Frame & Reference Podcast - 69: "Purple Hearts" DP Matt Sakatani Roe

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

On todays episode of the podcast Kenny talks with cinematographer Matt Sakatani Roe about the Netflix film "Purple Hearts." Lots of great tips for you to use on your next shoot in this episode, enjoy! Follow Kenny on Twitter @kwmcmillan Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coasts 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. Check out ProVideoCoalition.com for more!

Hello and welcome to this, another episode of Frame and Reference. I'm your host, Kenny McMillan, and today I'm talking with Matt Sokentani Roe, the DP of the new film Purple Hearts on Netflix. He also shot a bunch of really great music videos, you know, Imagine Dragons and Cage the Elephant. and stuff like that, and a few episodes of the Beverly Hills 90210,100 reboot back in, like, 2019, I think it was. This episode is full of a bunch of great stuff, great tips, you know, kind of bread and butter tips that you can use on your film shoots. We talk about filmmaking as a whole, you know, I know I've said that. I need to be more specific than that, I suppose, in these intros, but, you know, just the, not only the

industry, but just the sort of fundamentals or, you know, however you want to think about that. We just, this is, this is a great one, uh, on the educational side of things, uh, as well as, you know, uh, Matt's an entertaining listen. So, um, that's what you're in for. I'll let you get to it. Please enjoy my conversation with Matt Rowe. Tell me how you got started, um, creatively. always a visual person or did you come to cinematography through like architecture or something

like that i i well i came up i grew up in alabama so i kind of have like that football redneck lifestyle you know i had a lifted truck you know went to auburn football school not really thinking i was gonna ever be like an artist if that's what you want to call it nowadays but you know i was always interested in video cameras you had the dv camera growing up in high school you know filming silly stuff using it for like projects putting things together um i studied finance in auburn uh there really wasn't a photography outlet that i could join because i wasn't in the art program you couldn't take photography classes so i drove 80 miles every tuesday to a community college took photography classes i had one professor holly lavinstein at the school that did like a

short film program that really opened my eyes you know after school moved out to los angeles slept on my grandmother's couch for it seemed like a year, year and a half and just tried to find my way working, like, as a photography assistant, working in like grip, electric, all the random departments. And like, you know, that's like back in the day, like working for $50 a day before there were kind of like any like collective like, let's help each other, let's get the rates up. You know, that was tough. Eventually, a filmmaker named Mark Pellington gave me an opportunity to be his intern, worked with him for a good. bit but then my big break seemed to really be when he asked me to shoot his daughter's fifth birthday party video and you know he probably thought oh matt's going to go run around with the camera you know shoot some kids opening presents will be great but he told me do whatever you want make something

cool so i kind of just followed around a five-year-old girl experience her birthday parties like through the anxiety the helicopter parent she's ripping presents away from other people kind of having like a Darren Aronowski david lynch vibe i have a scene where like a little kids, like playing on a tiny piano, but I looped in reverse so the audio is getting sucked back up into it. And he said when he watched it, I think he said his daughter cried, his mother-in-law hated it. But that kind of gave me my big break. And I was shooting a music video with them going from intern to DP based off a five-year-old birthday party video shot on an XL-1 canon, I think. Yeah.

I've said this a million times on this podcast. I still have my XL2 in the closet. it, but I have to, it's awesome. Yeah, I have to run, I guess it's RCA to an HDMI adapter and then record it with the Odyssey, 17 plus, which is hilarious, but still works. Tape decks fuck though. But so when you were shooting that, that five-year-old's birthday, how did you conceptualize, like, were you just making it up as you went along or did you kind of have an idea? I kind of realized, like, yeah, I kind of think a lot of the work I do, I look for the subjectivity of a character's, like, perspective. And, like, if it's falling around a five-year-old girl who's maybe, like, three and a half feet tall, it's like, you know, this was before, like, the easy rig was even kind of a thing, you know, I kind of put the camera down.

I think I put a belt around my neck and just kind of ran around with her and just experienced her, you know, it was a big elaborate party, like there's stuff outside, she got lost, she fell, hurt her arm, but didn't cry. I followed her around. She's like, where's my dad? Where's my dad? And it wasn't until she found her dad. That's when like the tears came. It was like, you know, capturing the moment of a person, experienced the emotions of like, I need to show my dad that I need him in this moment.

And I felt there's like some beauty to that, you know, aside from the other weird sound design and Philip Glass score, I probably put on the piece. But it was kind of eye opening and I kind of helped me kind of figure out like what I want to do. like make something that C-mail was supposed to be just like, you know, a little kid's video, but it's kind of like everything I do. I want to find a subjective approach to it and have fun with it,

regardless of the budget. Well, and, you know, there's, I think there's something to be said for taking every job. You can't even if it's not really a job. Taking every opportunity, I should say. Because there's certainly a bunch of what I thought were going to be dumb gigs that, like, led to better stuff. Yeah, and eventually, I still shoot with the director, Mark Pellington.

Like I did, he gave me the chance to do my first movie with John Hamm, Bruce Stern, Alan Birstrum, you know, Academy Award winners. It was crazy. Nistalgia. Right. That's a great looking film. Cool. Yeah, I think Red Dragon and Cook Anamorphics. And that's actually where I went the supervising colorists of this film, Jill Bogdanovich.

She kind of, you know, great colorists helped guide me. kind of like early prep luts style fun stuff it all right so we're now we're jumping a little bit ahead but no worries uh no not not because of that but because every single time i've been like man i really like how this looks the colorist ends up being jill i want nothing more than to interview this woman because she has whatever my aesthetic is mentally she either created and it seeped into in my brain, or we came at that at the same time. I don't know what it is, but she, in my opinion, is a plus A1. I should also talk about the color.

