Frame & Reference Podcast - 222: "Predator Badlands" Cinematographer Jeff Cutter

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

This week I'm joined by the wonderful Jeff Cutter to talk about his work on Predator: Badlands! Jeff also worked on music videos for bands like Korn and films like David Fincher's Panic Room, which we definitely get in to.Enjoy!► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠F&R Online ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support F&R⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Kenny McMillan► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello, and welcome to this episode 222 of Freeman Reference. You're about to drop into a conversation between me, Kenny McMillan, and my guest, Jeff Cutter, DP of Predator Badlands. Joy. What makes a 90s or 2000 style corn? We'll just use that as the example, music video. Sure. And how would you achieve that today with the limited? But like, what were the discussions like making those types of videos at the time?

And how do you think they'd go today? And, like, how would you try to achieve that same thing? I mean, the interesting thing is there's not a whole lot of discussion that went into a lot of music videos. There were some videos where you really did. think through things, but there's a lot of music videos where it's just a whole lot of ideas that kind of get thrown against the wall a little bit before you're shooting. And then you're sort of just trying to reduce the chaos of some of the ideas and how do you sort of streamline down. It's, I mean, there was just so much experimentation in those days. And I also remember

making so many mistakes, like photographic mistakes from videos because you could experiment and you were playing around and sort of learning things. I mean, the very first music video I ever shot, it wasn't the first first video I shot. The very first time I ever had to do green screen on a music video. I had never done it before. I think I over exposed it by two stops. I had no idea what I was doing. But that's how you learn. Now, it ended up being fine because there's so much attitude. I think the other thing I discovered in music videos, especially shooting film, was how far you could be off track and yet still dig something out, or you'd still, whether you were crushing it down or like lifting it back up, if you had under-exposed it,

or often you were over-exposing things. And then a lot of the look would sometimes really get created in post, in color correction. You might be doing something, and it would just get pushed in a whole other direction. And it was just a lot of trial and error. So to do it now, I guess it would be the same process. But the interesting thing is now, because almost everyone chooses additionally, you're seeing that image right away.

And you're sort of, you have luts, you have all these things where you can immediately go, this is what it looks like. Back in the 90s and 2000s shooting film, SD tap, what you saw on set was a very different image than what the film. game gave you back, which was then also a very different thing that you could adapt and modify in the color correction. So maybe it's the sort of lack of control that kind of push things

in a certain direction. You know, it's fun. You know, the lack of that. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the everything getting changed in the grade. That's something that, again, I was talking to Edlin about. But the other common push now is like, oh, how can movies from back then look quote unquote better and everyone goes people shooting on film not doing everything in post and it's like no they're still doing that it's just so maybe film was an element but I think it's just like maybe to your earlier point about you could kind of send it and bring it back in and you would get something interesting whereas digital is not inherently interesting off rip yeah I don't think it's I don't think it's I

I love shooting digitally. Like, I actually don't have any desire to shoot film. No, I have no, I've got no interest in that anymore, really. It's not even so much that you can't change digital. It's the way that because everyone is looking at like an HD or higher than HD, you're looking at this, you know, not quite 4K, but you're looking at this super high resolution image, especially if you're looking on like a color corrected OLED monitor. And so everyone sees exactly what it could look like

with Lutz and with your lighting and all these things. And then there's a lot of voices that come into that process. And the sort of alchemy, and I don't miss it, but there was a bit of sort of alchemy and smoke and mirrors to film because nobody quite knew, including sometimes like the cinematographer I felt, I'd be like, I don't know. Like, okay, I'm going to under-expose this.

person's face three stops, is that going to be amazing or is that going to be terrible? And you just sort of didn't know. And that did lead to amazing stuff because you weren't at legend mistakes, but you don't get better without making mistakes and you don't get great stuff sometimes without it being occasionally accidents and things. Yeah, you know, I do like shooting film. I still shoot film photography, but I think professionally, yeah, I would be. I, you know, you just hear horror stories of people going like, yeah, 4 a.m.

You get a call from the lab. They're like, nothing on that real. Like, I don't, I don't want to go through that as a, luckily I never had to, but I don't, I wouldn't choose it. But, uh, nope, that thought lost. The sickness got me. Um, I did, I did read, um, it's funny. When I was watching the movie, you know, I got, I got my little notepad here. And I have written down video game three times.

