Frame & Reference Podcast - 163: "Mr. Crocket" DP Powell Robinson

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

This week we have my friend Powell Robinson back on the program to go into great detail about his work on the new film "Mr. Crocket"! Enjoy! Visit https://www.frameandrefpod.com for everything F&R https://www.patreon.com/frameandrefpod Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coast's leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs. Check out ⁠⁠Filmtools.com⁠⁠ for more. ProVideo Coalition is a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post. Check out ⁠⁠ProVideoCoalition.com⁠⁠ for the latest news coming out of the industry.

Hey guys, Kenny here. Just before we get started, I wanted to apologize for the month of not being here. The fact of the matter is, I'm lucky enough to have gotten a bunch of really cool documentary DP jobs. So I was doing a lot of that, I was traveling a lot. It was just hard to, you know, juggle these two things. But I've banked up a lot of great episodes. There's actually a lot more on the way. I just got to respond to all the emails.

So don't worry. Podcast isn't going anywhere. I just had a lot of work. Luckily, good for me. Yada, yada. But yeah, you're going to love this one. My friend Powell, he's incredible. A lot of great information on this one, but just wanted to say that up front.

And what else? I don't know. There's a Patreon now, if you didn't know. Patreon.com slash frame and ref pod. You can do that if you want or not. And if you'd like to know about the docs, I'm working on, I guess you can follow me. personally on

Instagram at KW McMillan because that's they're one of them sports related one of them is more social issues you know climate change food scarcity that kind of thing

but they're very cool you're going to like them anyway I'll let you get to it Hello and welcome to this, another episode of Frame and Reference. I'm your host, Kenny McMillan, and you're listening to Episode 163 with Powell Robinson, DP of Mr. Crockett. Enjoy. But yeah, no, I literally, I did have to look it up. I was like, I feel like I just, isn't it going to be weird if he's like two episodes behind?

And it was like, nope. full year, a year of episodes. Yeah, wild. What have you, I mean, besides Crockett, what have you been doing since then? It's been a weird mix of things. Back to some like really crazy high concept music videos. Did some like all green screen, heavy DFX world kind of stuff.

Shot a couple shorts. I've had two or two TV shows in development for a while now. And so those are just moving along. and planning the next features so got one this year and a bunch that want to shoot next year so hopefully the whole next year is just all you know movies

hell yeah because yeah I know like I was certainly dead up until like two months ago when I started this documentary I've been shooting and that obviously like pinballed into other work but boy it was slow for most people this year was no I mean

there were months just sitting around but it was usually like one month off one month back on and it was just like, it just felt so inconsistent and weird. Yeah. The, I can see that it. Oh, dog. Shit, you look better than me. I look like I just, I need to get a haircut so bad.

Um, yeah, I, I, uh, I'm lucky, I guess that I didn't build a lifestyle for myself that was unsustainable off very little income because I just haven't like, you know, a great career thus far. film that's kind of it's not great until it might suddenly be great yeah i'm just waiting for the shoe to drop where it's like all right well here's your first you know whatever multi multi multi multi thousand dollar gig and i'm just like all right all that's going in the bank and i'm not moving yeah absolutely yeah do you uh i literally just watched the crockett film so that's all i'm thinking of and that okay yeah let's say i'm ready i'm ready to jump in when you want to

actually like sorry i wasn't sure if we were officially no no it was just more usually i like we'll talk about other stuff first but i don't even i didn't watch any of your other stuff i just watched that yeah i mean i have it i mean all the stuff you put on your instagram looks fucking sick i will say thank you uh not that it didn't before but even just looking at it like yeah you really have had a whole bunch of really dope stuff come out yeah is it was it the go for it luckily i had a couple companies that were still done these really fun big music videos that carried me through a lot of the dead parts of this year waiting for movies to come back yeah because like how much actually i think that's probably

a great place to start is like it's so prequel is a music video i assume yes so i'm just clicking the most recent lot of the ears again like walk me through production of even just this like so it's a music video high budget music videos haven't really been a thing for very long so when you do see them, sorry, they haven't, they've died off. So when you see them, yeah, it's cool to see like, oh, finally someone puts them. And usually it's only for whoever, Taylor Swift, you know, someone huge like that. So when it's, when it's even a band you do or don't know, it's fun to see that's, they're still putting work into that. So like, walk me through the kind of conversations that go into a modern day budgeted music video. Sure. Um,

burst up. I mean, it's usually, it's, it's, what's funny is it's the same process as most music videos. It's super last minute, even when it's the big ones. Like, I feel like, you know, luckily with the ones that I do with the company, um, Blascove, the director Jensen, who did prequel and he does a lot of the falling in reverse videos. There's usually a lot of, um, more previous time on those than you'd normally get on a music video. We usually have like a week or two as opposed to like, sometimes, I mean, I've gotten called for pop stars where it's like, okay, we shoot tomorrow and you just have to like scramble and just get it. ready um you know nine lighting diagrams and just the last minute gear order you just you just run and go his because it's all the effects every single like we just live on a green screen for four days usually for his um there's a little bit more prep time for that just because i have to get onboarded into not only the worlds he wants it to light for but like his previs is very dense and there's a lot of you know he has an animatic that is every single shot usually chopped into the video prevised by his um his VFX company and so you know, it's a pretty easy onboarding process because he just has the whole video already cut

before I even get going. And so I just look shot to shot and like, okay, so if we're in this kind of environment, I know that like all we're doing is just one close up here. I can kind of get away with cheating this one thing and we'll save the huge 200 light setup for a different part of the video, which is helpful just because when you're jumping through worlds like that, it's easy to lose track. And, you know, that's the easiest thing to forget about green screen stuff is there isn't anything where you don't put it. And the VFX artists are sort of beholden to whatever you hand them. And so if you haven't already thought about what this whole world is supposed to look like,

it's too late once it's out of your hands to really go like, oh, but I meant for the sun to be over there. Oh, what I meant for this to actually have this thing here? Like, if it's not there and it's not reflected in the person, it's impossible for them to, you know, realistically relight too much later on. A lot of the contrast and the levels are very much based on what you hand them. So, does that make it easier or harder on you? Because you obviously, in most scenarios, we try to light so that it's consistent with the environment. But if there is no environment, do you just, does that just mean you go like, all right, this is what I want it to look like? And then VFX, is that what you're saying? Like, they just go, all right, that's what it looks like. Luckily, they give, like, at least with these, they'll give me what, they'll give me like, they'll give me like, okay, here's the space I'm playing in. And theoretically, if this is the space, then I need this kind of light, whether it's like a, it's like a 40 foot softbox overhead or is it actually a ring of hard lights? Is it only

side light? And I can kind of base off their pre-vis and then I kind of do my own thing on it, but it's still based on what they're hoping to do. And so when they get it back, they can then kind of tweak the background that they already have to fit with how I actually lit it. Gotcha. That's pretty cool. Is it just because he's a BFX artist that you guys don't attempt to do, for instance, like volume stuff? Or is that just prohibitively expensive? I mean, yeah, we're still within the limitations of music video world and also there are limitations still with, you know, volume spaces and primarily at least at, again, there are volume spaces that are 360 degrees, but at our budget level, which is still larger than most music videos, most of Jensen's coverage tends to span 360 almost in every shot. Like we arc every single frame for the most part or we're up and down or all around. And so, um, I think it's just easier for him to do it on green screen in some ways, because, you know, also the speed at which we can move. There are still limitations on volume balls with like, you know, the stuttering and sort of the image flicker from certain cameras that's difference than moves.

