyed) Northfork. Upon viewing the special features on the DVD I was amazed at how much the team pulled off with little to no money.

My question:
Because of the time/budget constraints you guys dealt with, were a majority of the shots extensively storyboarded? Not having worked on a production yet, my assumption (from reading about Hitchcock, etc.....) is that the more precisely the movie is storyboarded the better.

If not.....do you prefer a director to have detailed storyboards to communicate to you?


Thanks much,

kaos

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, I actually drew the storyboards for the movie based on discussions with the director -- you can see some of them here:

http://www.cinematography.com/articles/northfork/

You need to be well-prepared to make the most of a limited budget. Whether that means shot-lists or storyboards depends on how you like to work. I did a dinner table movie once with 11 people sitting around the table for over half the script, shot everything with 2 cameras, and I didn't feel like drawing all those set-ups... so we shot-listed.

 

[akmeister]

Hi David,

So we shot that scene in the kitchen the other day, and I pulled the 85 like we discussed. I'll see the results in a couple of weeks. I'm shooting my own film in a couple of weeks and am going for a similar look. I chose Fuji 400T for my main stock because of its latitude and muted, low contrast tones. I just read that article on Northfork, and downloaded the film guide pdf. I saw that you rated the 400 at 320ASA, what exactly is that doing? By overexposing 1/3 stop are you just going for a deeper negative in the print, or were you exposing for a slightly softer look? Just wondering what it's doing?

Thanks,

Aaron Meister

 

[Filmosity]

I saw that you rated the 400 at 320ASA, what exactly is that doing? By overexposing 1/3 stop are you just going for a deeper negative in the print, or were you exposing for a slightly softer look? Just wondering what it's doing?

I'm also wondering how you came to that decision. Was it through tests, or did you just somehow magically know that rating it at 320 would give you the look you wanted?

Chris

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I always rate color negative stocks 1/3 of a stop slower than recommended by the manufacturer, if not 2/3's of a stop slower.

This is mainly a benefit to printing, not telecine transfer. Printing an image "down" slightly, let's say in the low 30's instead of the high 20's on your printer lights, gives you a snappier image with less grain and better blacks -- it's not magic, just basic cinematography knowledge. So right off the bat, I rate everything 1/3 of a stop slower unless I don't want that look from printing a denser negative. Had I not been using a skip-bleach or other silver retention process on the prints to "Northfork" I would have been rating everything 2/3's of a stop slower for better blacks.

Actually rating a 400 ASA stock at 320 ASA is so conservative that it's within a margin of error -- you may misexpose a shot within a few printer points of the final image (i.e. within a half-stop range), so just because you rated the stock 1/3 of a stop slower, you don't always end up with 1/3 of a stop more density on the negative. So it's more of a safety margin against underexposure more than a guarantee of overexposure.

For normal printing of F-400T, because it is a somewhat soft & grainy stock, I'd probably rate it at 250 ASA at least, if not 200 ASA. Not for telecine-transfer only, I'm just talking about printing.

Not all DP's expose the same way either -- even using the same ratings, we may end up printing a movie at higher or lower lights compared to each other because of the way we interpret our meter readings and like to print images, etc. So some DP who says he doesn't overexpose slightly may actually end up doing so on his negative just because of the way he uses his meter and creatively exposes and prints a scene. You always read these stories by some DP saying "I rated this stock at 640 ASA instead of 500 ASA and I was printing in the mid 30's" and you think "what the f--- ???"