And it's the first. thing I wrote. I wrote video game versus Dune and then I wrote very video game and then basic intro very video game. The intro felt like the like the you know the first not cinematic but kind of the pre tutorial to the splash screen thing that happens in games and then I saw in an interview that you are also a video game person so a A what games you play and you played the Ark Raiders, and B, what kind of influences were weasling their way into this film? Because I was just guessing. I didn't know that was actually the case. Well, I think a big part of it is also that Dan Tractenberg, the director, is a big gamer as well. And it's actually how we sort of

initially bonded when the first movie we did would say clip with Lane. And after he had already hired me and we were, thank you. After we were, he had hired me, we were prepping. And at one point, we started talking games and he said, oh, you play and I said, yeah, I play some sort of weird games, not sure if you'd been to them. And he's like, like, what? And I said, I'm kind of into dark souls and games like that. And he's like, oh, I love that. I, so those are a lot, I do, I play

all the souls kind of games. I do a lot of sort of action RPG, those kinds of things. I'm not really playing anything right now. I'm just working on a project at the moment. And so I tend to sometimes kind of put that aside. But video games are definitely, I know there are big influence for Dan in terms of

story structure and elements, but even visually for both of us, we've referenced them. And there are things that I find that video, and maybe it's just, look, it would be the same thing of an animated film where when you have that kind of complete control of an environment, you know, whether it's, if it's a day exterior or whatever, and you can make it all dusk, or you can make it's raining the whole time or there's a layer of fog across the you know and the sun's always you know just above the horizon because it's a virtual environment and they can create that that that's always been something that I've tried to do and there's certain films that have I think done it quite well or at least done the sort of atmospherics that you see often

in games and you know directors like Ridley Scott who have always done that you know creating, always creating heavy atmosphere, mist, fog, those kinds of things. So I think that inflows from video games. The Last of Us Part 2 had some of the best cutscenes I've ever seen. Oh, the game. And the game, yes. So the game had some of the best sort of like an extended take, their coverage as well. Like in the way that they would cover scenes, the night photography.

actually was quite definitely inspired me when Dan and I were doing prey of that very sort of single source firelight and not you didn't you don't feel again and because I guess with games and I think the best movies do this but it's much much more difficult where you can really create those sources there's that there's that conflict between a torch that someone's holding or a campfire and you you want that really naturalistic look of the fire but the problem is then you also have the over the fire itself becomes too overexposed and their faces so you're like fighting like how do I get the fire to be exposed properly and get that so it's that balance and sometimes you can do it with just fire and torches sometimes you have to augment but how do you augment it

in a way without it feeling like oh there I'm feeling the movie light because that's always the thing I'm always looking for the way to not feel the movie lighting. You know, how are we not, how do we not get the audience distracted by the 18K on the condor that's crashing through the trees that you don't think of as moonlight, you think of as a movie light. Right. And that's what video games are able to do because they're not real. So that's been the beginning.

Yeah, the source just, he misses from nowhere. Just. Yeah. So, yeah, so that sort of, you know, influence and the texture influence, I think a film that has influenced me since it came out that I referenced for almost everything is the 2015 version of Beth that Justin Curzel directed and Adam Arkapal shot. And I'm always looking at that because it's the magnificent use of atmosphere and smoke. and I have this conversation all the time on set because I do a lot of atmosphere, softening the light, things like that.

When I first, not when I first started, but very early, I did some sort of second unit work on panic room. Oh, cool. You know, David Fincher's use of atmosphere has like stuck with me ever since then because it's, when you walk into a set, you're like, oh my God, this is so much atmosphere and you can't really quite imagine how that. And then once you see the results, so it's a constant battle on set where you want to do a lot of atmosphere and people like, oh, it seems like a lot.

But knowing that you're going to introduce some of that contrast back in the D.I process, but you want to, you know, it softens the sources and does fill the shadows and creates depth in a way. But that's a battle. But I always go back to Macbeth because they use more atmosphere and smoke than any movie I've ever seen. And yet it's not, for me, it's not overdone. It's just, you know, and it's a magnificently well shot movie. I think super underrated. The photography is, is magnificent. Yeah.

You know, you reminded me about there's this one YouTube channel that goes around. And I think it's called boundary break or something, but you'll go into video game cut scenes and be like, where do these characters go when they're not in the scene? Like, how do they get from here? Do they just, what? Do the, does the character actually run, you know? did they code that in? Sometimes I do.

One thing that I thought was actually very like informative from a cinematography perspective was obviously, you know, in the cutscene cameras cutting sides. Well, when you watch the scene play out, you know, wide, you can see where the character like will pop through the floor to get their face in the right spot. And the lighting just turns on and off in all these different places. And I'm like, if you just took that 30 second cut of the scene playing out in a wide and showed it to a student, I feel like they would, it would intuitive be like, oh, that's what you're doing in movies. Because obviously the scene is lit, but then like having to add the little key or little highlight, you know, having to cheat the camera off or down, you know, it doesn't have to be real. It has to feel real. Yes. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. You're only striving to maintain the illusion, not the actual content. continuity of stuff. Yeah. You also mentioned the not feeling the light. And I think that's something I wanted to touch on because obviously there's, you know, matching a source perfectly, the sun coming through a window or something and getting the exact right colored balance.