And, like, Jensen is a true, wonderful madman. And a lot of his shots are so visceral and have so much motion. I don't, we don't have time to mess around technically with would it or wouldn't it work on a volume. It's like, we're just going to, we're going to get it right on the green. We're just taking the person. It's so much, like, even the ground has to be fully redone. And that's part of the thing with the volume, well, you know, like, well, usually, on the most recent, like, prequel, we actually did build a ton of, of flooring and sets. Like, this is the one that's probably the most integrative of anything I've ever done with him, where every single scene had its own floor build and usually some, like, foreground elements.

In the past, we've done stuff where it's just green stream floor, green screen walls. It's all fake, which is crazy. but this one was at some ways harder because now back then I didn't have to really worry about lighting

the full distance of the stage because like as long as he was lit well and the green was keyable it was okay but now it's like now I have 70 by 60 foot

of set to light on top of the person and have to worry about the green screen so it's you know this one definitely was all in the craziest biggest lightings

that I've ever done yeah yeah I've actually been it's been it's been nice to have VFX tools become more and more accessible just even as a DP who edits my own stuff

I was doing this one shot for ad and the guy was like can we get wider and I was like it was night time right it was just the thing and I was like honestly I'm just going to make it smaller and then do the generative yeah and just make it look like that and he was like you can is that going to look fine

I'm like it'll look great trust me and then I get home and I test it and I was like yep looks fucking great. We are locked off. No one's going to notice. Just roto out where the guy walks and you're good. Yeah, the VFX thing is like one of those. I kind of hate and there's not a DP Orange so far as well who kind of hates the whole trend of Hollywood shitting on VFX and saying everything's practical now when it's all lies and there's still so much VFX and everything. He and I talk fairly

frequently about that and it's something that's come up honestly in regards to Mr. Crockett were like I saw an interview you guys did yeah the practical puppetry which is incredible in the movie I just I wish people would also

notice that there's a lot of invisible cool VFX work happening to make the puppets work and to make like Crockett's world feel seamless a bunch of little things in there that are you know really nice little VFX tweaks

and I feel like the focus is always it's always like well but the practical is so cool and it is but it only looks so cool because we painted on all the rods holding up the fucking flying puppet bird you know like that kind of thing

it's just luckily actually on this one there was less of that than there was on appendage but there's still so much augmentation to like the big seal you know that I don't want to get into spoilers but there's a bunch of stuff in the movie where there's fun VFX

scattered throughout that's right I just remembered it says I can't release this until the 29th yeah is that when the movie comes out no movie comes out on Friday this Friday 11th um but there's some stuff that we're like there was straight up wasn't a real thing on set

like the all we can dig right in if you don't mind yeah no yeah 100% the portal yeah the portal um effect from the beginning was something that wasn't pre-vised it was like in the script it said a blinding light you know opens up in the in the room and then he goes through and uh it i just knew that i didn't want to do the safe option which is just do like neutral or like cool just something kind of easy that anything could be dropped over later because i feel like this world is so vibrant and crazy yeah it kind of deserved something more wild and it was sort of a trust in the vfx process that i would give them this crazy color combo that i um actually so i took it from one of branded's main movie references so yeah one of the things that brandon did going

into this film he didn't give me many horror references at all the main one he's like let's think let's think about new nightmare as our main horror reference but in general i want you to frame this movie within the walls of menace to society and juice. Those were his movie references, and it was like 90s dramas and not horror movies. And I loved it because I've just never had that happen before as a reference for a horror movie. I've been given only non-horror movies.

This is fucking awesome. So I was watching those, and there's a scene in the beginning of menace to society where one of the characters is going through like a graduation party and it's like purple light through a window and red lights inside or some combination of those two colors. I was watching it for my fourth watch them. I go, oh my God, that's fucking it.

And so I came to set. I was like, okay, Brandon, I'm going to show you something really crazy. I have no idea if it's going to work, but just like, we've got to try it out. And so we built a full, like, I love my, my grip and electric team on this one of incredible. They built me an actual doorway of astorotubes that were basically alternating purple and red in different flickering colors. And it was like the first time we had Crockett in one of the rooms and we saw his costume and him in. it and these like this crazy purple red combo going and it was like no question like that's it we're sticking with us the whole movie this is the this is the look um but i love that it just came

from again a random party scene in a 90s drama that you know yeah would never have normally been a wreck for a horror movie which is it was cool well and i love how so i'm not actually a giant horror fan obviously i interview a lot of people who do horror films because horror films are fun and they get made a lot but i don't tend to watch them and one thing i love about this movie is it kind of I wouldn't even classify it as a horror film there's it's certainly shocking at times and brutal and like gory and five minutes in we're you know shoving stuff into people's stomachs and getting crazy you know but uh it gets pretty gross I'm very happy about dude that fucking the the bubble gag I was like I at first I

thought he was just going to pop himself and then I was like oh where's this going I was like that is so brutal talk about the perfect again perfect blend of the effects that no one didn't know what it is. So the head was real. Like the head blowing up and spinning back was real. And the thing that people might not have caught was actually a dummy head that they had two rods in it. And they were wiggling them around the mouth.

And so the mouth was like moving. And that was actually a dummy head to make the bubble like right before it burst. But to marry it back to the main shot, what they did. What they did was the guy did this incredible performance. He puffed his cheeks out. And he like, he veined his eyes out. He was doing it. And then we cut to the dummy shot.