Brian Smallers was the supervisor. Brian Smallers was the day-to-day colorist. Let me put you in touch with both of them after this. Please, that would be amazing. So I'll kind of half quote myself, but these days, cinematography squarely has a foot in post. and on set you know you can't use definitely can't have one with that no one's shooting seven oh nine for a film but talk to me about how you um develop those

luts and stuff like are you a little more hands off or are you more like kind of because I noticed all of your work down to the music videos is uh have a pretty solid color uh element yeah like Lut creation is kind of like that's where everything kind of starts from me because you know like I came it up in like the back end of like the film stocks you know like having like the different testing like you push it you pull it like what can you really do but when let's i kind of came out like it's a way to kind of put a stamp on your image but most importantly it helps people see on set because everyone you know now everyone has a monitor right and i've never really subscribed to the idea of giving everyone 709 to the video village

and then knowing okay it's going to look amazing by the time it's done i've really like taking on the idea of shooting lets in the creation of shooting lets like i I love live grade being able to nip the images on the fly. But on this project, I went in with Jill and Brian Smaller's colors. And they kind of just showed me different things, going over different concepts, talking about images, thinking about, oh, the shadows can do this. I don't really get into, oh, I need like a few more points in like the shadow area or take the hue saturation curve and bend it this way.

Like I'm familiar with all that stuff because I've done like the resolve classes and stuff like that. But like when you're working with colorists, like letting the artist have the tools and then interpret the vision. And just speaking things, talking about things like on a high level, I felt that's the best way to work with a colorist. Like I did this one project where, you know, we're looking for this low contrast vibe, but I told him, you know, make it feel like the image is in a cloud. And then one colorist is going to get there one way, another colors is going to there a different way. But letting like the artist really can drive those wheels, I feel like is the best process to kind of get the objective what you're trying to achieve.

Yeah. Well, and also it's the kind of idea of like a decentralized command, right? Like if you micromanage the colorists, you're going to probably both end up with something neither of you like. Yeah, I think that's totally true. Yeah, because like once we created these luts, you know, we had like five kind of shooting luts that we kind of played with. We took them to set. And I've always been like a one show let person just because in VFX, things get, you know, sometimes complicated. you have to double check if things are coming back the right way.

Like, I'm sure there's reasons to use multiple luts. But with this one, we kind of found like our hero one, you know, shoot with it. I kind of like the way the shadows sat and like with a little bit of bluer area. I like the roll off of like some of the warmth that was added. And one of the things they did that I really like is there's a little kind of fringe of cyan, sometimes where the shadows meet like the midtones. And it's just like one of those ideas of like color separation.

Like how can you get like these two dimensional images we see on. screens really pop in a third dimension. And that's one of my big things is where I like to kind of hide in like a secondary color somewhere, kind of find things with it's, you know, working with art direction. That's where it kind of starts, you know, kind of build your tools on set. Let the Lut kind of work in unison with all these other departments. Yeah. Well, um, so, you know, nowadays, especially with cameras being so good, like it's hard to pick up, you know, the Venice, the electric. as I still think the C-500's rad, like reds.

It's hard to, do you believe that any one of those cameras gives you something that the other doesn't? Or do you think that kind of the capturing of all that data, the grading is what gives you that final whatever it is? Because some people believe that there's a Genesei-Quada, any kind of camera, you know? I think it's basically the person holding it. You know, it's like any one of those tools can be a great cool, you know, upstream color, I think it was like a GH5 or something like that. Like, you know, I've worked on a movie on a 5D, uh, with director Mark Palington called I Mel with you with Eric Schmidt shooting it. And like we kind of had to unravel like the 5D color science back when it first kind of came out. And like the mark two.

Yeah, the Mark two. Like we kind of this whole test, you know, with the colorist of like shooting a film stock on a gray card and abstracting the grain. And like that was like back in the day like before anyone else was kind of doing it. And it was fun to kind of explore the tool. And I think, you know, once you kind of take the tool, understand its functionality, you know, you can film beautiful stuff with basically anything. And I think just having that mentality of like you don't always need the best stuff, you know, regardless of budget, you know, just make the best with what you got, whether it's like a, you know, a one light package, like a van package or like multiple fleet of 10 tons. sometimes I've been on big sets and you have every kind of tool imaginable and sometimes like you start turn things off to get back to where the foundation is well to

your point about the one show lot it's like you could think of it the same way as like you know sometimes a three lens package is a lot better than having every lens I just shot a little spec ad and we had a full set of atlases and we ended up using like three of them we would test them like we were using them all and then we were just like app it was like the 40 and the 65 i think we're like the only two that we need you can do a whole i think nostalgia i basically did the whole movie on the 65 and the 40 yeah like great lenses and i feel like that's uh you know having that kind of narrowed selection versus having that variety and it helps kind of create a visual palette with your images and you know i i'm granted i've gone on shows where i take

two lenses of like, or two lens sets with probably like eight to nine lenses in that set, you know, for certain situations. But then you always gravitate, you know, love the 40, love the 65, sometimes use the 75, but, you know, sometimes the 100 is good too. But finding that narrow selection tends to be, you know, a focused idea. Yeah. So I'm actually fascinated by early, early days. digital cinematography from a technical perspective because I feel like there's a lot of stuff

people can learn about what we were trying to do between film and digital because now digital is like good enough that whatever if you want to shoot film shoot film like that's fun but there was a time where the argument wasn't we wanted to make it look like film it was more that we wanted it to make it look good because digital looked like ass what were some of those tinkering things like you were saying like shooting a film stock on a gray card was so you just just overlaid a still image of the grain over the video? Yeah, I think it was a while ago, but I think we just shot like a gray card and kind of use some kind of like overlay tool to kind of pull out like the noisy channel of the

film grain, apply that back onto the 5D Mark 2 footage, and then it seemed to help the highlight roll off because you know, those cameras like I feel like they're 8-bit color science, you know, kind of like shooting reversal, protect the highlights. but then you also still don't have much in the shadows. A lot of my music videos were kind of started with that process and then, you know, finding ways to color it, finding ways to make it look more like film. Yeah, because I remember during the adapter days,

you know, you'd get the deal. I love those. Yeah, I remember one product. I can't remember who made it, but it had a spinning ground glass instead of a static one so that the quote unquote grain pattern. would move instead of having you know that kind of hard vignette with a static quote unquote brain I remember using that one of us can afford that yeah yeah I remember using

that thing once I was like was it what kind of camera did you connect it to was it like that P3 camera the there was the there was the HVX 200 there's the HVX the DVX the I think you could connect it to an Excel but that was like a weird adapter because the XL was mirrorless I suppose and then you you had, yeah, the Sony P-3, F-3. Was it 900? Well, there's a couple of them. The F-900 was the attack of the clones camera.

Yeah. That big shoulder rig joint. But yeah, I think the F-3 was around that. Oh, yeah, I remember. I don't think I ever used that one, but I remember, like, when I did a shoot with it, I was in a basement, and I threw the thing on. We never tested it, and I'm like, oh, why is it so dark? And that's a quick, good, quick lesson to learn about stop compensation.