That's one thing. But what are methods that you make it so that you don't feel that source? One quote I remember someone told me was like, you want to feel like the the light had to fight to get to the set and not just be there. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great, yeah, I like that. I always use the term, and it's sort of, I call it incidental light, although maybe you could actually call it. It's not quite accidental light, but I say incidental light because I've had this, I'm sure

we've all had that experience where, and I think, you know, you have to be open to it, But I've had moments where a light will turn on and it's like they've set the light. I've said, okay, let's put a light over here and it's going to aim this way and it's going to come through some diffusion. And the light gets set in a certain position and it's maybe panned off the sets, pan the opposite way than you mentioned. It has pointed down and it'll hit the floor and the light will turn on and it'll be like, wait, that's it. That's what this should look like. And there's the sort of the happy accident part of it. But then there's also the part of it where it's not the, it doesn't feel like you've,

like you were just saying. You don't feel like you're pushing light into a set. I remember the very, so when I was a camera, I started out and I was working as a camera assistant for a commercial cinematographer, Marco Mitzay, and this was in the mid-90s, and I was also shooting music videos for like basically no money before I had any representation. should. So I was sort of doing those two things. But we had, and in film school, also shooting other people's projects and had no money. And I'd worked on low budget movies. But for the first time, I remember him taking a 12 by frame, a bounce and bouncing the light off the 12 by frame. And I'd

never seen that before. Sure. My entire experience, all my experience before that was pushing light through either hard light or pushing it through frames. But seeing it bounce, off, my mind, it just all, I went, whoa, that's how you get that quality. And that's always stuck with me. But this idea that the, I think there's an imperfection of light that, you know, you still, we all still want beautiful images. But can we make those beautiful images without them feeling, you know, where you're really sort of aware of the light sources and how good? The other thing I think about a lot is there are a lot of

cinematographers who I really admire and who do incredible work but I can sit and watch what they're watch a film that they've shot and I can see oh yeah okay you've done this you've pushed this light you're here you've bounced over here yeah but you have a rough sense

but the very best work is when I look at it and I'm like I don't even know what you've done here like you've got sort of top light but like you're returning this? Are you augmenting this with something? Is it, you know, and that to me is always the stuff that I find the most sort of inspirational and, you know, exciting to kind of also then pursue for myself. Yeah, I, the, you remind me of two things there. One, I had a similar

experience to the bounced off the 12 by thing, which was someone telling me that they were bouncing off Negg. And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean you were bouncing off? Yeah. It absorbs light and they're like now with a powerful enough light anything's a reflector if you're strong enough light and I was like what? Or using even just using the neutral gray cloth as a diffusion

you know to like there's something about taming something incredibly powerful to get it where it is that feels more real. Yeah I try so what I'm doing I try not to ever use as much as I can I shouldn't say never but I rarely

use lights outside during day because I always feel like that's competing. If it's sunny, then I just, I'll try to return the light if I need to. If it's not sunny, then you're also going to feel that light source. So I just sort of try to avoid lights. But I will often bounce. If I'm returning the sun, I'll usually try to do it off of like a day blue rather than a white bounce because it a cuts, you just find white bounces to often be too much light where I'm like, well, that's not really what happens. And then also the color, usually if you're getting backlit by the sun, what's coming around the front of you is all sky, which is quite much, much cooler than the sun

source. You're not getting this big white bounce returned. But it's, yeah, it's all those things like you're saying, bouncing off day, just doing unconventional things that find ways for the light to just feel as natural and un, you know, not sourcey, because sourcey can be quite good. It's not about being sourcey, but about it being unmotivated or unrealistic, I guess. Yeah. Do you ever use the Bluff bounce?

I don't think I have. I'm not sure if I know it. I think his name is Andrew Bluff, but I believe his last name is Bluff. And basically it's just a set of bounces that come, I think it's like three or four versions, but there's one that's like green bottom, brown, middle,

giant blue top. There's like one, There's like one for Oh yes Just so when you bounce You get the camera of you know That's cool I don't know anyone who has one But it is a great idea

Because that's That's a yeah I did quickly want to touch On the panic room thing Because I spent Quite a long It got dark in this room It's I spent quite a long time

Finding that special edition 3 DVD set just to watch the like four hours of special features on the thing. Yeah, yeah. Because we did special, I mentioned this before on the show, but like special features lost art. And it used to be that a lot of,

