Jennifer's Body Options

[Tom Lowe]

This could definitely be one of your bigger-grossing films, David. Seems to be a lot of buzz. But heck, there was buzz even back when you were filming, I remember. Paparazzi and whatnot.

[James Steven Bev...]

Boy, I am seeing commercials everywhere for this thing now.

[Chris Keth]

Boy, I am seeing commercials everywhere for this thing now.

Yeah, it's everywhere. I have to say I'm looking forward to seeing it. The movie looks much more in the tone of classic 80s horror rather than the current shock value movies.

[Tim Partridge]

Yeah, it's everywhere. I have to say I'm looking forward to seeing it. The movie looks much more in the tone of classic 80s horror rather than the current shock value movies.

I think the film seems much more post ironic, 1990s, like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Looks suitably slick and glossy, David. Love the matte shot also of the suburban street at night.

[David Mullen ASC]

Looks suitably slick and glossy, David. Love the matte shot also of the suburban street at night.

That's not a matte shot, I actually lit that wide shot... Here's a shot I took from ground level with my fingers blacking out the condor with the two 18K's on it -- the real shot in the movie was a high angle to get the lights out of the frame. No post efx.

[Tim Partridge]

Yikes! Thankyou for the correction, David. I am sure my initial response gave you a good chuckle, nevertheless.

The lighting and composition I think definitely illustrates your love for Albert Whitlock's classic work (though I am sure you didn't set olut to emulate that kind of look). I think those kind of unexpected but striking images really help elevate the material somewhat.

[Marcus Del Negro]

That's not a matte shot, I actually lit that wide shot... Here's a shot I took from ground level with my fingers blacking out the condor with the two 18K's on it -- the real shot in the movie was a high angle to get the lights out of the frame. No post efx.

David,

I just saw Jennifer's Body tonight in my film symposium class with Leonard Maltin (I am a student at USC). I must say, very nice work. I especially loved the wide residential shot you discussed earlier--how long did that take to set up?--and the "fly over" NFL cam-style shot across the school's football field (was that a fly-by-wire rig, or some sort of steadicam shot?).

I can't quite speak to how much I loved the story, but overall it looked and flowed great. Thanks for an entertaining film.

[Jack Barker]

David, do you know how and why the convention of adding blue gels got started to represent moonlight? I am used to it like everyone else in the world, but sometimes it looks a bit cartoonish, since we have all seen real moonlight, and it is white (reflected sunlight), not blue.

[David Mullen ASC]

David, do you know how and why the convention of adding blue gels got started to represent moonlight? I am used to it like everyone else in the world, but sometimes it looks a bit cartoonish, since we have all seen real moonlight, and it is white (reflected sunlight), not blue.

Well, moonlight is around 5600K, and since most night interiors are around 3200K, in relation to other sources, moonlight would be bluer in color.

But the convention predates cinema, when theater shows and magic lantern shows would use blue gel for moonlit scenes, and then early silent era movies would dye the print blue for night scenes. So it's been a symbolic representation, a visual clue for the audience, of night for a long time. It was particularly useful back when night scenes were actually shot in the daytime, so it was more clear that this was a night scene.

But personally, I pick the color of night scenes more on its psychological effect, and the visual design of the movie. Generally warm light is considered inviting and romantic, and cold light is considered discomforting and distancing, less friendly.

Also, in this case, there was a specific reason for lighting the street blue-ish -- the character first drives through a street of occupied homes with a warmish streetlamp effect passing over him, and tungsten-lit houses, then he turns a corner and approaches an unfinished set of tract homes with no streetlamps, which seems odd to him. And then he finds an empty house with candlelight visible in the upper window. So the blue-lit empty street is meant to contrast with the warm-to-white street that has working streetlamps, and also contrast with the small spot of warm candlelight he sees.

I sometimes light night scenes with warm light to represent sodium-vapor streetlighting and forgo any moonlight effect, but I find the problem with lighting entire scenes with a moonlight effect that is not at least a little pale blue or cyan is that all-white tungsten-lit moonlight just feels light a tungsten-lit scene -- in other words, when the light falling on a landscape or in the woods is dim and blue-ish, the audience just accepts that it's supposed to be moonlit, whereas if the woods were all lit with white light, some might wonder what the source of that light was because it's not as clear that it represents light from the moon.