And just running tests. Do you, do you get a lot of opportunity to like, do tests or do you kind of have to tinker on your own, pardon me, tinker on your own time and then. I do a little bit of tinkering on my own, you know, I have friends that we have cameras. I have good relationships with all like the rental houses we use. I can kind of go in any time, throw up a set of lenses, kind of look at stuff. But it's never, like I was working with an AC on the last project and he worked on, you know, stuff with like Fincher and like legendary filmmakers. He was talking about having like three to four weeks of camera tests. Yeah.

And I don't know if like the generation nowadays, at least on certain projects, like we have that ability to kind of have that kind of testing and, you know, trying to find like, okay, this is around my shadows and this is one I want to test like the diffusion on this type of set with this piece of wood and this kind of color costume. you know sometimes we only get like two days to do a hair makeup wardrobe tested and sometimes we get one like the last show i don't think i got any um it just depends but i think it's important to try to figure out like here's your palette here's your paint brush this is the lens learn what not to do with the lens learn what the lens can do like look at the fall off um the last show i did really get to do a test i just kind of threw out every kind of overhead diffusion quality kind of like i always wanted to learn like sometimes it's hard to with me. Is it quarter grid? Is it half grid? Is it, you know, is it a silk? Is it a black silk? Is it a gray grid? I just threw up every single one of them kind of try to roll test, trying to figure out what's the right tool for the right situation. And I think that helps inform, you know, the project helps communicate with the grips. But then, you know, sometimes it changes like project to project and you're feeling something different. And I feel like retesting old ideas can sometimes be valuable. Absolutely. Did you have any

interesting notes from the overheads test? Because that's something I'm fascinated by. I love black grid cloth. Black grid cloth. Black grid cloth. Yeah, it's big stop loss. I forget what it was. But actually on Purple Hearts, we used a lot of it for our night scenes.

You know, sometimes like you could think, oh, you go throw up some LEDs, throw up a balloon, throw up something like, you know, soft quality. But we would put 18Ks in our condors, throw up a 8x or 12, by a black grid cloth and make a kind of like a big Shamir on an 80 foot lift and just use it to kind of like light our scenes and are the main set for Cassie's apartment was on a third story and was shot practically so very difficult to maintain and do time shifting through the different script notes like you know I think we had like 30 or 40 pages in that apartment and they always would not schedule like the same kind of day just based on function

So we had to have these kind of tools and grid cloth with an 18K black grid cloth seemed to be the way to go for our night vibe. So I so this is highlighting my ignorance. I literally didn't know they made I knew they made gray. I didn't know black grid cloth was an option. It's really cool. Jake Reader, key grip. Oh, shout out Jake.

Yeah. What does that look like compared to just, you know, using a regular grid cloth and just dimming down like crazy. It kind of, it shifted the Kelvin. I think I metered it right around like 6,500 to 7,000 Kelvin. So it shifts. It's a little cool. It has that kind of like soft quality that you get kind of from a Shamira, but it was,

you know, it was somewhat still directional, which was good. So instead of just like, you know, throwing up a balloon and kind of let it go in universal, like we were able to kind of shape it because we can still kind of put the condor and shoot it back in a direction and it's kind of have that. quality but which is interesting too sometimes you don't like it but you get kickback when you put a big light like that into like an eight by frame unless you contain it off the back a bucket but then it seems like we got a two for one where we would get the soft kind of bluer quality kind of shooting into the set but then we could also kind of bounce it the opposite direction because we didn't have the biggest budget in the world so sometimes you only get one or two condors but if we're doing a big night scene we could use it to bounce light off the bounce it a little bit and have to have the biggest budget in the world and have have it backslash on the decept behind us. Huh. It's actually really cool.

Never would have thought. Were you mostly using hot lights like that or did, were you leaning on LEDs as well? Oh, we used, we get a little bit of everything. I like hard lights. Just because you kind of shape them a little bit. You know,

I kind of growing up, I, you know, gone to trouble trying to Kino flow everything. You know, you just have a set with tons of soft light and you end up trying to like get rid of it. But then it's kind of finding ways to kind of embrace like directional hard light um was one of the things i tried to do on this but you know inside the house you know we had light tile um blake farmer gaffer rigged up light tile all over the place

tight tubes everything running down to a blackout app so when i was operating because i you know operated the main camera with um my two other operators uh dennis nois and luke uh it was tough to try to make calls while you're kind of shooting on set. We always had the comms on talking to DIT, Gaffer, KeyGrip, and everything just kind of going remotely was like the only way to kind of do this because sometimes I had the light while having the easy rig while talking to the actors and running around drinking a coffee. Right.

You know, to your point about directionality and stuff, it's something that Ellen Curris told me in that podcast was how we were talking about diffusion. both on the lens and in the light, and she was saying how she prefers directionality to an image, which is why silks are no good and a pro mist is no good, because it doesn't have any, in her words, it doesn't have any sensibility. It's just fuzzy. So she wants like a quarter grid or a half grid or something because it's still soft, but it has, you know, intent or whatever you want to say. And that stuck with it. That like, as you were saying, that gave me sort of permission to not use kinos, love kinos, especially their LED panels are in my,

opinion and I've done the tests literally the best panels you can use color wise but um you know to be work a little harder and be a little more uh I guess not take risks in such a sense but yeah yeah I guess well it's interesting because like I guess you could think of as taking a risk because like you sometimes with hard light you worry about oh could you get the little eye kind of dimple underneath an actress or can you like bring out the skin texture too much if you use hard light so for me on this film it was like the concept you're trying to do less and like really embrace it like there's sometimes where like you see imperfections in a face but then you look at like so many great

films that have been made and sometimes they just let people like get blasted by the sun and not have to worry about oh should i put an opal should i put a grid no just let the sun at the face and it looks rich and it looks real um and i think that was one of the things like you know i pushed myself to try to really do on this project because you know going back into the kind of whole concept of the lighting of the film like we had a whole arc plan like the characters they come from fragmented lives they had fragmented emotions so in the start of the film in the first act we really wanted to have that multicolour approach like the characters are fragmented so should the light you know we had reds blues greens playing off the

concept of the film with the political polarization you have one person from a blue household one person from a red household and together they become purple and in the film as the characters kind of find the relationship and the connection between each other I start to slowly introduce

sunlight so I take fragmented color spectrum and bring it into a full harmonious like color spectrum like daylight and letting that art kind of develop throughout the film the goal was to make sure we ended the film on a sunny day which