And then we cut back to his shot. But what they did was just barely in VFX, hold the cheeks a little bigger, and made it just so that it looked like it was cutting in with the practical effect. And then they went to the head popping. It was like one of those things where you'd never know that it was this mix of VFX and real, but it's like perfectly seamless between all three of those edits. And it's, yeah, loved it. Yeah, I'm, I'm sorry, you were on a tangent though about, about, um, about, uh, normally, or yeah. But, uh, well, I was going to say to your point, like, I'm a big fan of Todd Viziri. And, uh, I like how much effort he goes through. to try to educate people on like how VFX is not I mean there was another guy on YouTube who did I'm sure you saw the series it was like a three part series of how

the bad VFX is the VFX that people are complaining about because they don't see good effects good VFX is invisible yeah so I'm moving you around my screen I was just trying to find a yeah no it's exactly and that's I think that's why people and studios have

started trying to push this narrative that like only practical effects are good because they're trying to not get caught in this BFX overall are bad. It's just, unfortunately, it was them who put that kind of stigma on it in the first place by forcing people to do too many last minute changes to BFX. And the BFX they did do don't look as good as they would have if they just committed, you know, right, beforehand. But they caught, they caused their own problem. 100%. And also, they haven't equipped with the, you know, failure of studios to properly make behind the scenes

behind the scenes feature edits you know they haven't equipped the audience with the right tool set to describe what they do or don't like so that feedback is not correct you know people go oh I hate VFX a lot of times we don't you know people be like oh they just did a bunch of green screen in this movie and you're like there's actually no green screen in it first of all second of all

that's not you mean bad VFX you don't mean quote unquote green screen And even if there was, you probably didn't see it, you know, and then the volume, because Disney wanted everyone to know about the volume for the Mandalorian, now people go, that's better. Or in some cases, that's worse. Or, you know, it's, yeah, it'd be better if the audience was slightly better equipped to explain what they don't enjoy. And the fact is they just don't enjoy rushed work. Well, this, the thought is to leads into one of my favorite things to talk about with this movie is that talk about bad effects. Often, um, a lot of vintage or analog videos. tried to be faked. Now, like, people just have their overlays in, you know, After Effects, and they try and drop, like, VFX, static glitches overcuts, and they try and, like, add a filter to make it look like old footage. And we knew from the beginning where, like, this, the Crockett show itself, it has to look real. This thing has to be, like, as close to authentic as possible. And so from the beginning, I was like, we're going to run it through analog. We're going to do it the right way. But it also had to be like, it was crazy. It had

to be shot the right way to actually look appropriate to be run through that footage. You know what I mean? Like, we had to think about, it has to think about, it had to be filmed on a sensor size and on Zoom lengths and at a T-stop that actually reflected the period that it would have been shot at in the first place and the style of lighting like the crazy like you know huge overhead ring of fire tungsten just studio blast that those old kids shows kind of had so you know it started there um and turn and then from that you know went to film ummmulation and then went back to my uh like a really great company my buddy runs it um called circuitpent TV, but they just do a ton of, it's all, the whole company is about CRT analog, not only scanning,

but glitch art and glitch works. And so he's built boards that can affect every part of the VHS image. They can affect, they can do multiple like dirty mixes of multiple feeds, he can glitch it any way you want. And now he has DMX and like timing control on the glitches too. So we were doing scenes for Crockett where we could figure exactly when the glitch needed to happen. We could just program the most ridiculous, heinous, like, purple static to cover the screen and leave right as Crockett had a line. And so this was like the one thing I was very adamant, couldn't be VFX. And this one was like, we got to do this the right way. And so we did. We ran every shot of Crockett in that world through a crazy CRT scanning process where it's like it goes in through VHS,

hits all of his boards. We glitched it out. And then we're actually filming a CRT screen. It's not like we just recorded it to a VHS tape and ingested it. I think part of why it works well and feels so real in the movie is all of our plate shots are old 90s CRT TVs and then you take a plate that we shot of the Crockett show on a CRT TV and you stick basically a recorded CRT screen

over a CRT TV and suddenly you get like the actual pixels from it look right when VFX marry the two. It's really it looks so authentic. It's awesome. I am so dark in here. Sun's going down. So you're telling me that the TV shots were comped? Yes.

All of the TV shots in the movie are all comped. Never would have guessed. The reason it works is because, yeah, if we had done, like, say we did all digital, you take our Alexa footage of the Crockett show and you just run it through some after effects filters and then you smack it over the play to the TV, add some glow, and you try and make it look right. You're still missing what made those CRT images so crazy. There was, like, the spread.

Pixels weren't that dense on those screens. Like, there was a weird spread to how the, you know, the diodes actually shot the image. out, there was color shifting, all this stuff that happens when you actually shoot one of those screens. And especially the glitch part of it itself, if you just take an overlay and you throw it over your footage, it's just a preset overlay not based on what your footage actually looks like that just adds and static and goes blah blah blah blah and goes away. This was using the footage itself to generate the real glitches. And so it's not like we just liquefied an image to stretch

and come back or whatever. It's like we had a designated knob and we would turn it and the image would go and then you know you'd turn it back and it would go back and you'd hit a button and it would send it into rainbow mode. But it wasn't just like overlaying the colors. It was taking the real analog image and separating it and shoving it back together. And that's why I think

every single glitch in the movie feels so authentic it is it is as close to us filming that on a TV as possible. It just wasn't done at the same time. It was filmed on a CRTV and it was actually through a VHS player just six months apart. but when you marry the the 6K plate of this the glitched analog image over the Alexa plate of a TV on set, the, you know, it feels right because it's the right kind of iod lining up and, you know, over the image. It's crazy. It was sorry. I just, I like me and him, Danny at Circuitment, we've been nerd out about this for months now. So I'm just happy to finally be able to talk about it. Oh, for sure. And also like you going on rants is better than me going on rants. No one listens to this fucking show from me. Uh, but, uh, but, uh, Yeah, I mean, it looks great.

Did I ever tell you about my friend's movie, Dude Bro Party Massacre 3? Yeah. Yeah. So like that, the version they did, which would have been like 2014, was they just put the,

they recorded the tape based, or they shot on a red, but they put it on a tape, put the tape player, put the VHS in the VCR, and just played it back and recorded it to a different tape player, but they just hit it with baseball bats.