However, it's also an issue of relative color -- if a scene is only moonlit, then I tend to keep the color very pale blue or cyan, not aggressive (unless for symbolic reasons) because deep blue would be too annoying visually for a long stretch. But if the moonlight is mixed with other sources then I keep it very dim generally (unless those other sources are also very dim, like a candle) relative to the artificial source, and it tends to look more blue in comparison with the other source. In other words, if you lit a scene with full-orange to represent candlelight, then even a quarter-blue color for the moon in comparison would feel quite blue-ish.

The other thing in this case, "Jennifer's Body", is that the director is a fan of Dario Argento movies and the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" and other 80's horror movies, and those 80's films often use a strong blue color for moonlight (uncorrected HMI) so we wanted to pay some homage to those 80's movies by using the same visual conventions.

Plus I don't consider this kind of horror to be realistic -- the genre allows more stylization and theatricality. My main regret on this movie is that I probably played things too safe and conventional. The production followed "Juno", produced and written by the same people, in the same location and with the same crew, and my first thought was to follow that visual approach for the dialogue scenes between the teenagers, very soft-lit and natural, underplay the horror theme. But now I wonder if I should have been bolder and worried less about how natural it looked. The tone was a constant debate during production, both internally for me, and between the director, producers, and me -- is this a horror movie, it is comedy, etc. I tended to light comedic dialogue scenes more naturally than the straight horror scenes, but there were some inbetween scenes where it was less clear to me how to approach it. My one general thought was to increase the level of blues and greens as the story progressed, to move the movie from naturalism to expressionism slowly, which is a common approach to thrillers and horror, that we go from the safe and familiar into dark uncomfortable areas that are more psychologically real than actually real.

[Jack Barker]

That was the longest, most complete, and best reply I have ever received on any question I have ever asked. Thank you!

[Blade Borge]

I know you've talked before about Bill Wages and his clever bouncing techniques, did any tricks you learned from him come in handy on this shoot?

[David Reynolds]

Thank you for sharing your experiences, it is inspiring to me.

Well, moonlight is around 5600K, and since most night interiors are around 3200K, in relation to other sources, moonlight would be bluer in color.

But the convention predates cinema, when theater shows and magic lantern shows would use blue gel for moonlit scenes, and then early silent era movies would dye the print blue for night scenes. So it's been a symbolic representation, a visual clue for the audience, of night for a long time. It was particularly useful back when night scenes were actually shot in the daytime, so it was more clear that this was a night scene.

But personally, I pick the color of night scenes more on its psychological effect, and the visual design of the movie. Generally warm light is considered inviting and romantic, and cold light is considered discomforting and distancing, less friendly.

Also, in this case, there was a specific reason for lighting the street blue-ish -- the character first drives through a street of occupied homes with a warmish streetlamp effect passing over him, and tungsten-lit houses, then he turns a corner and approaches an unfinished set of tract homes with no streetlamps, which seems odd to him. And then he finds an empty house with candlelight visible in the upper window. So the blue-lit empty street is meant to contrast with the warm-to-white street that has working streetlamps, and also contrast with the small spot of warm candlelight he sees.

I sometimes light night scenes with warm light to represent sodium-vapor streetlighting and forgo any moonlight effect, but I find the problem with lighting entire scenes with a moonlight effect that is not at least a little pale blue or cyan is that all-white tungsten-lit moonlight just feels light a tungsten-lit scene -- in other words, when the light falling on a landscape or in the woods is dim and blue-ish, the audience just accepts that it's supposed to be moonlit, whereas if the woods were all lit with white light, some might wonder what the source of that light was because it's not as clear that it represents light from the moon.

However, it's also an issue of relative color -- if a scene is only moonlit, then I tend to keep the color very pale blue or cyan, not aggressive (unless for symbolic reasons) because deep blue would be too annoying visually for a long stretch. But if the moonlight is mixed with other sources then I keep it very dim generally (unless those other sources are also very dim, like a candle) relative to the artificial source, and it tends to look more blue in comparison with the other source. In other words, if you lit a scene with full-orange to represent candlelight, then even a quarter-blue color for the moon in comparison would feel quite blue-ish.

The other thing in this case, "Jennifer's Body", is that the director is a fan of Dario Argento movies and the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" and other 80's horror movies, and those 80's films often use a strong blue color for moonlight (uncorrected HMI) so we wanted to pay some homage to those 80's movies by using the same visual conventions.