Thankfully, it happened. And then that was kind of like the first time you'd really see the character as being hit by hard, directional, non-diffused sunlight. And it's supposed to represent their emotional arc and their energy. You know, that's kind of what we were saying. I can't remember if we recorded this part if this is in the preamble. But that speaks to the point of, like we were saying about how, you know, cinematography is a string of images. And it's not, you know, three point lighting every time because it's pretty. You know, there's, it represents.

story not just looking good you know yeah and and i and i push myself to do this too because like sometimes like if you end up with like an image you just think it's not so pretty but like does the frame tell the story does the light set the emotion and sometimes like it's just good and like did not have like the most beautiful images like sometimes because you can't have beauty without ugliness and just trying to find ways to like put up an image let it be transmissible mission will let it be accessible and it seems like sometimes if you kind of like oh here at ad light here's an edge here's something else here's some like cool color sometimes the image i don't know like can it be palatable you know yeah well and to your point like film in

every form art honestly is uh you know it's it's juxtaposition you know like they say jazz is the notes you don't play and all that shit but like you can't yeah if you just have all beauty it's not beauty it's just flat it's just one emotion yeah like that was actually bringing up jazz like that was what like

when the director and I Liz Rosenbaum like we talked about like having our sets it's kind of like you know every day we came in with a plan we met every morning for like an hour before call to kind of you know we worked out the spots making sure

here's where we want the characters to get to but we did leave a little bit of flexibility with the blocking with the actors with the space to kind of transform as we went and like thinking of it as jazz like if dennis a camera operator was playing the snares i was b camera operator on a little bit longer lens off to this side playing the trumpet you know liz is kind of conducting the orchestra from behind cameras and then blake jake and michael my

d a t are just kind of manipulating the images and kind of mixing the levels as they're coming through the speakers and just having that kind of fluidness um to the set and just having that kind of fluidness um to the that I think really helped bring the authenticity to the performances and letting the characters feel like they kind of had that freedom. And, you know, one of the things I just dislike sometimes is, like, when you have a character, like, run in and, like, hit a mark because it's the frame you really want to hit. You know, granted, that's very important, like, with Dollywork and kind of finding the marks for the assistance and everything like that. But, you know, sometimes when you're trying to capture the energy of two people yelling at each other, having that kind of onset freneticness is, you know, it's going to be fun. well and also you don't want to catch an actor in the middle of them delivering a really hard line or whatever going yeah you know check their feet you mother I gotta you know yeah but then like when we were operating we would like we would do that you know the ACs like you know Bradley broiler first AC is amazing but like we would always like count our feet like if we were running back with actor we go and stop we would like do the little these on the ground kind of put the marks for us too so you know it wasn't like like kind of having a bunch of cats inside an apartment for 40 pages.

But, you know, we tried to be focused as much as we can. But we still wanted that opportunity because, like, if a character sat down, like, great, run in there, grab an emotion. Like, do the scene from that. Like, having that kind of inspiration was fun. Sure. I wanted to ask you about your music video work because you've worked with some great bands over the years.

And what, it feels like that used to be how people could make a, Mark is a DP and now it's not so much because people aren't investing in music videos like they used to. What would your experience like shooting with because you did like an Imagine Dragons video right and like yeah, that epic 12 minute one. That was fun. Yeah. And a few like metal bands and stuff like that. Like what were some of the lessons you learned on those films and maybe some risks you were allowed to take because of potentially there being less heat on you? Or was there the same amount of heat on you because they're, you know, the label was involved? it was interesting because a lot of those music videos I did with my mentor mark

pelington who you know I shot the five-year-old's birthday party with and he brought me up and then kind of threw me into these bigger projects and I don't I think I was like ignorant at the time because I didn't really understand the you know the importance I guess there was a lot of money involved but for me it was still kind of just running around with the camera and it wasn't until like you know if I didn't make my day one or two times and you learn really quickly that it's still a business you know we're not just out here making art you know sometimes you can on certain budgets but it's very important to make your day made it important to have like the communication of achieve the objective of what you're out there to do but with like some of those

projects specifically to imagine dragon one it was kind of like a lesson in narrative filmmaking from like an early start to go out there like try things you know I think that video was shot in like three and a half maybe four days but to get that much footage out of those three days to learn how to move fast be minimal learn what you need to light and what you don't and I think that was a lesson of just kind of being restraint and kind of learning how to hold back could I like you know famous musicians in a space with like a couple park hands like on big mombo combos coming into a second story window and call it acceptable and not have to feel like I needed to, you know, book like key every scenario.

And I think it's having that kind of ability to kind of pull back. And I guess those are still considered risks. Like does a character or an actor not have to look their best in every shot? Can they sometimes have those facial imperfections that, you know, we as DPs see like, oh, is the no shadow in the right place? Or do you feeling the under eyes to an extent? But, you know, I guess that was my approach. Just like, just trying to think, like, can I do less with the tools that I'm given?

Because I don't know I have all these tools at my disposal. Yeah, that's a big one. If you were to go back and do it again, would you do it the same way? Or having learned something now, would you change any elements of that? I'd probably over, honestly, I'd probably overlight it now if I had to go back and do some of that stuff. Because I'd think about, you know, you always want to think about your turnarounds, think about your day. Can you light a big wide and go into coverage with kind of minimal work? But, you know, nowadays I probably do something a little different in kind of taking the set and making it bigger.

I love giving directors a big, clean set, potentially, you know, 270, 360 if I can do it, it's always fun with minimal kind of relighting and just kind of bringing an eye lighter or a key if you need it. But just kind of going through a place and finding the best possibility to make the most flexibility I can out of a set. This was, I guess, what I would take back to those days. Sure. When you say overlight, you mean like put too many lights or overheads? Too many lights. I think that's always comes down to. Like, yeah, it's like any time I've, you know, I've regretted something, a decision I've made.