Yeah, very inelic. See, this is the non-disaster. This is a non-destructive way. And he has a whole ecosystem now. So if you're looking to do this, circuit bat TV is absolutely the place to go for. Because the control, even that he's developed since then he's rebuilt the boards

and they're fully time-coded now. And so you could program an entire live concert performance like to be and and you got different glitches hit on the beat every time. It's incredible. So that's so cool. We went ham on the movie. Well, yeah, that's so cool. The thing that always bugs me up, you know,

after I think we are actually exiting the film emulation era and now squarely are going into the analog era or whatever you want to call it. People really seem to enjoy like I see girls at bars, you know, young, you know, like young, not young, but like 22, you know, with like handy cams and little pocket digit cams and stuff. Like all that's coming back. And, uh, but the thing that always bugged me about film emulation was exactly what you were saying. It never came from the image. It was just grain slat. It was just a noise. pattern. And it never felt organic. You'd have to go to fucking live grain to get them to do it for real. Yeah, the best, I mean, that's, that was the magic of how, like, so Danian Van der Kroeson is just one of the best colorists ever. He's who did Kroket, the

actual finishing grade. So we, we kind of had two colorists. That was the other fun part. A buddy of mine, Jared Rosenthal, did the actual pre-grade on the Crockett show footage that went to the VHS because it had to happen way before we hit, you know, obviously finishing. He had to get all the comps done first. But

he did like a really good 70s film emulation on the Crockett stuff that sold extra well because it then went through to VHS and we saw that emulation how we're used to watching it. And then you cop that in and then you take what Damien did which was he actually had developed like a 90s lot for us as well as a 90s grain structure that we used throughout the whole movie that was mapped really well

to different parts of the image like shadows highlights and mids in a different way and it just gave it it gave it a really authentic kind of lived in feeling that the movie the movie needed that we were fighting a very odd tone it's like an it's like a mid 80s horror movie that's set in 90s philadelphia but you've then got a lot of people saying but you also need to make sure it looks modern and expensive so the very interesting tone is a deepie to try and balance because you've got like the producing the production needs the directors wants and then like how to actually enact all of that. And it was a really interesting challenge to try and, you know, I think the 90, like, it's all you're saying. You can't smack a 90s lutt and a 90th grain and approach it that way without actually exposing the image to sort of be that way as well. And so I watched Crockett back and a lot of the lighting choices we made. It doesn't even feel like myself. Sometimes it's very weird. We were living so deeply in the worlds of like I said, Metacist Society and Juice. We were adhering to like so many of the like the hyper blue hard edge moonlight and like other things that we've been there that if we hadn't done that and then you tried to work in that kind of vintage grade to it it wouldn't have worked as well and I think that's one of the things Damien did so beautifully like he had to hit this mark right down the middle and so he had developed this vintage like the sort of retro look that he managed

polish in a way that never stepped into being like a joke like the movie I don't think the movie's look feels like a joke of that no no it's just it just sort of feels hopefully of era enough to make you feel like you're watching maybe a 90s film. Well, that's what I was kind of saying about it not feeling like a horror film is not that horror films always look cheap or whatever, but it's like

I don't it looks incredible. It looks incredibly polished. It does look like I was actually going to ask about the colored lighting and stuff because that's certainly even keys are yellow, they're not tungsten. Oh, I got some more. Yeah, I got so many funny other things about that, but yes. Perfect. Keep going.

But all of that made it feel very not unique in a way meaning like nothing else looks like this but just of itself you know it felt to the tone of the film was perfect but the other thing

that I think helped the thing I was going to say earlier was you're a weird sick part of the audience I bet roots for Crockett so it's not even a horror film you're sitting there going yeah get them fuck dad yeah yeah yeah yeah

Yeah, absolutely. Man, Elvis is just awesome to work with. Like a lot of what we did later on is inspired by choices he was making, which I'm not so happy to talk about. But yeah, I mean, it was such a thing where we were watching these 90s films. And every day they made fun to me because I was living with my Gaffer, my key group. We all got an Airbnb together in Philly because it's the only way I could afford to bring my hometown crew with me on this one because it's still a smaller movie. I mean, I'm glad we made it feel like it's maybe not, but it was.

and so every day they'd walk in and they wouldn't even look at the TV they'd like, it's a juice, isn't it? I was like, it's a juice again. I was like, I was just letting that movie seep into my consciousness every day. And so, yeah, there was just so many bold choices made in that, like, the 90s era of like,

when film, true film could take such crazy saturated players in a way that might clip a digital sensor, they had these rich, luscious sort of tones. And so, you know, how do you make a horror movie that also has those? it definitely had to be we had to really think about it going into which scenes we were allowed to flex on

and which ones we couldn't because you don't want to do it in a scene that it'll take away from the scene and so a lot of the dramatic moments we wheeled it back, we went for more neutral stuff or at least things that were really based off the practicals in the rooms

but we always wanted this feeling that when Crockett was showing up Crockett's bringing his world with him a little bit which is why the red and purple crazy splash of color cuts through every environment it's in like you've got the sort of still saturated blue

but like the blue moon and like all the sort of earthy tones of the main character's house but like very little color otherwise and like during the day the walls themselves are easing sort of like I would just a neutral beige just warm tone there's not a lot of pop to it on its own

and we wanted to lean into this like every time Crockett shows up shit goes wild and so even in the First scene, the opening cold open, the opening cold open, that is what they're called. Good English for everyone listening. It, yeah, yeah, totally. We set a grade for it and then desaturated the first half.

So that before Crockett shows up, it feels like a blanched, bleached version of it. And then Crockett shows up and when the lights start flickering, we use that to hide basically a keyframe on all the saturation. So as the lights start to flicker, all the saturation pumps up. So when it cuts back to the shot of the kid, he's now got this like golden light on his face. The wall behind him is like blood, rent and vibrant. And it's like, Crockett just brought some bullshit with. Yeah.

And it was just a fun, it was a fun balance to find because if you go too far and you make something too bright and colorful, it doesn't feel scary. Um, but he's a character who wants to be bright and colorful. And so it was like a really, it was a really fun challenge to find when we were allowed to juice it and when we couldn't. Yeah, juice it. no pun intended yeah he i mean yeah at the end of the day cock it wants to be a dad you know yeah um yeah so what were you guys doing when you were doing the more like because when we talk about like everything being really saturated and whatever it doesn't ever look unnatural like i don't know like an accident or something so how how are you like choosing you know these warmer

keys to look good and not just like piss yellow or whatever like was there like a specific something you were dialing in yeah so my my my gaffer Nate Thompson he um we have a very specific workflow when we don't have a DMX board and said he's got like a little iPad vest thing and then he can control the lights from so he didn't have to sit in a monitor and he's like typing on his iPad and like just able to he'll just listen to me as I'm commenting to myself and he'll just start like dialing little things casually while I'm complaining about some part of image I don't like until, you know, I don't realize he's subconsciously just sort of been like fixing stuff that he's overheard me talking about. But, um, we'll, we'll look at the

scene to start. And a lot of it was based on the practicals we were given. That was kind of the, the coolest part was Michelle Patterson, the production designer. We did appendage together. We've known each other for a long time. And she knows if she gives me lamps, I'm going to use the shit out of there. And a lot, a lot of these lamps had very, because they were a more, a vintage design, thicker, almost muslin-based shades on them. And so, naturally, what was coming out of them was already warm. And so I'd never bounce to fix that. I was like, if it's going to be warm, I'm just going to say, this practical wants to be warm,

and now it's warm. And I also think, I spent so much time in music video land, lighting every type of complexion, height actor, every form of person you can imagine in terms of talent. And one of my favorite things is that I feel like in a vanity ethnicity, darker skin tones often reflect warm light very well. And sometimes a lighter skin tone like mine might eat it up and turn it a little greenish or skew it in a weird way. But a darker complexion might just take it and it'll warm itself up a little bit more. And you get a really, really lovely warm tone out of it. White people are annoying to color correct.

