PlayStation2

This feature article originally appeared in Vol.9 No.9 of DV Magazine

On-set photography by John Nelson

A Walk on the Wild Side of DV by Scott Billups
Describing the creative process of any David Lynch project is best left to much better wordsmiths than me. The man whom Mel Brooks so aptly dubbed "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" has made a very good living from exposing the dark and hidden meaning in everyday life.

After working with David on his latest movie, I was beginning to shed my own conventions in favor of his unique and innovative style. His pallets are richer and denser and have far more texture than you're likely to encounter working in the homogenized 'safe zone' of contemporary production.
His disturbing reverence for the magical texture of smoke and fire is often used as context for the menagerie of shadowy characters he retches up from his deepest psyche.
From his 1977 classic Eraserhead to the psychotically compelling worlds of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, Lynch's creations both repulse and seduce us. Even his sojourn into the milk-bread world of television resulted in the hauntingly arresting underbelly of Americana known as Twin Peaks.
So ... when he ask me to shoot an upcoming commercial that he was slated to direct, I accepted ... immediately.
Knowing of his propensity for alternative methods of expression and his growing infatuation for digital tools, I expected to shoot on a camera that I've had quite a bit of experience on, the Panavised Sony F900 HDCAM.
Man, was I ever wrong.
During the filming of Mulholland Drive, David was looking for a small form factor camera to create content with for his upcoming website ( www.DavidLynch.com ). I had recommended the Sony PD-150 because of it's image quality and versatility when used in DVCAM mode.
The look that David wanted for his web series Rabbits echoed similar pallet preferences to those created by noted Cinematographer Peter Deming in the texturally rich Lost Highway. I calibrated the PD-150 that he'd purchased to a denser, more film like profile.
David's view of the emerging digital toolset take a uniquly artistic view. "It doesn`t really matter what way you work, or what medium you work in, it`s all about ideas. Every story, every idea wants to be told a certain way. Now with digital cameras, the really great thing about them is the amount of control you have afterwards to fiddle around and start experimenting and get even more Ideas".
So here we were, prepping for the world-wide media rollout of the Sony PlayStation2. A project that would eventually become one of the more heavily viewed commercials of the century, playing in well over a hundred countries including China, Japan, Europe and the southern continents. Nearly everywhere in fact, 'cept the good old U. S. of A. ... and David says that he's so happy with the look that he's getting from the PD-150 that he wants to shoot the commercial with it also.
Terry Wordingham served as the producer for the London based agency Great Guns. His take on David's choice of tools for this major international commercial took an unusually upbeat British timbre. "We were a bit shocked at the format choice initially. Then of course, if we'd wanted to paint solid yellow lines down the center of the road, we quite simply would have looked elsewhere, and perhaps gotten less."
Aside from the format, the shoot was essentially one of those full-blown, multi-day, Hollywood type productions that any big-time agency creates for a big-time client. Big sets, big crew, big gear, bigger in fact than a lot of motion pictures I've worked on. For the past fifty years, the 'classic' film crew system has evolved around the physical requirements of a 35mm shoot.
After several meetings with my key gaffer Mike Mikens, we decided that the best approach would be to just ignore the fact that this camera was so small and treat the entire production as though we were pushing around eighty pounds of Panavision.
Yeah well, at least that's how we planned it.
Whether it is the edgy surrealism of a whacked out Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet or Laura Palmer's lovely Twin Peaks, everything that Lynch creates has unusual seminal aspects to it. Our particular gunny sack full of unusual seminal aspects included flame throwers and spinning blades in claustrophobically narrow sets with impossible lighting scenarios and a hundred gallons of liquid nitrogen just waiting for showtime.
Then there was the script. To start with, it contained 24 rather major visual effects in 60 seconds.
THE SCRIPT:
It all started rather normally with a classic Lynchian character (we'll call him LynchMan) who enters a tight hallway by walking through an industrial strength flame. Then it starts getting strange.
Continuing down the hall the LynchMan (played impeccably by Jason Scheunemann) begins to hallucinate violently as the walls turn into a thicket of thorny trees. Glaring loudspeakers boom Lynch's own brand of stream of consciousness sound design as the camera maintains an eerie 'over-the-shoulder' voyeuristic presence.
As the LynchMan continues down the hall he meets a man on another dimensional plane, strange fleshy letters loom out at him and a mysterious pink woman floating through space signals for him to be quiet.
LynchMan looks down and realizes that his right hand is missing and that smoke is billowing from the opening at the arm of his jacket. As he looks up the missing hand smacks him in the face with a meaty thud, bores through his cheek and then forces itself out of his mouth before flying off into the smoky distance.
As though impatient with the pace of its tortured body, LynchMan's head floats off and follows the dismembered hand down the narrow hall toward a mysterious cloud of smoke.