Plus I don't consider this kind of horror to be realistic -- the genre allows more stylization and theatricality. My main regret on this movie is that I probably played things too safe and conventional. The production followed "Juno", produced and written by the same people, in the same location and with the same crew, and my first thought was to follow that visual approach for the dialogue scenes between the teenagers, very soft-lit and natural, underplay the horror theme. But now I wonder if I should have been bolder and worried less about how natural it looked. The tone was a constant debate during production, both internally for me, and between the director, producers, and me -- is this a horror movie, it is comedy, etc. I tended to light comedic dialogue scenes more naturally than the straight horror scenes, but there were some inbetween scenes where it was less clear to me how to approach it. My one general thought was to increase the level of blues and greens as the story progressed, to move the movie from naturalism to expressionism slowly, which is a common approach to thrillers and horror, that we go from the safe and familiar into dark uncomfortable areas that are more psychologically real than actually real.

[Frank Discussion]

Those shots that I've seen are gorgeous David. The best of luck on the movie's reception.
Ebert has already said he liked it:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...VIEWS/909169996
And Rolling Stone says it's "Hot, hot hot!"

Thanks so much for sharing your journal and letting us ride along for your trials and travails.

[Eric Steelberg]

My main regret on this movie is that I probably played things too safe and conventional. The production followed "Juno", produced and written by the same people, in the same location and with the same crew, and my first thought was to follow that visual approach for the dialogue scenes between the teenagers, very soft-lit and natural, underplay the horror theme. But now I wonder if I should have been bolder and worried less about how natural it looked.

But I like naturalism!

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm not criticizing the look of "Juno", which was wonderful and appropriate, I'm just criticizing my own timidness sometimes as I try to find some sort of happy medium that pleases everyone involved. We started out shooting the movie in the high school, which was all fluorescent-lit with hardly any windows, which was hard for me to find ways of making it interesting. The locations in Vancouver seemed to suggest a certain soft-lit approach, and we started out with a lot of dialogue scenes. And with the same writer and producers as "Juno" I was never clear in my own mind how much they wanted me to continue that look, since there were some similar scenes, characters, and locations. I just wanted to please Dan, Jason, and Diablo, plus Karyn, and I spent at least a week of shooting trying to get all their vibes on the material because it was not clear in my mind quite. On the other hand, the original DP hired (who had to leave early during prep due to a family emergency) was known more for horror movies, and so was Fox Atomic, the studio.

But now I wonder if I should have stylized the look more, I don't know. I never really solved the problem of how to make those fluorescent hallways of the high school interesting. It was a bit frustrating because I had just shot "Assassination of a High School President" in a great old high school building in New Jersey, with a lot of character and window light, and now I was dealing with such a mundane location in Vancouver. It comes back always to this problem of doing modern stories, do you embrace mundane reality to ground the story in a recognizable world, or do you stylize it visually to make it more interesting to look at?

The truth is I question how I shoot most movies after I shoot them! But this was a tough one because of the two genres being mixed. Was it a character comedy with moments of horror or a straight horror movie with moments of comedy? Even when doing the D.I., the main issue was always how dark to make the movie -- at that point, I was pushing to make things darker but the director wanted to make sure everyone's expressions were always visible, which was tough in moonlit scenes, how much to open up the image. Around the time we were finishing the movie, I saw some trailers for a horror film that Dan Pearl shot, which was very high-con, and I wondered if I should have gone that route.

I like naturalism too, don't get me wrong, but I also look for opportunities to abandon it when appropriate. The natural lighting of "Juno" was pitch-perfect tonally and lovely to look at. This was one reason why my first impulse was to sort of shoot the movie like "Juno with scares", sort of build on your look and then twist it as the story goes into more horror. But that didn't quite work either because the story is not linear really, it's a flashback structure, so it had to start out in this mental institution, jump to the past crime that got her there, and then jump farther back in time to begin the story, but that was further changed in editing. So a linear progression where the look changes didn't quite gel in my mind either. So ultimately I had to treat each scene's need individually and decide how much mood to apply.

I didn't mean to sound critical at all of your work on "Juno", which was top class. You have to remember that we were shooting the movie just around the time of the Oscars when Diablo won, and I was sort of surrounded by the excitement of "Juno" and the people who made it, so I vaguely felt this pressure (probably in my mind only) to continue the tradition, so to speak. But then, all of Karyn's references were to 80's horror and Italian horror and certain art photographers, and yet the script did have a lot of scenes of people talking in high school hallways, classrooms, and small suburban houses, which seemed to call out for a nice natural look. But was that just me taking the obvious and easy approach rather than question that, subvert it? I don't know. It's tough because my natural tendency is to not "fight" how a location wants to be lit, partly because it's time-consuming and often it doesn't work to cheat the light too much. And also there is the issue of the acting, which in essence, wants and needs to be seen -- the problem with overly shadowy, hi-con lighting can be that it overpowers the actors in the scene. So maybe I made the right choice to keep it softer and simpler for those scenes. I don't know. I guess perhaps it's good to be challenged by tonally-mixed material that doesn't contain obvious clues as to how to light it. But then you're left wondering if you made the right choices.