It's tough. Yeah, you get the skin tone pushing in one way and it doesn't. There's only a thin world where we're. very pale complexions want to land. And so I loved but I just had experience while playing with different kind of color lights in that situation. And so I just knew this was, we didn't want to push things too cold, I think, ever, except for when it was like blue rim moonlight.

It wasn't going to affect skin tone too much. And so that was a big staple for us. Like 90s, you know, honestly, since the 70s to like almost through the 90s, vibrant blue moonlight was the way to go. Like HMI's with full blue on it. You watch some of these movies and there's like a blue like Hellraiser, but that was intentional. But like even again, a drama like juice,

he's walking down an alley and there's a blue fucking laser beam down the alley that's supposed to be the moon. We have to do it. Like it feels unnatural. It feels staggy. It feels fake. That was part of the time period. So we're going to do it. And so we did. All of our moon is like blue as fuck. And it

it's one of those things where I watch it back. I'm like, that doesn't really feel like what I'd normally do. But it fits. It fits the movie, so we're just going to do it. And it sort of just wanted to work itself out. I feel like the style Brandon set out for us and then the practical that was given by Michelle and then what Crockett brought to it, it just all sort of wanted to fall into place. All that said and done, the reason it all doesn't feel too forced is Damien, the colorist, finishing it out, really knew how to massage this in tones into a very dense place. It didn't, feel digitally pushed like it all feels like it sits it would sit on a film print about the same way and so none of it ever clipped out so hard it looked like we just

like burnt the sensor on like an ASM do you know what I'm like there's times when you're shooting with a smaller digital sensor you shoot a saturated LED and suddenly you used to get weird clipped colors and we made sure to not clip it on set but he also knew where to not push it too far in post where we gave him

probably 120% of what ended up in the actual edicts he was able to dial it back into a more analog feeling place. Sure. Yeah, the, I can't remember why I got excited.

I was just about it. I was like, ooh, and then it went away. But what was your lighting packs? Because obviously on it on a, not that it was a tiny budget, but a smaller budget thing.

You know, so you got to have an economy of motion, an economy of gear and whatnot. Yeah. So we had, we had two. Yeah, we had two sort of setups ongoing.

Because the stage, the way it worked with production, we set up Rocket World the happy version first and we had to shoot it out before we fucked it up and so we built a Michelle built this incredible kids show set and then we talked

for days about how I was going to like build that sort of overhead tungsten array to not only look good in camera but also on camera when you pull back and you see it like in world because there were plenty of times where you see the whole studio lighting ready So we had to make sure it worked for both things. And so we had ongoing like 30 tungsten lights that just lived on the show because they were

just rigged the whole time to a rat pack in the ceiling. This is one of the coolest things we got to do. So normally a lot of people in our situation were to lay back to access to hand dimmers and things. But because of our brilliant Best Boy Electric and also Nate, my Gaffer being very good with like his rat pack and controlling it through Luminar, we got a 26 channel rat pack box that we hung in the ceiling, fed all the tungsten lights into it and ran a little, a little, you know, a wireless receiver. And so we sent 30 tungsten lights to the iPad. And so he was like digitally controlling all these tungsten units.

And so they were all like everything in the ending in the hell world, we were like, we thought initially maybe we should go for like putting tubes on the ground and making like they'd cover it with VFX fire later. Right. Flame effect. Everyone loves flame effect. We were worried that was going to kind of box into a corner and like we wouldn't. I don't know, it might also bump the VFX toss so much, it wasn't worth it. So we were like, what would happen? Like, if you were, if you were to take Crockett's real set and then someone just, like, dropped a bomb in it, what would happen? And because that's kind of what it looks like in there.

It looks like someone dropped the fucking, like, a bomb through the ceiling. It blew a hole in the roof and the whole set exploded. It's kind of how it feels. And from the beginning, I'm Michelle, like, it's got to be smoky. It's got to be like red and like it's all on fire, but not with real fire. And so we were thinking, when you know, when you put upton lights, they'd get warmer if they get lower in intensity. And so if we were to lean into the idea of what would happen if you dropped a ball on set, all these lights wouldn't work properly anymore. And so it was like every tungsten light had a, I was on a pulse or dimmed to like 50%.

And so through the ending, that's why that whole world feels like it's kind of constantly shifting and swirling and like nothing feels real. It's because every single tungsten light through the entire ending is just on an oscillation. and they're all on different speeds and so every single light is at a different speed oscillating and it never goes to 100 so we never got too neutral again and then in camera we balanced

I think I balanced like 7,000 Kelvin in camera or something so we took tungsten and we made it like ultra tungsten and so then like all these the sudden you had this weird thing we're like is the world on fire or is it just the stage lights

and you kind of didn't know and that's sort of like what Crockett's hell is like is this hell is this hell is this still a big play? Is this a stage show? Like, we don't know what this is. And we kind of wanted to have him to have this, like, evil circus ringleader effect, you know, where, like, he's got his, like, his circus lights overhead, but they don't really work anymore. And we actually got our electric team and our

grip team got so into it. They were like, we have the coolest idea. And so we walk in and they messed, like, they can't did some of the rails. So, like, the lights were hanging at angles now instead of, like, how they had been. And they dropped lines. Like, they had perfectly spool lines of the whole thing. But for the Hell World, they just started, like, cutting the ties so the cables were hanging from the ceiling and, like, the ropes were all askew. And everyone got so into it.

And so that was, like, one package was just dedicated, all tungsten, permanently on a rat pack to Rocket World. And then with us, we had, like, a genuinely pretty small breakout kit. We had a lot of night exteriors in the movie, like, a ton. But I'd initially been, like, you want to see up and down, like, seven city blocks. I need a balloon. I need a balloon. There's no way to do this without a balloon.

and through the power of friendship and creativity, we trimmed down just how wide a lot of the shots were so I could do it with a more, not traditional approach, but honestly a more practical approach, so I'm going to, I'll phrase it. We took all the unused tungsten lights from the set, and we just put them on stands with a ton of branchos, and we just started blasting houses, like, not gracefully in any way,

just like a student film taking a 615 just aiming it out of house and we just started to do that we was like fuck it blast that house blast that house and we didn't put enough branches that it felt like it was coming through trees and it didn't really feel as just obvious but so much of the exterior of this movie are just with us being like fuck it blast it and I have some photos I can I can maybe even send you later that are like oh just rows of old mole lights on the side of the road with seven different layers of branches in front of them so it just felt like this weird texture streetlight hitting all their

exteriors. And then we had our LED stuff. So we had a couple of vortexes. We had the go-to. We had a couple of light-sock Duplo 40s. I used those duplo 40s everywhere. Those are just the indie lifesaver.