As the headless, torso finally catches up to the floating head, the cloud of smoke parts to reveal another LynchMan looking back at himself. The smoke continues to clear and we see a long golden room were LynchMan is now sitting on a velvet couch with a DuckMan and a Mummy. Oh yeah, and the arm is now growing up out of the floor.
After a few beats the DuckMan turns to camera and quacks out, "Welcome to the third place."
Nope ... you don't want to be the person telling David Lynch he can't do something he's already seen in his head. I mean, the chance to work with people like him is the reason that we're in this business. He gives the people around him a rare chance to be creative on an entirely new level.
THE DANCE:
Once the script had been sent out to all the department heads, we started cross pollinating. Nearly every way of doing something made things easier for one group and harder for another. With a half-dozen departments each sporting a full crew, the resulting 'dance of the budgets' was truly a thing to behold. Left, right, left; left, right, left. The dance begins.
THE SET:
The unique production design of Jack Fisk called for hard slashes of light along the inside of a long dark hall. Set Dressing decides that multiple strings of Tensor lights lining the inside of the hall will do the trick quite nicely. Construction doesn't like it because it comes out of their budget and Camera doesn't particularly like all those hot light points. Left, right, left ...
Since the only possible lighting could come from the camera or the ceiling, the project's Construction Foreman Todd Young worked closely with noted set dresser Peter Jameson. Their eventual solution was to create a series of horizontal lovers that would not only create the hard slashes of light, but could also be angled as the camera moved to prevent stray shafts from hitting the lens. Left, right, left ...
Camera says fine, mounting the lights externally gives us far more control but now they come out of our budget. Left, right, left ...
"David deals with all of the different departments as blocks of clay" Jameson adds, "he just keeps molding and forming everything around until it starts generating the look he wants." Todd shakes his head in agreement adding, "You've got to be pretty confident in your abilities to step so far outside the box so often. I've worked with [Lynch] before, and no matter how far out he takes you, he always brings it back together."
Veteran special effects maestro Gary D'Amico has burned, crushed and blown up property in a number of David's projects. "I think my favorite gag was blowing up that cabin in Lost Highway" says D'Amico as he tightens the nozzle flange on the flame thrower. "Don't know when I've had so many gags that played so tightly together though. We've got gags here that are still playing while we're triggering another, and this tiny camera lets you get right into them. Lots of unusual vantages, should make for one heck of a look."
LIGHTING:
Key Gaffer Mike Mickens notes, "Since the lighting needed to help develop and define the urgency of the situation, we worked out a system that would allow us to animate the entire lighting rig. For the hall sequence we hung several dozen Peppers from a swinging pipe so that a small push on the rig would create dramatic cycles of movement within the set. The hall shoot was all about using a lot of small sculpted sources rather than a few large diffuse ones."
The second of the two main sets was all about getting practical 'special effects' elements to work seamlessly with digital 'visual effects' elements. As an over simplified point of clarification, special effects is where you blow something up while visual effects is where you make something look like it just blew up. Just about anytime you mix the two, you're going to get some spectacular results. Spectacularly good or spectacularly bad.
"The principal gag that ends the spot calls for these three characters to be sitting on a velvet couch in a long golden room. Without the throw or the budget to create a really huge set piece, we knew that we were going to rely on some sort of postproduction comp effect" says Mickens.
Chroma key in an environment as tight and atmospherically affected as this is nearly impossible. The best you can hope for is maintaining an edge to your foreground elements so that you can cut clean matts in post. By timing the background to be a 6K warmer than the key light, we not only pulled the character element toward audience but we created a rim that made cutting matts a heck of a lot simpler.
THE CAMERA:
The PD-150 is a great little camera but the field of view is unusually narrow. We fitted ours with a Century Precision Optics wide angle adapter over which we layered a number of neutral density filters. The short stack of ND's gave us an equivalent rating of around 100 ASA. With all of the pyro and hard slashing lights, it was crucial to ending up with detail in the highlights.
By making these small formats work for the picture you not only eliminate many of the visual clues that people generally associate with home video but you force yourself to actually light the scene.
One of the great things about some of the newer DV cameras is their wide latitude for calibration. By using a good chart (DSC CamAlign) and a the waveform monitor that comes with computer software like Adobe Premiere or Apple FinalCut Pro, you can tweak the gamma curve, histogram and color density range to create a substantial number of looks. A nice thing about the 150 is that you can save all of your presets on a Memory Stick.
"Every story, every idea wants to be told a certain way" says the spot's director. "With digital cameras, the really great thing is the amount of control you have afterwards to fiddle around and start experimenting and get even more Ideas. With this project we tricked the camera and forced it into a profile where the look approached that of film. Once we added those filters and adjusted the camera`s settings, the look started to get real pretty. It forced the camera to go to work.