I don't know who's in charge of doing it. But like, there was someone out there who was like, I must educate all the film school nerds on how we did this. And I love it. So I want to know what you learned on that shoot because there's a lot of people who are always in my ear

about any time I get someone who was in Fincher's orbit to drill them down at least a little bit. Because even the best in the business all go like, yeah, he's something else, man. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean, I learned a lot. And I was, we were basically just doing inserts. So it's like an insert unit. And we did about two or three weeks of inserts. so there were I mean the one atmosphere as I've already mentioned the smoke was one just how much sort of smoke

the I think what was interesting what was most interesting to me was the kind of focal lengths that were being used often and they were much wider than I sort of imagined like the 27 21 27 35 you know really in that sort of more wider focal length that always imagined that it would just be longer lenses, even having seen his movies, but we're often sort of wider, closer than I kind of would have thought. And maybe that's also partly because his depth of field, because everything was pretty much like we shot, I think they shot the entire movie and we, our interest as well. The whole movie was basically like, I think, two and two and a third or two and two thirds. It was like that was the stop. We're shooting at basically shot. I

I mean, again, I wasn't there for a lot of it, just the kind of things that were told to me and what we were kind of like trying to replicate. The precision, and everyone knows this, I mean, just the precision with which everything is executed, the level, the demand, the detail of what, you know, we were doing inserts of, you know, like forest woodedrous hands, putting a piece of duct tape on like a hose that's going through a hole in the wall and we would do you know 70 takes of that trying to just get the exact you know um the exact sort of moment that he would be looking for uh and then the other thing that was really sort of uh really illuminating and educational was just the under exposure and

shooting things to two two and a half three stops under not like we're not that we're deliberately they were deliberately under exposing and that was the base just like, oh, in this moment, this fill, this key, what any, you know, any number of things could be, or these shots of, I did a lot of inserts of inside the panic room when they're like, there was like wires and they're trying to like tie wires or something. I forget exactly what it was. And that was all just very, the light was just flat and under exposed. It was, that was what we were doing. It was like, this is going to be a very murky sort of kind of image. And it all looks incredible and it's beautiful.

And I think that was sort of illuminating, having done music videos and things, and so much of that is high key and lots of back light and these very strong sources and also color. Then to come to this world of, oh, it's going to be quite mute, and it gets naturally muted from the undio exposure,

the atmosphere, and just these very, you know, obviously gorgeous image, and very elegant. I think there's the other thing and that you don't what influenced me was like

oh things don't have to be poppy and bright and colorful you know to be beautiful. Yeah and it was from if my memory serves from watching the DVDs there was an earlier use of keynote flows right

because I didn't see a lot of like on set lights there would just be like a few kinos and then construction lights yes there was a lot a lot of what they did was they would take tubes and they would just they would take these a tube or two and they would you know tape them up to the ceiling and then they would just pillow a little bit of diffusion underneath it so they'd get a little separation maybe six inches of separation and they would just have these kinos popped and that would create this very

under-exposed layer of sort of like top light. It's what, like, Conrad Hall used to call it room tone, where he would light a scene, and then he would take a little frenel or something, and he would just pop it into the ceiling and just lift the base of the whole set a little bit. And that was what this was sort of doing. They would have these kinos, and they would be a cooler, they would be slightly, you know, there would definitely be slightly blue and I guess naturally slightly green or maybe that was introduced later in the in the DIY and then you know there would be lamps that would then be

motivating sources but there would be this very sort of top light kind of thing that would be happening throughout the different sets yeah that that that's something that I've been thinking about a lot because I do a lot of like interviews documents documentary stuff. And the other day I was in a kitchen that I should have just done that. And instead, I try to get cute with it and light from the wrong side. And I'm still mad at myself about that. But, uh, because I kept, you know, like just bang it into the ceiling is such a film school thing to do. If that's your key light. You know, for it. For ambient tone, it's like, yeah, I go for it. And also, you, a little film school tip for anyone listening, you can, you can,

unless it's like popcorn ceiling like this, you can tape like trash bag or whatever to the ceiling and make yourself a skirt. Teasers. And then bang, is it called a teaser? Yeah, if you want, I just said a teaser that blocks the light, yeah. Oh, good enough.

That's a little skirt. Takes it off the walls, shoot your, you know, inexpensive light. You got a film light. Yeah, and you've got a beautiful source, a beautiful soft source coming from the top. Yeah. I like top light.

I'm a big top light guy. All right. So we'll get into, let's get into Predator because a lot of it, I think being a top light guy and being a sci-fi guy, I was very much taken with, you know, the tank that they were in when they're having an argument

and they're about, you know, that sci-fi blue look going on. But obviously a lot of the film takes place outdoors daylight. And it's not on Earth. It's somewhere else. So I was wondering, A, well, you kind of touched on a little bit earlier, but like, how are you shaping the light to make sure it looks good? How are we working with VFX to make sure everything matches?

And, you know, how do you make it not look fake? Obviously, it is fake. Your brain tells you it's fake because you haven't seen that world before. But I noticed that there's, you can't, very difficult to see the scene in this one. You know, it all, it all married very well. And I couldn't, I was like, is it volume? And then I saw behind the scenes, I was like, no, they're in a jungle. I don't know.