Lightmat Spectrum. And my, like Afri and I have fun love with the Astera hydras. I've got a pack of four of them. They're great. They are. The best accent light ever. They can go anywhere,

but the right quality to, like, do a specular ping in the background. And there were times where, like, in Hellworld, we lit the back of the set with just like one of those off in a quarter, just raking down like a 40-foot wall just to catch, like, not to expose the wall, just to catch the specular stuff going down the wall. And, like, you know, it's just so tiny, you can just plop them, you know, we have plopping hydras everywhere. And what else do we have?

Oh, I mean, the Nix bulbs. Nix bulbs are the go to for on location stuff. That's how we got a lot of our super dialed, you know, all these practical colors. Like, we had a nice lamp and it looked warm already, and we were like, but if we just warm it up more. And so we often would lean into what it was already doing because we had the Nix bulb control. And we had a couple HMIs, but we, it was slim. I mean, this movie was slim. I think I had an M18 and a Joe Lico.

And so, you know, we were working with not a lot. And it kind of had to be that way because we were doing so fast. We didn't have time to set up for a lot. And we weren't living in scenes like, we didn't have a day where you just did a two-page scene in one room where it has to stay consistent all day. We were doing like 30 shots in a day, 35 shots a day. And so you're never in a room long enough to worry about consistency. So we kept the package kind of small.

Luckily, again, our production designer gave us so many elements to play that It was like we found this perfect lace curtain for this. One of the things that we noticed in a lot of these 90s films was there's some texture between the outside and the inside because they always had beads, curtains, lace. They had so many different layers in front of these windows. So all of our windows are usually multi-layered in this, which is how we got away with like, we developed a tactic for lighting the windows where we knew we'd be going through major in summer's bedroom sets, which were builds. and the hallway, which was a build, and then it connected to the real house. And there's literally scenes where you can see into the actual hallway and into one of the real bedrooms from the hall, but we weren't allowed to shoot in there.

And so we had to match everything from there to there. So, like, we are approached to lighting the windows on the stage. We actually had to match it to real life, because if we didn't light them the same way, you might think that was the stage instead because we were in a very small town in Jersey and there weren't a lot of streetlights. couldn't see shit outside the practical location windows. So it looked as dark as a stage would. So we had a tactic of you take a vortex on a hard mode and you tilt it up.

And so it hits the top of the window. And it like basically casts a little moonlight gradient coming down. But it leaves the bottom open with no color on it to then hit like a streetlight. And if you don't give the separation, we were noticing on our first couple of days, we had the mood hitting the whole window and the tungsten hitting the window and it just mushed. You know what I mean? Like you just got this weird color blend. And so we started to do things where we would use the voice.

cortex, hard mode to really sculpt only to like a corner of moon, put a brancho in front of it, and then use a tungsten to hit the other not lit up corner. And so the whole window was exposed, but it was just this interesting color graded across every single window. And with enough branchos, we did it on every single window for the summer slash major house. And you just can't tell which is where or when, because it all matches. Which is a weird little fun system we developed. And we would start putting like Knicks bulbs five feet away from the window so it looked like a street lamp outside. even though it was just a Knicks bulb, just hanging out on its own. And as long as he didn't rack focus to the background, you couldn't tell.

If you did, it looked really stupid. But luckily, we never did. Yeah, we had to get creative because it was slim. That's honestly the reverse of a trick that I stole from something. Now I'm going to steal that one, too. Because I literally just did something like that last week for like an interior hotel scene. And yeah, it turned into mush. And I just kept at a certain point, I was like, I can't.

can't keep fighting it. Just let it hit the ground. Fuck it. I can't remember who it was. They were saying they had a lot of good luck faking daylight by shooting a super hard light into the bottom of the thing to suggest sunlight. And then they would just put like an astera tube above it so that the soft light was actually affecting the interior. But the image of it looked like a like a hard skip or like it was the sun. And I was like it's a good idea. Yeah, one of the things that we also wanted to try on this one, because we knew we had a lot of daytime scenes in the stage bills for the bedrooms, but no, obviously, tiny budget. We didn't have any backdrops. Like, we'd have no, you know, the vinyl backdrops you can backlight. So we had to figure out a way to see out. And, like, it was just, there were shears. But, like, even if you just light up few years, you talk the thing out there. And we're like, how do we simulate that there's something in the distance that's hotter than what the, like, my biggest pet peeve is smacking. diffusion flat on a window frame and then just shooting a light into it because that's not how I'm guilty works ever and I oh I used to do it all the time I I still sometimes sometimes you have to there's no choice but like we luckily had enough space we had these shears where we we took um ultra bounces like it took 12 by 20s and put them outside each window and put an hM or a vortex and i under bouncing into the ultra bounce so it wasn't the window frame that was over exposed it was something in the background behind the windows and overexposed.

And then we would just send a little dapple onto the curtains themselves. And so you ended up getting this idea that like maybe it was the sky blown out outside, but it wasn't like you could tell there was the window frame itself was blown out, which usually with how the shadow, like it so means when you do that, you can't put people outside. Like there's a shadow passing. You can't put like branchos outside to get dapple on the windows.

It's just like, womp, like an LED screen for a window. And so we were able to get more depth by doing ultra bounce, blast it, and then put a tree outside, blast that behind, like the sun's hitting it and hitting the window. So you get this, like, apparent depth, even though it's just ultra bounce in a plant. Yeah. Well, and also the diffusion to the window trick obviously affects the way that the light source enters the room in general. You're going to, it's going to widen out and flat, like, maybe that's the look you're going for. but it certainly then becomes a very massive source in relation to the world. Yes.