CAMERA MOVEMENT:
In our little re-design of contemporary methodology the first thing we lost was the dolly and rails, since there was no place for either. After trying several failed conventional alternatives, Key Grip Shawn Crowell settled upon using a cable dolly fitted with an apple box to sit on. The Gaff crew rigged a boom light off of the back of the dolly and then ran a small Kino panel off of the front that eventually sat between my legs.
Crowell also built numerous plates and mounts that would hopefully give the little camera a more massive look. "Like every other department on this production, we were constantly adapting and modifying our methodology. Tiny cameras quite simply move differently than big ones so the rigs that we built were all designed to add mass and give a better sense for aiming at arms length."
"While there are definite benefits to the simplification that digital offers, I think that there still a few critical tools that need to be developed and refined", adds Lynch. "These small cameras don`t move cinematically, they`re light and flimsy. We need a really nice little StediCam and to see more tools like the rigs we made for this commercial, little stabilizers, little dollies and cranes to make them real smooth and cinematic. Then there`s the obvious tools that filmmakers need like follow focus, and more mechanical interaction".
CAMERA SETTINGS:
The biggest drawback to using a prosumer grade camera is not as much the resolution as the ability to perform manually, those operations which demand high degree of exactness. Auto focus and auto iris are fine for some projects but only the most adventurous videographer would rely on them for any type of high-end production.
Like most of the better small DV cameras the 150 allows you to turn off nearly all of the auto functions. There is however the matter of the focus ring from hell. I've never been able to figure out why the manufacturers of such quality gear continue to create a focus ring that never stops turning. It is virtually impossible to pull focus in a dependable manor.
CAMERA SETUP:
Perhaps the main thing to keep in mind if when you go 'off road' with the factory presets is that you've got numerous venues out there and they all require different image settings. DV for video, DV for the internet, DV for desktop, DV for digital projection and DV for film. (See Sidebar)
Even though we'd timed and tweaked the tiny DV format to perform at its very best, and even though the clients and everyone concerned was happy with the image and resolution, I had a SONY HDW F-900 HDCAM prepped and ready, just minutes away.
THE PREP:
The day of the shoot came much to soon for just about everyone involved. Jameson complained that the paint wasn't fully dry in the entry way so David went over and gave it a light touch with his finger. "Yep, still a little tacky there Pete, but a damn fine job," he said with that undeniably Midwestern twang. "It'll set right up when Gary hits it with his thing-a-ma-jig", and then he and I were off to other stages to see other sets.
After a beat or two Peter realized that 'thing-a-ma-jig' in this case meant Gary D'Amico's industrial strength flame thrower. "But that paint is five coats thick!" holler'd Jameson, "Who knows what it'll do when the flame hits it?" Without slowing his springy stride David turned and smiled, "Well Scotty, guess you better get that one on the first shot". It was starting out to be one of those definitive days that you live for in this business.
The back set was to be the room where the LynchMan sees his own reflection in a piece of glass. As the light level is raised in the adjacent room he sees through the glass to the three characters on the couch.
The walls of the this room needed to be replaced in post so we once again relied on splitting color tempratures to create our matt rim line. We timed the large diffusion panel to 33K and then brought in 27K Keno's for front fill.
In addition to creating the classic "store window" effect, the huge piece of glass also served as a barrier for the enormous amount of smoke that we were planning on pumping into the space where LynchMan was standing.
THE SHOOT: Day One
First shot up, was a tilt down from an array of flashing lights to point at which the blow torch blasts through the wall. Due to the movement it wasn't a shot you could just lock off and trigger remotely. So, while everyone else was enjoying their iced latties in the 'safety zone,' I'm in the hootch holding the PD-150 with oven mitts.
David calls action, the lights start flashing, I pan down, Gary hits the flames and damn if Pete wasn't right all along. That wall went up like a six foot match head. Even melted the small matt box that was holding the extra ND filters. "Kinda gives it a nice crispy look" remarked the director as he ran his hand over the now blistered wall. "That's just money in the bank boys, let's keep it."
While the art department worked away to stabilize the blistered set piece, we headed over to the chroma key set to see if we couldn't knock something off in the mean time.
The shot we were going for was an element for the gag where the 'girl in pink' floats through space. We shot it a number of ways; Girl against black and then girl against green, both on the sticks and hand held.
Since it was an element and was aligned in the vertical dimension, I turned the camera sideways for several of the shots. In the end it was a simple handheld shot against black that we used, not because of any technical reason, but rather because it was simply the best take.
The word from the Hall Set was that the protective coating that they'd just covered the entry way with wouldn't be dry for at least eight hours, so we started prepping the Golden Room set.
We had just effectively taken a good four hours off of the costume department's schedule, so while they started frantically wrapping the actor who was to play the mummy, we tried various techniques for filling the room with smoke.