Yeah, no, I mean, almost, there were a few set pieces that were on stage, that were essentially blue screen with like a little patch of dirt. For example, the father, when father kills Quay in the beginning, and, you know, he's coming to kill deck or he wants Quay to kill deck. That was essentially just blue screen. a little bit of dirt and a little piece of spaceship and then just fantastic VFX extensions of all those sets. So Olivier Dumont was our VFX supervisor who's a fantastic, creative artist who really wanted to honor what we were doing. And so we were a lot of conversations and it was always about how do we, you know, how does he take what we start and how does he continue that?

There is that particular scene is interesting. We can, well, I'll get to the other stuff where it's like 90% real versus this, which is like 5% real. And I want to touch on especially, too, how you light for VFA because that's something I've learned as like a holes. Well, I mean, my approach, so. lighting for VFX is more about I don't think of it in terms of lighting for VFX I think

what is the scene demand and what is the kind of lighting that we should be having in the scene and so a lot of our scenes Dan and I are very much into soft as a lot of people are like nobody I mean it's tough being out suns outside during the day in sunlight and this was also one of the first one of the early scenes where you see all, you see these three characters and you see their suits

and you see them in their, you know, full glory. I mean, you get Deck and Quay in the cave, but that was also quite moody intentionally. So here, you know, when we were shooting Dan was like, this should be kind of moody, you know, because he didn't want it to just be these suits that were just brightly lit and really exposing any, not that there were like flaws,

but if there are any, you don't want to see those. So it was going to be a moody scene no matter what. The hardest part of these kinds of scenes is just having no reference where you're just in this blue and you, so I've done things where you have, it's not dissimilar to like, I've done things in like giant office sets. And we've had a trans light. And then you also have a blue screen because sometimes when you get close to the windows, the trans light doesn't work for perspective. And you end up then dragging a blue screen across. when you're in that set and you have this translight and you backlit it and you look at the image on the camera on the monitor and you say oh yeah that's and you balance it and it's like this looks correct as soon as you pull that trans light away and bring a blue screen in you're like i don't know anymore because you need that reference of what because the the people in the foreground lit don't exist in a vacuum they they exist in relation to the background so

So when you get into that blue screen environment where you have, I don't have a trans light to pull across. So you just have to live in this world of blue and you just have to trust that your experience and instincts, you're going with the soft light, you're giving it the shape you want, and you're imagining. And that's where the conversations happen with the effects. And they happen on a preliminary level where Delivay and Dan and I are talking like, well, it should be dusky feeling. And so we want it to be, you know, quite clear. clouds of the sky, but there's no hard sun and you have those conversations. I like to what I imagine, what kind of looks good to us, taking the blue screen element out of it, you just go, well, the suits look nice, there's a good mood to this, but it's not

too dark, it's not too bright. The heavy lifting in a scene like that really comes in the DIY, not even the work that Olivier does when he creates the backgrounds. I mean, the blending is I don't know how he does that where the hour like 20 foot patch of dirt he then extends seamlessly but the hard part is when something doesn't feel like it

sits in the environment and this was a particular scene where Dan and Olivia and I talked about it quite a bit because it was like I was on something else and they were working on it and it wasn't feeling right to them I sat in on a session and it was just

it was the ratios it was like oh if the sky the sky was dim and they were dim and they were dim and it's like well actually we want this moody but the sky would still have to be a little bit brighter because for them to have this value the sky has to be a greater value and you just have to kind of find that find that balance between those things so that's the sort of hard part of the i think the most difficult thing when you're dealing with with this most difficult thing for me when I'm dealing with like very blues creek environments. The other stuff when we're in the forests and we're in these incredible locations is not nearly as difficult.

I'm thinking of it the same way I treated praying where it wants to be very, I mean, on this film, it's a weird, it's a bit of an oxymoron because it's another planet, so it could be anything but you kind of want it to feel as naturalistic as possible even though it's not earth that's the sort of it's the thing that we measure and the thing that we measure everything against and so if we see this forest and if it feels more grounded even though it's another planet then i think you'll believe it more and accept it uh versus where yeah okay we could take a of lights and make purple lights streaming through the trees because hey we're on another planet the sun could be purple we could do that but i think an audience would immediately be like

what is happening and then it doesn't feel like a real place even though it's not a real place i think you wanted to even though it is like this fantasy thing i think you wanted to feel as real as possible as ground as possible so we just reminded me you know so i wanted that suns and not two shadows By the way, there's three in this. I think on Yautja Prime, I think, I feel like, yeah, when there's a one shot of deck at the very beginning, when he's on Yatra Prime and he's standing at the mouth of the cage

and there's three sons. But yeah, exactly. So I think there's that naturalism that you want to seek so that it feels grounded and you're like, oh, this feels like a place that. that this predator has actually landed on. And the more you do that, the more jeopardy and the more you're going to care. And the more that, you know, the more you can.