Yeah. And this gave us a lot more shape and controlling. It was only it was coming through that little portal to the window, which was great. Yeah. The thing that I love about the way that you think, and I think it's something that a lot of people seem to clamor for, at least online. I need to be spending less time online, but I'm still there, is that you are thinking about, it's so easy for a young creator or even a producer or whoever to go I want a 90s aesthetic and then you just exactly as you said you look up you know glitch VHS glitch and you slap it on

whatever you got but being able to go deep and think about why those things were that way and replicate that not only gives you the aesthetic you want but it leans into that thing we were talking about earlier about people not liking VFX or whatever it's like it's it's it's real. It's good. It's good because it's real. It's not an aesthetic. It is a, it is a methodology. Same thing with the light. You know, it's a methodology of why it doesn't need to look good. It needs to be it. If that makes any sense. Yeah. It's a really, it's an interesting thing where, you know, you want, you want it, you want people to be like, oh, that's a good looking image. But like, if they think it too much, that means that they're not looking at the movie. And it's looking at the movie anymore. And it's really satisfying. honestly now to me sometimes when no one mentions it you know like a review comes out no one says anything about the looks I think you know sometimes that means it sometimes it might mean you did a bad job but to me sometimes it also means you made the movie look the way they think that movie should look that they didn't even think about

how it looked and I to me that's something I've been very interesting it requires a little bit of ego death where you have to be like I can't show off and same deal like you can't say I want to do it I want to get a 90s look and then light it however you it instinctively like things because then you're just doing it for yourself and it's not going to have it. And so you have to kind of give up on a little part of what you want for what is required from the film a little bit. It's a weird hard to swallow pill sometimes. But like I said, I watch this sometimes and I go, that doesn't look like anything I've ever shot before or probably ever will again. It doesn't even look like I did it to me sometimes now, which is cool. I really love that

because I'm very judgmental with myself. And I'm, um, you could separate yourself from this one. yeah just because it's such a strong push in a weird direction I've never done that like you know still there's some shots but I can see that I didn't quite get it the way I wanted sure don't happen but like that's how we all are to ourselves like it's if you don't self critique a healthy amount you don't get better um but it is weird to just try and be like totally distance yourself from what the movie like what you want versus what the movie wants which very weird balance well and it's also you know I think you'd probably agree that Like when you're given constraint usually it can constraint is where creativity lives, right?

And if the constraint is the film must look, look a certain way, I imagine that can end up being more fun because now instead of like putting everything on your own back, like, how do I make this look the way I want it to look? You're like, okay, cool. Now I get to make it look the way it's supposed to. And it's more like putting a puzzle together and less like writing a song, you know, where it's coming from your heart versus, you know. It's more manageable mentally, I feel. I think the dream is that people don't think about this movie being able to look any other way. Not necessarily if they comment on how good have a job you did, how incredible it looks. It's like the most stunning thing they've ever seen.

It's like if they don't say anything, but they just don't question this movie could have been anything else, I think that's the best job you can do. And it's, you know, it's a little tough because everyone wants validation. But I don't know, like, you know, to anyone, including you who kind of feels that way, I think the audience's standards are so high now that if they don't say anything, chances are you've met that criterion. And so they don't say anything. So that means you've done like the best. You know. The expectation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's when people think that. I see. There's a point to me sometimes when you hear like, sorry. I'm sorry. We are. Yeah, we're desinkingly crazy. so sorry. Hell yeah. Let's let it let's let it settle. We did it. Did it.

Okay. Go for it. Yeah. If you make something that people comment on how the movie looks and not how the movie made them feel, I feel like you distracted them a little bit in the wrong way. You know what I mean? I don't know. Or that's just, I mean, my opinion, man.

Well, and I've seen a lot of sort of meta commentary about filmmaking these days about everything's too flat and everything's too dark and I just wish people would go back to making bold choices. And luckily, even though that was what the film wanted, that's what you did. So I think at a certain point when a lot of people do go end up seeing this on Hulu, on Friday, on the next work. Yeah. I think they probably will respond that it looked good only because it's something that they haven't seen and have I have seen comments on various forums and letterboxed and whatever about how most film looks the same

because they will usually say digital sensors and LEDs but like you know it's it's all just a tool but I think you've inadvertently stumbled into a look that people have actually been excited for I hope so man we look me and my Gaffer we love color. We love throwing as much color to everything we do. And it's actually something the movie that I'm prepping right now with him, it's the dead opposite.

It's, you know, it's very much inspired by like the strangers and the invitation, which are bleak, not saturated movies, it's very much on. So it's fun to like have gone from a feature that was balls to the wall, whatever color we wanted. It's fun. It's interesting. It's fun to have the limitation to now be like, all right, what are the two like tones we're allowing yourself to have in the scene?

And then we're going to squash that range even more. Like, if we normally did, like, you know, balance to 4,300 in camera, Moonlight's 56, and Tungsten's 32, so now it's like, we're going to move those ranges even tighter. So it's like, say, balance of 4, now, you know, Moonlight is 47 and Tungsten is 4. So, like, we're really, there's just a little bit of, there's still color balance. There's still range. But we're just, it's like, it's like an audio compressor on the white balance a little bit. So it keeps us feeling like, we're trying to go for a bleaker. A bleaker feeling. I'm more a never one. I think that's something really little. I thought that movie, The Stranger is just like, there's no moon. There's no moon.

Like, it's not traditionally. It's, it's silvery or white, but it never goes cold thing. Am I kind of like crazy? I just saw my internet connection is unstable. Yeah.

You, you got, I got to send you a screenshot of, uh, they've put like a, uh, like a pastel filter on your image. yeah and somehow the the one recording is set I don't know how I don't know why suddenly it just got awful but uh yeah it's and I did an interview earlier today and it was all so bad so I think it's me too but um not the interview was bad the connection was bad um but that's interesting that you you liken it to putting a compressor on the image that I'm gonna have to think about that for a minute because that is because we think about a dynamic range so much but to to limit the

visual range is interesting. Yeah, it'll be a new experience. Yeah, I'm like, I don't even know what I think about that. I'm like, how would I do that? And also, what would I do? You know, over the pandemic, I had to become a freelance colorist and stuff, and I've been doing way more color work now.