It's been because I had too many lights on the scene. Whether it's because I'm trying, because whether I'm trying to address a thing on a face that I see that I feel like could be done. And I pay a lot of attention to the facial structure. And I've worked on certain projects where that's, expected um to kind of have that kind of beauty and that kind of um look but you know it's always important to gauge that with project you on and to make sure you kind of light for the project and light for the story and not light for the um beauty vanity yeah well because like i uh i know i used to work at abc and i was interviewing joanna coello who shot the rookie and the rookie's a

very ABC looking show. You know, I kind of, I figured out their visual language pretty quick working there. And, uh, they are very, they seem to really, um, prefer kind of that, you know, very flattering lighting on most of their stars. And she was saying they actually gave them quite a bit of leeway, but, um, it is interesting, like, which clients are like, all right, you better, uh, the DPs from Grace and Frankie. Obviously, you know, uh, actors of a certain vintage are going to need and demand. the softest light possible.

How do you combat, assuming you've come up against something like that, do you push back or do you just go, I got it, like I'll figure it out, or is there kind of an interplay? Lining a face, it's always been like kind of an interpretation, and you kind of have to gauge, you know, one, the talent, gauge your clients, whether it's filmmakers, directors, screenwriters, producers or studio knowing your audience i think is a really important task because you know at the end of the day we're still as a cinematographer we're a business person we have to be able to become asked back to a production people have to like the work that we produce and it has to kind of meet the expectations of what we're supposed to do if a project comes to me and wants the kind

of clean look if you want to call it that um you do the best version you can there's been been amazing high key photography and sometimes you see like high key photography nowadays and it feels unique because a lot of stuff has gone to the darker path you know i love doing the darker stuff too but i think having a balance and like you know if i feel like a project kind of the story will motivate a specific you know a frontal broadside key in a certain scene because i the actor is doing a great job and i want people to see the face um you know you go to that tool of tricks specifically like kind of my go to has been And bleach muslin with a little bit of Roscoe pebble board behind it. Sometimes tough spun on top of Ruscoe pebble board into a circular bounce. You get the hard light from the silver and the tough spun on top of it kind of milks it out and diffuses it a little bit. So you can kind of have like a specular bounce that's still shapeable. So you move the kind of bounce around and you kind of shape and have that nice kind of. circular fall off. That's really cool, actually. That's a great. It's crazy how

functional, utilitarian, what I'm trying to say? Multifaceted? Muslin is for being such a thick fabric. You can do a lot with it. Yeah, because I think we, as someone told me once, I think we tested it, you put a light through muslin. You're going to get the same output through muslin, the same distance as you would as the bounce. So it's kind of, like it can be a two for one. So what we did on one project is we put like silver behind it so you kind of double activate it and so you get kind of the hard light with the soft light I forget we had I think we had a name for it we also did a ultra bounce behind the muslin I think we called it a ultra muslin so you get the soft quality unless you don't want the silver so you shoot in the muslin you get the

bounce off of that the light transmission that goes through the muslin hits the ultra bounce and comes back through like double diffused so you kind of get a two for one like spread on the face and that was gorgeous we would put sky panels into it put tungsten lights into it and it just kind of gave that kind of nice quality and you could stagger as many as you want and upsize it you know put five different four-by-flops and I think in Canada my key group was making five-by-fives which is like seems like the perfect size you put like three of them you have a 15-foot light source that's really cool yeah there's so many like shout out to all great gaffers out there because some of them were so inventive with like because that kind of that's

almost like a like a thin-ass book light oh it's amazing and you can kind of just kind of put it in like a small area and you can double break it if you need to but it seemed like with that kind of formula we were just putting things up we were doing it outside and putting m90s into it and it would just be like the perfect key for an external exterior scene and you know yeah definitely shout out to all my gaffers and key groups that I've collaborated because my approach has always been like you know Same with like when let creation. I like to be kind of hands off. Like I know the tools, but then, you know, key grips and gaffers and first ACs,

they're on set probably like 50 to 70% more times than I am. And they're on different sets working with different DPs, seeing different techniques. And each one of those like collaborators is going to come back to my set with a massive wealth of knowledge. And they can talk about like, yeah, I want soft light. Okay, what is soft light? Is it this balance? Is it in the, you know, beadboard? You can bounce a light and bounce it off the wall of the truck if it's windy and you need something else, which I've done many times.

Sure. Yeah, just coming with, like, interesting tools of the trade. Is there any particular, you've mentioned a few, but anything that you've been taught that was really like a cool aha moment for you that you can think of? Think about a second. I think the tough spun on top of. Roscoe silver pebble board making little time you can do it you can size it up to because I've seen it where it's been like a two by two little circular dish with silver and tough spun on top of it you slide that in and it seems like it's the soft this nicest like

kind of directional eye light that you can kind of put because it having a circular source in the eyeball I think this comes back to Harris-Savides with talking about that back in the day when you're doing like makeup commercials if you see like a square frame and an eyeball it registers as like inorganic but you put like a circular

catch light in a person's eye it tends to have that kind of like emotional connectivity and I think that's where sometimes people have gone when you see circular bounces on set like someone's been taught that or learned that along the way and it's something I always advocate for too

sometimes you can put a little cut out on a square one if it needs to be a square but I do like building like three by three circles, four by four circles, five by five circles with Tufts Spun and Roscoe Silver. Yeah, you know, that I think that I've learned a lot from at the beginning of the, I'm going to make a sentence here. So at the beginning of the podcast, I'm asked about like, oh, did you come from architectures? Because I've met a lot of DPs that came from architecture and kind of what you're saying

about round versus square is round is organic. you know, humans are, animals are round, they're not, there's no hard edges. And artificial is right angles. There's no right angles really. I mean, you know, maybe geodes or whatever. But yeah, it'd be weird if you looked outside and saw the sun, it was a giant square box, right? Yeah. Well, and to your point, too, like, that, that's, it's kind of like those little extra thoughts

that make you a more maybe valuable DP because it's, very easy to put up a sky panel with a Shamir on it and go like, there, that light's great because it looks great. But like you're saying, you'll see it in reflections and stuff where it's like, especially if you're a DP watching film, you go, ah, sky panel, like in the eye, you know, because we're always staring for catch lights, you know. Yeah, the double catch light, I'm guilty of it sometimes because you just need to and sometimes it's hard to work around. But I know, like, there's a bit a whole thing of like, is it one catch light or is it two? But then, you know, you can have a human beings sit in a space and have multiple practicals on the