And that's what matters most. It doesn't matter how great it looks if you don't care. So all of it, everything that we do is in service of making you care about Dex journey and making you, you know, empathize with him and feel the jeopardy of what he's going through. So that everything is in service of that. But when we're on those practical locations, it's shaping the light like normal, sometimes using lights, mostly not. A lot of it is about planning. That's a big, big part of it because you're locked into the sun path.

We got lucky with a bunch of days where we got overcast weather. I think that really adds to the extraterrestrial quality. And then, yeah, you're just picking times a day trying to, you try to force and bend the schedule a little bit. He worked with the first AD, and luckily with the director like Dan, it's as important to him. The photography is as important to him as any other aspect of the film. So sometimes you're in situations where it's not the primary concern. So it's like, look, you'll have those conversations where the director, and it's their movie. I get it.

Like, we just need to get this shot. I need to shoot it now. And that's what you do. But Dan's concern is, as much as my concern, he wants it to. look great. So he's like, yeah, let's look this way in the morning. Maybe it's slightly less efficient. But in the long run, it's going to make for a better movie, and that's going to make everything better. And there's also a thing where I've found, if you point the camera in the right direction at the right time of day, your job becomes quite easy. Yeah. And it can look great.

it'll look yeah and it's and you it's it's quite easy and you get an incredible shot you get like million dollar shots you point the camera in the wrong way at the wrong time a day and now you spend twice as long trying to make it as half as good at best because now you're like trying to block the bad light or you're trying to do this and it's all doesn't look you know the whole thing doesn't work and the shot doesn't look very good and it took you longer and so the hard work is trying to organize that at the beginning so that you can be pointing the camera in the right direction at the right time of day yeah yeah when you when you're talking about the shaping it like let's say you have that perfect you know golden hour shot are you still throwing in

some neg or are you just like nope that's we got it uh sometimes it it it it really yeah i mean it it really depends. It's the sort of litmus test for me is always, do I feel like this is about, so I'm the happiest. I am happiest if I can use one light or if it's like one, if it's the sun, or if I bring one light, or even if it's not literally one unit, but one source. So if I'm coming through a window and I've got 318Ks and, you know, conceptually it might, conceptually it's simple. It might not be, it might not be simple to execute because it might be 318Ks on lifts and they're outside a second story window and now you've got a bunch of rags outside and you're creating. But the concept isn't just light. If I can do that and only

return that light with say bounce cards versus like passive versus active fill. Try to avoid active fill where we're bouncing light into something on the fill side or or creating a backlight because you feel like you need separation. It's like unhappiest if I can have this one source, if I can return. I always think the other thing is I really try not to make active fill in those things. Because again, it's like, well, that's not what would be happening here. If I can bring a bounce card in, fill in an actor's face if they need it, pop their eyes, you know, a little bit with a card. But I'm just returning that whatever the source is, be at the sun or be it a window light or be it top light from you know like on the base practical

fixtures um in the end fight that's when i'm happiest because i'm like okay there's the source i'm not cheating other lights of course you have to cheat of course sometimes an eye light has to be a little tube or a little brick or something because the bounce car doesn't do it or you can't get it close enough but that's when i feel like i've been most successful is when it's like oh there's the light. I haven't done anything else. Yeah. I, the, you just reminded me, I feel like I know the answer to this, and I don't like the answer, but I need to ask you. I don't know if you did this. But one thing that I always try to tell students is if you're going to use a reflector, you know, as your key light, you're, you've got

no money, you just got that shiny board and you're outside or whatever. Do it from up here. Don't do it from down here. The light doesn't come from down here. It comes through it up here. And then I'll see behind the scene shots of people bringing in the white card, the fill card, under the mat box. And I'm like, why that's not where that comes from? Is there a reason that I'm missing? Or is that just like, that's where we had to put it? So I do. Yeah, yeah. So I definitely bring white cards in underneath. Okay. I do do. No, no, no, no. It's okay. But, but. But, the way, there are no right or wrong answers. It's always whatever our personal tastes are. I yes so I do it because my one of the things I like to do is I take white I'll take white cards and sometimes silver cards and I like a round shape because it puts a nice reflection in the eye versus a square shape so we have a lot of like two foot three foot one foot round whites and then silvers on the other side like on a cloudy day it's nice to use a silver card because it'll just pick up the soft light just put a little ping in their eye on a sunny day it's silver's way too much so I'm usually using

it, I'll use a round ones and I like. But sometimes, yeah, because I, like you, I like top light. And so the top light looks great, but then it's like, okay, actually I need to fill and my fill does want to come a little bit from below. Not like, I don't like it right underneath, but sometimes you need it when you're doing the top light. But it is like, it's a subtle, for me, it's just trying to find that little bit that takes a curse off the little bit of the top light and helps fill it in in a way that only even feels natural