"For a gag like this you're looking for a smoke source that has a short but dynamic hang time" says D'Amico. "Basically it means the element doesn't last too long and that it has a lot of texture to it. Liquid nitrogen fits the bill quite nicely and has the added advantage of not making you hack up fur balls like many of the chemical and combustion solutions do."
While many of the layers were accomplished by Gary tossing some liquid nitrogen out on the floor, the bulk of our gags were generated with far more control.
For the room where the LynchMan views his own reflection Gary rigged a 12" pipe on one side that pumped the smoke in, and another pipe on the opposite side that sucked it back out. The resulting swirls of highly detailed clouds were quite dynamic when lit from within by a single 2k.
The mummy showed up in a timely fashion so we fitted a blue hood to the actor who played the DuckMan, tweaked the lights a bit and fired away.
THE SHOOT: Day Two
Finally dry, the hall was first up on our shot list. Gary had beefed up the hole where the flame was to shoot through and Peter's crew had added a few more coats of flame retardant.
Having enjoyed myself so thoroughly the day before with this shot, I graciously allowed my Gaffer, who is also a very accomplished camera operator, to man the camera. After several takes (we watched from a remote video tap), David saw the shot he wanted and we moved on to the next set up.
Emerging from the still smoking set and noticeably missing a few singed hairs Mickens grinned widely, "Man! What a wild frigg'n ride that was!"
David was already working away at making the fleshy letters so the camera crew started setting lights and building up the dolly rig for the tracking shots in the hall. After a bit of experimentation we settled on an eight pound plate for the camera ballast and rolled out some dry runs.
The trick was trying to thread the ungainly dolly down the narrow hall without scraping up against the walls or letting our back heavy contraption tip over. "The beauty of rails is that you don't need to aim so you can just focus on the momentum and proximity" says Key Grip Shawn Crowell. "By the time we get the snoot and all the gear loaded on this thing, not to mention our rather hefty DP, I'm pushing three hundred pounds down a hall with only an inch or two of clearance."
We ended up putting tape markers on the floor for him to steer by and since we were shooting MOS, (Mit Ot Sprecken) I could call out positions as we moved.
We finished out the day shooting the rest of the inserts that would eventually go into the final composite. Many contained smoke, flames or some sort of dangerous element so it wasn't a set that you could ever relax on. The flip side is that there was always something going on so the client was never bored.
SOUND DESIGN:
Few directors believe more strongly in the power of good sound design than David Lynch. His own sprawling mixing studio is crammed with the state of the art equipment. Lynch's studio manager is veteran sound engineer John Neff, who in addition to a long and colorful history in Rock'n'Roll music production, has been mixing Lynch's motion pictures and commercials since 1996.
"For this commercial, David wanted to treat the track as if it were a small movie," Neff says as he punches up the base on the studio's 24 bit ProTools. "Most of the elements were created from scratch while David played synth for the music underscores and myself and a girl did voice-overs".
"We ended up with 31 tracks of elements and voices, some of which were pitch-shifted and reversed for that other-worldly effect. David's a big fan of reverb and we always create new acoustic environments for each of his projects. For this one we needed a small enclosed feel for the hallways and a spacious atmosphere for the Gold Room" Neff concludes.
POST PRODUCTION:
All of the takes were digitized through FireWire into FinalCutPro using a MacG4/2X500 computer.
"I`m a Mac guy" says Lynch with a big smile. "I like Apple, I like the way they think. They`re happy and scrambling forward in a really good way. It`s a really great thing that you can just pump your shots into your computer, no scanning, no conversions, no worry about matching back out, and you don`t need to deal with gate weave because it`s already rock solid. You can just shoot and then go to work in the computer."
The selects were then converted to uncompressed QuickTime file format where initial chroma suppression, gamma and histogram settings were made in a beta version of Adobe AfterEffects5.0. "I've now fallen in love with the magical AfterEffects" says Lynch. "This program has become my new best friend. I'm using it to build a lot of the things for my internet site."
Since the agency was in London and the client was in Japan we used WamNet to shuttle the rough cuts around. All domestic review was done using BetaCam dubs which were output using Pinnacle's, CiniWave board.

While the vast majority of shots were composited in AfterEffects, the final color timing was done in Discreet Logic's Combustion in order to calabrate with the agnecy's Inferno's.
Once a consensus of approval was reached, the director's cut and subsequent elements were burned to DVD-ROM and delivered to the client on DVD-RAM in uncompressed QuickTime at (PAL) 16 X 9 aspect ratio.

Although the commercial played in numerous markets in black and white as an homage to David's classic Eraserhead, the director's cut (which can be seen at www.PixelMonger.com/screeningroom.html) remains his preferred color/density pallet.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it is the source of all true art and science.
-Albert Einstein

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Scott Billups is an LA based filmmaker. His latest book, Digital Moviemaking is available everywhere.
(A sample chapter of his new book can be downloaded from his website at www.PixelMonger.com)