And now I think about everything in both of those worlds of like, how would I shoot that and how would I color that? And would I be fighting it or like, yeah, That's just going to be a fun brain exercise for myself. I think audio and video tools go hand in hand a lot. I have a background in music and I feel like that has helped me find ways to express what I'm going for visually on set, even if sometimes it only makes sense to me. I know, honestly, I've, every time I've spoke, I grew up as a drummer and I played guitar a little bit,

you know, drummer my whole life. And especially in editing, boy, does it? having a background and rhythm coming to Andy but yeah I've tried to I've asked a bunch of different DPs who are musicians which apparently is a lot of us and architects um like what is that combination between music and film beyond um just the simple you know storytelling kind of thing I I one thing that I saw was Josh Hami from Queens of the Stone Age talking about why he doesn't share freely his like pedal board and like how he gets his sound and he's like it's cool to know what your favorite musicians did in our case filmmaker imagine i'm talking about filmmakers

for this whole analogy so i don't have to redo it but he's like it's cool it's cool to know what your favorite musicians did but that's you don't learn anything from that that's not that's not helpful and also you don't want a Gibson going through a fender amp you know peanut butter and chocolate I get it it's great but you don't need to do that you know you want to be what what isn't happening so that you are unique in some way and he said that by trying to figure out how he gets his sound that path will take you to finding your own sound versus being very prescriptive about it and saying like oh it's this pedal this compressor this amp now you sound like Josh. You know, you don't learn anything from that. And I think that the truth is the same is true with filmmaking. We're like, oh, he got this camera and this light and this lot and, you know, shoot, you know, David Fincher, obviously everyone likes to ape. And it's like, oh, he only uses these focal lengths and he puts it here. And it's always the two cameras. It's like, by being prescriptive, you're not, first of all, you're not doing art. And also, you're not thinking about what you're making. You're being very, you know, color. numbers and that doesn't that's kind of like trying to appease everyone it's the same I think mechanism in your brain where you try to make something for everyone and you please nobody if you're prescriptive with your art you know it's has the same interesting counterpoint because I've been asked I've been asked a lot of times

by many people who say why do you share all your BTS aren't you afraid like well that's different do it are you afraid like people are going to do what you're doing why do you tell them exactly what you're using. Why do you tell them how you got exactly what you did? And I think my argument has always been, there's no way to be at that prescriptive in film because we're never going to be

in the same location with the same production designer at the same time of day and we're shooting the same scene. And so like, I can tell you how I did this scene, but even if you take how I did that scene and put it on yours, it's not going to look the same even if you do exactly what I did because

everything else is different. and so I've often felt good about sharing it because some people just might not know what tools are out there a lot of the times when you're coming up you don't even know certain things exist I'm sure I still don't know half the things that exist I'm not crazy high level to know every tool

that's out in the world and so when I see a DP talk about some crazy thing I've never heard of I'm really grateful because I don't even know how they use it that's funniest thing about BTS photos I'll post my overha I'll post my BTS but like half the time on the day some shit slops and you probably changed up half of what you drew anyway but it's like if people understand

why you did something then they can understand why they might need to do something similar but different on their own project and like the thing that separates I think well I you know maybe I disagree with Josh on I feel like again what's gonna happen he tells everyone his pedal board like they can't they'll never make the decisions he makes they'll never have the touch he has we'll never have the musicianship and the years

of experience he has so even if they use the exact same thing he's not ripping them out of anything because they can't be him and like part of why I think every DP is so different and so good I can tell you the exact same gear I had on a project and you can even try and shoot that project with the same package

and it's going to look different because you're you and that can either be a good thing or a bad thing and I think it's just why not share the experience because it just means you're going to have better looking stuff to look at. It means that other people are going to shoot stuff you like to look at if you tell them how to do stuff you like to do.

And they, you know, they're interested. Like, it's, there's no, there's no harm because I could walk into a room on a scout and another dude you could walk into a room on a scout. And a director will say, here's my scene. And like, you go, here's the gear you have. Here's the camera and the lights go. And there's very little chance you two are going to put things in exactly the same place. And it all comes down to your own personal taste. So I don't know. I think sharing is

caring. Mr. Crockett. I fully agree to be there. I more so meant the analogy in my head is less about specific gear. I think sharing, you know, behind the scenes, photos, lighting diagrams, that's how we all learn. The thing that I try to push back on is exactly what you said. Don't make this exact thing thinking you're going to get my look. This is to inform your journey. So the point I thought he was trying to make in that clip was you need to learn what all these things do. And if you do end up sounding like me, I don't, well, I know this particular about that. But in getting out of the analogy, like, it's great.

It's important to know all the tools and it's important to know how they work and how you can achieve certain things. but at no point should someone learning assume that by doing x they will receive y it should form your next new thing you know yeah that's yeah i would agree yeah and i and i also i think i've been shouting about uh needing more um special features so people can learn from day one you know of this podcast absolutely every day you know more fucking special features yeah show us how the stuff I watched, I've said this a few times and now it's like a thing I have watched all 12 hours

of the Lord of the Rings extended edition behind the scenes I think those got me into filming that like the Matrix BTS DVD and yeah probably those two honestly I've never seen Lord of the Rings

I've seen all the behind the scenes I can tell you exactly how that film is made I've never watched the movies now you got to have a you got to have the religious experience that we've all had you got to sit down and now you got to watch all three extended back to back lord of the rings movies in one day well and the funny part is is like the the long you know i'm i'm almost i'm 34 the longer i haven't seen it the funnier it is it's like you know this people do that with star wars and everyone goes oh my god you haven't seen star war you know except this lord of the rings and it's like i've seen

the clips like i know i know what it looks like i know i know what it looks like I couldn't really tell me the story. Yeah. Oh, Peter Jackson's a fucking jeek. Did you see his World War I, like, recolored, remastered documentary thing? Oh, yeah. It's pretty interesting. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. And Guillermo del Toro. I think that was the other one. It was like, hell boy. Just all the production design. The work that goes into a Guillermo del Toro film on production design and costuming alone is a master class. Talk about a dream production to work on, man.

oh my god yeah even like pinocchio even though it was stop motion I was just like this is so Guillermo like I love that you he has that signature and again no one can do it like Yermo like because it comes from here

you know it comes from the old mine mine palace so like every time he puts something up I'm like yep yep that's you bet them every second of it um well shit man it's been an hour already and I have to go to some gala wow fancy yeah

It was great talking about it. And like I said, as someone who doesn't, you know, every time I get a horror film or I'm always like, let me, I'll skip through it because I don't really enjoy horror. And then I ended up watching the whole thing. And I was just like, I was one of the sickos who was like, yeah, Crockett, get him, you know. That's, dude, that's what Elvis did best, man.

He just made, he somehow, he's so endearing and yet such a psycho. It's incredible. Yeah, it's perfect. The character's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm excited. I heard the, I read the director talking about like, hey, man, he's,

he's immortal so we could do this a bunch and I'm like fuck yeah let's do it oh yeah this our whole team would come back our our whole the entire crew just loved the movies making it so much and like the character that I think all of them would probably come back for a sequel so it pretty cool we'll see Hulu I know you're listening do it fund it um all right I got to go I'll let you go but I'll keep in touch cool man sounds good later buddy be it Frame and Reference is an Owlbot production.

It's produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan, and distributed by Pro Video Coalition. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can do so on Patreon by going to frame and refpod.com, where you can get all the episodes and clicking the Patreon button. It's always appreciated, and as always, thanks for listening. Thank you.