opposite side of the conversation and I think I think it's justifiable and I think you know as cinematographers we tend to catch things more so than what other people think and I think it's always a balance like am I lighting this scene for my cinematography friends or am I lighting the scene for an audience or who am I really lighting the scene for and I've definitely been in the situation where I feel like oh I really need to impress some people in the cinematography circles though this is going to be really good IG post to make it dark and make a contrast he had some green and blue but you know teach it's own you know I started playing a game that's fun for me but annoys the shit out of my girlfriend which is where did that backlight come from we'll be watching shit and I'll just be like

where's that backlight come from and she's like what because now I'm like making her realize that it's just you know they're outdoors or whatever and the moon's here and for some reason there's just yeah it's that game yeah I know some it's it's it's it's hard to like sometimes not do it but I think you know someone said once that like front light is and especially commercial photography nowadays is the new backlight yeah well you that is funny how like things are so it's you know as as David Fincher said film is fashion things are cyclical you know what was once uh the look in the let's say 40s then people want to be the counterculture to that and then it just kind of circles its way around and

now we're coming back to hard light where soft light was the thing for what the past 20 years or so oh yeah hard light is the thing right now he's basically 20k to the face or sun to the face and just having that commercial pop it feels like something's like there's something refreshing about it you know we haven't seen it in a while and letting it come back and kind of seen you know the great designers of like you know how can you do production design costume and the other departments how can they work with this new technique that you know has been around forever but sometimes comes in and out of fashion. I've seen some really great work, just like frontal hard sources,

and it just feels contemporary nowadays. And I'm assuming it's going to change within the next couple of years. It'd be something different. Yeah. That's actually, you bring something up. What's your relationship like with your production designers? Do you get a lot of time to talk with them? How do they inform your work?

My relationship with Kevin Bird, production designer on Purple Hearts, is almost, if not more important. and then my collaboration, my gaffer, and my grip. We're looking at sets. He's doing 3D renders. We're trying to figure out, like, what's the space going to look like? One, from a story perspective and, two, like, emotionally, how can we set the character into the space with the set decoration?

Working with the set decorators to make sure, you know, your background is going to look the way you want it, and there's not something poking out of someone's head or it's going to have the right color palette. But, like, working with a set, and making sure it has the right stuff seems like it's one of the most important things that a set amount harder if we're going to do

because I make the joke on set. I spend more time moving chairs around on a set than I do lights. Yeah. Having the basically plan the footwork or if you're building a set from scratch, making sure the dolly can fit through all these different places,

making sure that your camera work and your floor plan is going to be able to be conducive. If you put too many chairs or put too many tables or put to many lamps, build the practicals into the set to find that motivation or find a reason for what you're going to do probably pass that practical to actually

extend that light through or ideally sometimes the practical works and that's all you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I've got a dumb question for you. How many lamps are you guilty of putting? Like, what's your worst? Like 40 lamps?

How many lamps, like practical lamps, have you put in a scene? What's the maximum number? In a scene? I think if you look at, at the first couple scenes in the bar, we basically did environmental lighting practically through the whole first part of the bar scenes because, you know, we wanted that fragmented color spectrum, like the fragmented emotions of the characters. But, you know, every single one

of those LEDs was placed by the wonderful, like, set decorators and on-set dressers. And then Blake, my Gaffer, we'd go through, like, making sure, like, oh, man, is this neon going to flicker? great, okay, we've got to find a way to work around it. Bobbinette on neons, great, easy trick to take the intensity down that you don't necessarily see all the time. We tried streaks and tips, we tried neon dimmers, but sometimes they just don't pulse the right hurts, even if they have the nice voltage dimmers in the very acts. You put a lot of neons in a scene, you're going to end up with problems. That's why working with art department, I went to the neon place, tested every single one of on a camera,

and learning what we could work with. But if there's specific colors you wanted and we knew we had to control on set, Bob and it was kind of the fast trick to kind of throw that up there. But there probably could have been, I don't know, a couple hundred practicals in that space.

Carnival lights rigged around the bar. But it was fun because, like, we go in and like we want to do a scene. Oh, we want a little more shape. Great. Unscrew these practicals. Turn these practicals. Throw these on, throw these off.

And it was getting that, like, sometimes like eight, nine pages a day in a scene with probably like seven characters. and only having a certain amount of time, I think it's the way to go. We may have had a few strips of light tile, just kind of for a soft key, but I feel like even with that,

we sometimes kind of played it low or just to extend a little bit. Well, at least that's motivated. Kind of what I was alluding to is when you see a scene in like a bedroom and this child has like 15 lamps around the room. And you never notice until you think about it. You're like, hold on, one on the bed,

two next to them, three behind them, two next to the mom. There's one by the door. it's funny because like when I ask for practical sometimes in a space from art department like they'll I come in and sometimes I'll be overwhelmed the practicals but I sometimes like that because then you can actually figure out okay let's establish the look let's pull out these six or this certain these lights and you kind of at least you're left for the foundation to be able to like or I can block a scene I light it successfully and like in this fashion I would just guess like I'm sure I probably like snuck like five to seven in a background of a shot because I wanted to actually extra blobby out of focus boke somewhere sure but it looks good and then i think people are happy with it who's the say like you know was this the wrong choice and i think that's the thing i struggle with like cinematography sometimes like you know who are we really serving you know you know we want to be the artist um we want to be able to be asked backed um and be successful financially for our families

and if a person asked me like we want to have a lot of like interesting sparkly background great I'm here to serve yeah well and it's also too like that's only something I guarantee you no civilian has ever been like there's too many lamps in this house like you know it's just stuff we look at I did I did want to ask you at the beginning and then we kind of jumped ahead but like what were growing up what were some of the you know films that sort of got you going and kind of influenced you know worm their way into into your brain and kind of spoke to you visually I think my mom accidentally took me to see seven when I was in elementary school. Hell yeah.