when it doesn't feel natural like I'm on a movie right now where one of the characters basically wears this helmet the whole movie and then he has a mask that comes up and it's just a giant so I've got nowhere but below

and like maybe below and he wears glasses so I'm like how am I? supposed to like this guy's, and it's like a lot of top light? How am I supposed to light his face? So there's a lot of light coming in from like here below because there's nowhere else to bring her from. So you try to, but even then, it's like try to make it a bounce card where you feel like you're sort of naturally returning top light that would be bouncing off the floor

a little bit. And it's not, it's not ideal, but, you know, look, there are always challenges and you know you have to find some way around it and some things are going to feel fake a little bit faker than others you know as long as it looks good well and then in my head i was like oh you could make it like a little green so it feels like the grass and it's like yeah but then at least with a maybe not with the predator but with a natural person you don't they're necessarily just want a green fill that's right yeah it's a Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did.

It's about actually. 100%. I, uh, it's kind of two ideas. One of them was just, I loved that you guys went with what I wrote town as 80's night. Because everyone does nighttime different and this was like 80s night. The, it wasn't, it's softer than, than I would sort of think of 80s light. And I tried not to go backy with it. It was more like siding, try to be soft and siding with it.

but it does have that kind of very blue color. And maybe it's the atmosphere. But yeah, I sort of tried to avoid that I definitely don't like the kind of backlight thing. Like moonlight is just this very, real moonlight is very hard. And then obviously very dim. And it's not pretty. So now you have to have movie moonlight. but as we're talking about all these things

movie moonlight becomes the opposite of everything I've just talked about which is like it's this very obvious movie source so it is the thing that I struggle with the most and the thing that I find the sort of hardest to like you know and there have been times where I felt pretty good about it

it's also interesting because like on pray that when Dan and I were doing that we had scenes with moonlight but we also had firelight So you're able to have the moonlight It's this very subtle flavor in the background For most of it But by the time you get to the end of the movie The whole fight is no fire

And it's just moonlight And it's the same thing It's just like big It's as soft as I can make it But it's still big sources crashing through the trees And yes it's the same thing here It's

You know I like top light A lot for moonlight the problem with large like areas of so when we were on the base there's no moonlight because we didn't because I had sources so I was like I don't want any blue I didn't want that to be raking cross I think of it and this is how I thought of prey as well I always think of like night stuff as the way your eye the way the eye acclimates to bright and dark images so if you're in a very dark room and there's just a match lit

You will, your eye will adjust to that, and that light, that match will be a source, you know, and it'll do that. If you're outside at night and you're at a campfire, that campfire becomes a source and the moonlight goes away. But if the campfire is out, then the moonlight's the only thing. And so you're, so I think of it like that where I'm like, okay, I'm on the base, there's lights, moonlight can go away. I don't have to think about it. I'm outside in the forest and decks on a hillside and there's not a source within miles. It's got to be moonlight and we've got to see the image. And so you just try to find that balance of like how to not make it feel as movie-ish.

But it's the thing that's always going to feel like for me, a movie light. And my point about top light is there's just a lot of environments where I can't get the kind of construction crane over the top of the set and create that. And like we did use some balloons. well actually no sorry we didn't use balloons we used balloons on prey I wanted to use some balloons in some areas but even then I couldn't have some of the frames are wide so wide and we end up and with the wind in New Zealand we sort of created soft boxes like cubes on arms but now you're still limited to the arms so we'd get them up quite high but they were still coming kind of from the side right but yeah it's it's that balance of like

the fight between terrain and what it should look like and what the source would be wind yeah all those things I did I did want to know I got to let you go soon unfortunately I feel I don't know if it's the Benadryl talking but I'm learning a lot having a good time but I did have the thought when watching the film because especially when they start making their way to the

Wayland Jutani camp like as as the as you know being on the creative team where do you slot not like in the universe but like when you're making it do where do you place do you think like we're creatively making a predator movie and therefore we need to kind of sit in that visual realm or an alien move does it switch when they get there like all right now let's make it look more like alien or was that not even a consideration it was not a consideration it was not a consideration in terms of predator, the predator universe, only because when Dan and I did prey, I think we definitely referenced, we didn't reference any of the earlier predom, we did

for action, certainly the original, the first predator. We referenced that sort of like the muscular filmmaking of that. Visually though, photography, we were referencing the Revenant and, you know, movies like that, survival movies and movies that were set, you know, in that era. So that was our visual sort of like, those were the visual guides for prey. So because we had already strayed, I was actually just continuing that aspect of it from there where I wanted it to be, as we've sort of talked about, just very grounded, very naturalistic. Let's make this planet feel as real and tactile. Like this is a real place and all the things that happen are scary because of how real I feel.