[Micah Fernandez]

I was planning to passing on this movie, but now I'm intensely interested in seeing it.

[Ziryab Ben Brahe...]

I like naturalism too, don't get me wrong, but I also look for opportunities to abandon it when appropriate. The natural lighting of "Juno" was pitch-perfect tonally and lovely to look at. This was one reason why my first impulse was to sort of shoot the movie like "Juno with scares", sort of build on your look and then twist it as the story goes into more horror.

Well, I kind of agree. I like when the lightning changes as the movie moves into the horror and get's more frightening.

And indeed many horror movies tends to begin with a naturalistic approach in terms of the color and quality of the light. As the horror is getting closer, the color of the light get's cooler and the quality, more direct and hard.

[Eric Steelberg]

Well, I kind of agree. I like when the lightning changes as the movie moves into the horror and get's more frightening.

And indeed many horror movies tends to begin with a naturalistic approach in terms of the color and quality of the light. As the horror is getting closer, the color of the light get's cooler and the quality, more direct and hard.

Exactly, which is why David did a great job by creating that visual arc, thereby making the horror aspect much stronger.

I was just giving you a hard time David. How could I resist!? You gave me a perfect setup to comment!!

Personal and external pressures to do the right thing and deliver the proper visual tone can only drive us to do better work. If it had been so easy, you may have not done as well as you did. And it's not like you were indecisive, you just struggled (like every artist) to have your choices stay true to the material.

[Adrian Sierkowsk...]

Damn, I was 1/2 hopeful for a DP Rumble so I could take side-line bets between David and Eric :/

Alas.

It's also nice to hear that I'm not the only one who questions what I did on a film after-the-fact.

[David Mullen ASC]

I am prone to self-doubt a lot... every night my prayer includes the phrase "let me get better at my job" because I want to get better at cinematography, beyond the technical challenges. The trouble is that you can only plan a production so far and then you're still going to have to make dozens of snap decisions on every set-up as to where to put a light, what colors to use, and what amount of fill... and it's really at those moments where your natural skill and talent comes out, without too much introspection and reflection. And sometimes, I go home thinking that my impulse was wrong in retrospect, that I should have made a different choice at that moment.

I can make lots of excuses, of course -- tight schedules, technical delays, budget limitations, other people making mistakes that affected my work, but ultimately the audience doesn't care about excuses. And ignoring the technical mistakes, my real concern is more conceptual, intellectual... i.e. did I have the right general approach to guide my daily decision-making. It's a lot easier to be clear when the script is strongly biased towards a single look & established genre rather than a mixed genre movie. On the other hand, I seem drawn towards tonally-mixed projects, maybe because they are more challenging. Or maybe that's just the realm of medium-budget quasi-independent filmmaking these days, to take studio material and give it a slight indie twist -- on a smaller budget.

It's always a question too of how much to go with the flow, bend like a reed... versus stand your ground, be obstinate, stand-up for an idea. On the day, everyone of course wants you to be flexible and go with the flow, but with the final product, people forget about those moments of natural compromise and simply ask why the final product isn't better.

But that wasn't really the case here, I wasn't asked to compromise by anyone, I'm just wondering if I should have made bolder stylistic choices in lighting. One example is in the day exterior work -- my natural tendency, after years of shooting, is to avoid over-complicating day work but to just try and manipulate natural light. Things tend to go faster that way. But with the constantly shifting light in Vancouver, I started to get screwed because simple adjustments didn't really help (adding fill, taking away fill, adding an edge light, adding a silk, etc.) In retrospect, there were times when it would have looked better if I had simply flown a black tent over the actors and lit it entirely artificially.

I should add that I've been shooting for eight weeks now on this Showtime series, I'm exhausted, and yesterday Mr. Spielberg himself visited the set, which was stressful enough, but then while I was trying to make a dolly move within a small space of a hallway, he commented that the eyelines were too far off (which they were because I could not physically get the camera where it should have been) -- we fixed it on the next take simply by cheating the eyelines for the camera and ignoring the actual architecture, and Spielberg was right to make the comment, I just hadn't gotten around to fixing the problems on Take One, but I felt bad to have let him down, so to speak.