Yeah, and that was definitely a big eye-opener. She said I walked away really understanding the concepts. I know from what I remember seeing it back when I was a kid, there was something about it that made me feel a certain way, like not necessarily scared or cried, but it was an intensity to the images that I found really interesting and I feel like I walked away from that seeking out other material like that or at least being fascinated by it um but later in life one of the films that really kind of stood out to me is of course like apocalypse now like never before I had seen an film that used color in such a

fascinating way um trying to find an idea for each one of those colors and I know Vittorio has these three books that are extremely rare and hard expensive to try to buy someday i hope i can afford them um but just having that color theory and like that's one of the things we tried to apply to purple hearts like in the film red was like one of the characters like conflicts you know whether she has diabetes you have blood in the pharmacy she can't afford her bills like throw a little like neon practical up there making the dad's character uh hurt his car maroon like trying to find informative decisive decision making

seemed like a way to kind of get through the film without just like throwing out random ideas even if they're not registered but just coming up with a concept whether like yellow was family, yellow costumes for the mom character, blue was the theme of privacy

and finding like solitude but learning how to engage with other characters to get towards that warm light when the connections with the two characters to find romance to yellow warm. it helped kind of focus us as like you know so many elements need to be cited like you know in an art department meeting like okay what color is the cell phone cover what color are the shades

like trying to find a reasoning for decisive decision making seem like an expedited way to do your pre-production process and help find a way to guide those decision-making because so many decisions have to be made in pre-production yeah and uh for the sort of aspiring filmmakers that may be listening it needs to be kind of hammered down how important those production design and costume design choices are like you can't just you know you might only have access to your apartment if you're filming but you really should do your best you know hit home goods or something and like think about what that character would have because people will notice if you're a guy and your main character's a girl and she lives in

your bedroom theoretically like no one's going to believe you they're going to it's going to come off as cheap yeah it's a tough thing because like pallet creation i think that's kind of where people talk about production value is like you know what is your palette what are the tools you're working with and it seems like you know any camera seems like it can produce a good image nowadays but then what is the stuff that you put in front of that camera whether it's you know if this story takes play like a marriage story it looks gorgeous um two characters running around a very small white walled apartment Robbie Ryan looks amazing but it's like trying to find the right palette for your story and finding like the right costumes because if you look at those

two characters running around in that white wall apartment they kind of just had that right level of separation or assimilation into their space that fit the story and I think that's one thing you know to kind of gauge like do you want to go super loud with your palette or do you you want to go super contained is this in palette is it out of palette or why is it out of palette and if it's out of palette what can we do about bringing it back in palette and i think you know going through looking at these location photos working with art department you kind of have to put a thought to every single piece and object that is in your sets kind of feel like is this part of my story or is this not work like we did we tried to put a practical lamp in her

Cassie's apartment in the film and the production designer are looking at it like I asked for it because I knew there's going to be scenes staged around this dining room table we both looked at it looked at each other I'm like this does not go here and it just didn't make sense so we lost it came up with another way to light the scene

but you know I don't want to always like put something in the frame because it's going to make my life easier from a lighting perspective but sometimes doing it for what's right for the story and not for the ease of the cinematography opens up the door to finding new creative solutions.

Yeah. Well, and, you know, talking about, like, constricting the pallet or exploding the palette, like, I think it's important, once again, to hammer home, like, having that palette. Because if you think, like, oh, I want this to be extravagant, and there should be a lot of whatever, at a certain point, if you're doing everything, you're doing nothing. You're not saying anything with your image. or like it's just too much you know yeah yeah and i think just coming down to like informed decision making i think it's the most important thing to really like when you're in prep because like what

i do when i prep for a film i kind of just open up a blank word document i just start typing like what are the themes why am i going to shoot wide shots in certain situations why would i shoot this way um i know on this one i came up with like random things of like okay how this is it going to be a handheld film how I'm going to work in the proximity with these characters. What lenses are I going to pick? I think it was Bradford Young. It talked about when he's behind camera,

he likes to kind of reach out and be able to touch that character because that lens kind of informs a certain technical decision that lets you be in a proximity to a character's personal space. Walking around with these characters inside, sometimes a small space. Let us really

be next to them and feel that subject activity. And the emotions and the detail of the face. And, you know, I carried, you know, probably eight lenses out of that set. How do I know, okay, this scene's great for the 32. This scene's great for the 65. But going back through like my notes and looking at why I wanted to make a certain creative decision, I think that was the most important thing.

Yeah. Were there any reference films that you guys use or maybe photographs or anything? or were you kind of pulling this all? We kind of pull, I looked at different, like, photography elements, like, specifically two films, like, if you can kind of see it in the way our blues fringe between, like, the blacks and the mids, placed beyond the pines, was a big reference as color-wise, because, you know, the way they let the kind of expanding color palette, like at the start of the film with Ryan Gosling, transfer into a different color film with Bradley Cooper towards the end, that kind

of helped me come up with the idea of the characters like color arc. multiple color fragments going into like the full spectrum light of the sun towards the very end also a film by reid morano called meadowland um i think she operated herself with animorphics um amazing camera work um and that was one of things i tried to borrow from that's really cool yeah the uh it's funny because you know you're told like no i think i was about to say something i don't think it's true anymore but uh I think most people, what am I trying to say here? I always think of every film or anything that anyone makes as part of like a lineage of images.

So if yours starts with seven, you know, and goes to, let's say, Place Beyond the Pines, putting elements of those things that you love or think are great isn't stealing, unless you only take one thing. That's stealing. But if you take like three things, that's synthesis. That's, you know, that's now you're part of this family tree of images, you know, even if it's very loosely connected.

Yeah, well, you see that in art too. It's like everyone's kind of borrows from masters. And, you know, we watch films as cinematographers to be inspired and come up with ideas. So many people have done great work before me and so many people are doing great work now. You know, that's like I do love Instagram, just kind of seeing all the work of like, you know, all these other cinematographers doing great stuff. I think the problem that happens is, too, is that you start to get like an imposter syndrome

and thinking, like, man, there's a lot of good work out there. How am I going to ever, like, aspire to get to this kind of place? With this film, I feel like it's kind of like one of the first times I really could have, like, implemented, like, my best foot forward. And I guess it seems like, based the way, like, Netflix is tracking right now, I think we're being rewarded, which is, like, it's gratifying to, like, actually have you know finally a project that finds commercial success yeah well uh you said this off when we weren't recording but it apparently beat out gray man after that first weekend it was

out yeah i i think i was tracking it over the weekend and then you know i saw people posting about it and i guess it's number one right now but like i think what i'm most excited about for the lead actor sophia carson she's also singer-songwriter her album's also also like number one, like tracking above, like, all the other films that came out recently. So I'm super excited for her because such a hardworking person. And then, you know, she was on set, you know, sometimes not even the trailer, just hanging out with us, like behind camera on days. She wasn't even there. And I think, you know, having that filmmaking family, you know, it's great when that's being able to be achieved on set.