When we got to the Whalen Utani base, the night exterior was not really based on anything alien. It was more just a lot of it was actually built. I wanted these for these practicals, these large tower structures because this was like sort of what we considered like a, it's not like a permanent. It's like a military kind of outpost. So we wanted to have that feeling and wanted to have these like work-like towers. And then that would be the kind of made the sort of dominant source. And then we designed these towers in that sort of thing, in the shape that we had. Recently it was going to be an octagon, but then that was going to be too expensive.

And also Dan wanted to kind of go with a hexagon to kind of go with this sort of triangular hexagonal motif, I guess, of alien, where we definitely were inspired. by the alien movies was the couple of interiors where you meet Thia, sorry, where you meet Tessa in the kind of machine where she gets put back together. And that's a very alien-inspired set and therefore very alien-inspired lighting. That one, just sort of the top light and sterile, very white light. And then the scene when Tessa talks to mother was also very much inspired by the original alien with the warm kind of orange light.

and she's in that room, and then the kind of green screen and a little bit of green kind of interactive light on her. So those are very much of that flavor. But the rest of it was not too much inspired by that. Yeah. Gotcha. I actually, and I guess you didn't do this on purpose, but I'm going to say it was probably welcomed by, I guess, alien fans.

I don't know. But there's like kind of an establishing shot of the camp. And it very much looks like the camp that's in. Romulus Like it's like kind of the same structures and the same orange And I didn't know I was like

Oh interesting nod to Romulus And I guess no I mean No I mean because we were Who It wasn't a specific nod But I'm sure

That subconsciously we actually all went To see Romulus while we were in prep So just before we started shooting Romulus came out So it might have been something That definitely subconsciously Might have influenced Color palette and stuff like that

sure what i because we skip past it and it'll be the last question where i let you go the uh and just because i wrote it down clearly i liked it uh the research truck when they're having their little deck deck in um uh whichever one tessa yeah tessa yep the i really liked i think maybe it stuck stuck out to me a because i liked it but b i think just because we've been outside all the time and now we're in this very sterile environment um How do you light something like that? Is that all just production design lighting that, you know, obviously you kind of like or are you bringing sources in for that?

Yeah, no, you're different. So it was a very small set. And there was a lot of sort of in the beginning. So Rob Vincent, the production designer created that great set. And then, you know, we work together in terms of like where we think practicals should be and where like I want practicals that in terms of the frame. And then that definitely does some of the work. and then we're bringing in small units and just moving them around and manipulating them

and sometimes like one of the walls would peel out so in order to do the coverage you have to peel the wall out and then you basically try to put the practical or a replica of that practical back even though it's off camera you want it in the same spot to create the same base level so it's a lot of a space that small and you're trying to start to create mood is quite tricky, so you do want the practicals and you use them, and you definitely use them, like, where they're great is when you sort of shoot into them, and then they create that nice, because once you have that hot reference in the background, it allows you to also not overlight the characters. You can underlight the characters, and they don't look dark

because you've got this nice, like the direction towards Tessa, because Thia is up against the wall. So when we're looking at Thea, it ends up being quite flat. She's right against the wall. There's no practicals behind her. She can't have any backlight. So she's just getting this kind of three-quarter front light. And that's kind of all you can do. I mean, it could have been, maybe it could have been more topy or something, but you know, you still want to try to make it cosmetic to a degree. When you turn around on Tessa, now you have the depth of the set. Even in a small set, you've got all these practicals that you get to frame her against, which then allows you to really bring the light down on her without it feeling like the image is too dark.

I mean, one of the things that I'm sure I'm not the only one, but it's, you know, trying to, when you're trying to make sort of strong imagery, you can either have lit faces against dark backgrounds or you can have darker faces against lit backgrounds. You know, it's like those are sort of the two of the other, obviously other versions, but those are two very strong. two shortcut ways to making quite a strong image. So in the case of Tesla's coverage, yeah, we were able to frame against those practs, but we were definitely augmenting,

augmenting those existing practicals quite a bit, you know, to get eye light, because they were all up high. So even just to get, like, wrapping those lights a little bit and get little pings in their eyes when we could. Yeah. Right when you said strong light and dark background,

I, like, checked in on what's, it's rain. Where are you having right now? I'm in Sydney. Oh, yeah. I'm in L.A. And it's just been thunderstorming for days. Yeah, that's what I've heard. Yeah.

It's just the darkest hell on here. It's four o'clock. Well, like I said, man, I really thoroughly enjoyed the film. And it sounds like literally all my friends. Thank you. And I can't wait to see where that story ends up because it's, It's a joy to Yes

There's a joy having you on, man I hope Whatever this helmet Would not judge dread that you're making You can come back and chat about it I would love to Yeah thank you so much I love to have in the conversation

Frame and Reference is an Albot production Produced and edited by me Kenny McMillan If you'd like to support the podcast directly You can do so by going to Frame andrefpod.com and clicking on the Patreon button It's always appreciated, and as always, thanks for listening.