And then I think it just creates like a community, especially when you're trying to make something for, you know, not the most money in the world, but everyone's working super hard. And these things are really hard to make. And I think that's one of the things I try to help, you know, gauge in my life. Because, you know, working on a film, you know, you don't really have, like, nights off. You're kind of up early in the morning. Weekends, you're always prepping for the next week. And I think it's, like, you know, really important to try to find balance in this, you know, like if there's commercial success in a project, great, I might not work for a good bit.

And, like, you spend time with my family, you know, go out and do something in nature. And I think that also is prep for the next project to kind of find that ability to deflate and kind of, you know, avoid media for a little bit. I love films, but sometimes it's hard for me to sit down and watch, like, you know, artistic films that I, on my list that I'm trying to knock off because, like, sometimes it's just easier to kind of sit outside and, you know, read a book or, you know, play in the hose of my son. Right. There's actually, I, someone, I don't know. if it was on this podcast or if I heard heard it elsewhere, but that idea of like going out and doing it, um, other things is so important. And I think, uh, it's Stephen Coulter is a really good, um, he's like at the forefront of, of this studying of, um, what do you call it? Not

the zone. Um, what do you, shit. Flow state. Um, you know, when, when, when, when, when, flow state, like when you're working and you kind of lose time and do a lot of good work and you're not thinking about what you're doing, you're just doing, you know, losing yourself and whatever you're doing, whether it be working out or art or snowboarding, you know, but part of achieving flow state does involve essentially a recovery period. And I think that that holds true with what you're saying with, you know, your work life balance is like if you don't have that time to just play with your kids or sit in nature or do something completely unrelated, your work will suffer.

Just working all the time doesn't, yeah, it might make you money, but if you keep that workload up for a long enough period, you will have diminishing returns to the point of doing bad work. Or maybe worse, maybe not worse, repetitive. Maybe you'll fall back on just like tropes that you've done. I can look back at my work and see exactly what you're talking about, you know, and I feel like there's some people, everyone's different. You know, some people can go back to back and be extremely successful and brilliant. But I guess with myself, I feel like I do need these down times between, you know, projects, whether it's commercials, films, or whatever.

And I find that it's sometimes hard for me to take a camera on vacation. Like, you know, I was in mammoth and my family. You know, like I like going to the mountain, getting my mountain bike and jumping in my mountain bike and jumping off a cliff but then my family at matt you're the photographer take the family photo and me oh and no one's ever satisfied with it too the way i take it is always like can you redo it or yeah it's a thing but i you're doing the wrong angles these are yeah but i think yeah but i think it's like finding that ability to unplug if i got to the advice to any like young filmmaker experience life you know read go out and do something and it's sometimes hard because like

Instagram is like a great resource for so many different, like, images and, you know, finding things to learn about photography or filmmaking, but I think life's just as important as a tool to try to master to bring that back to each one of your projects. Well, and something else that I've noticed that a few other DPs have echoed, so I feel like I'm not, you know, talking out of my ass here. But I think it's very easy to go on, you know, Instagram, YouTube, whatever. and try to figure out what the quote unquote correct way to do something is when a lot of times the best way to learn photography, cinematography, whatever your art form may be, painting,

is to just push everything else aside and goof around. Goof around. People need time to like goof around with their art form and just see what happens. Maybe it'll suck. Maybe it won't. It's like with writing. They always say like it's better to write 20 pages that you're going to throw away than to sit there and not write anything because you're nervous, you're not doing it correctly. Yeah, one of the, during COVID during the lockdown, it's like, it's funny. Like, I actually got more inspired to do photography and tinker when I had zero work. And then one of the things my buddy Ryan Wood was a great operator, we would do, we'd give ourselves photography assignments every week.

And the first photography, yeah, the first photography assignment was to shoot an egg. It could be on a table, could be on a background. How do you shoot an egg, light an egg? light an egg, photograph an egg with the lens to make it unique. And I heard this from a, I guess it was some kind of photography school thing back in the day. So he and I both shot eggs. Like I came up with a way to put like a nice horizontal line off a white desk,

created gradient background, silhouette the egg, do something. He did something completely different where he, I guess he turned a lens around. It's a macro photography of the egg on his countertop. But we took that and like every week we kind of gave ourselves a new assignment. let's go shoot points of intersection intersecting commerce oh he went out and shot like a road met a person inside a building talk to them did portraits i went to some kind of underpassed graphical landscape black and white photography but just going out and trying to find a little fun task it seemed like it gave me a kickstart to get reinvigorated coming out of the pandemic to then go back to back to back i think three projects projects non-stop. Now, am I kind of in my downturn right now? Well, it's funny, too, because, like, an egg is a very small, but almost perfect analog

for a human head. So good exercise. It's interesting. I think it's going on trying to. Like, everyone's going to do it differently. I'll have to send you the ones I did of mine, but it's unique. And I was actually proud of it to come away with it. That's cool.

Shit, man. Well, we've really blazed through this hour. This has been a lot of fun. but I'm going to have to let you go because it's a work day. But before I do, I like to ask everyone the same two questions. It has changed a lot recently because various DPs are, you know, haven't done. I don't need to over explain this. Anyway, first question, is there a piece of advice or maybe something you've read that is stuck with you that you think would be worth sharing with people listening?

something that kind of maybe has a, you know, is on repeat in your head a lot. I think that's basically one of the techniques that I brought into this last film and going back and looking at the work that I've done in the past was the scene, like sometimes, you know, don't over light or sometimes be, find restraint in your lighting. Not every scene needs an uplight beadboard silver surfer. not every light needs an opal diffusion. Like I remember there's one scene in the bathroom where Nick and Sophia are in the tub,

and we had, it was probably like an M40 coming in through the window. And I'm like, oh, man, on the day, I'm like, man, I wish I put an opal in front of that light that kind of diffuse it coming in her face. She's a famous actor. She needs to look beautiful. I saw it in dailies, and I saw it in the film. I'm really glad I didn't put that opal in there.

Like, let the light be harsh. Let it have some shape. and definition because it didn't that hard light coming through the window it did something different to the character where you feel like more empathetic where they feel like the characters like move vulnerable sometimes like walking around outside

if we had someone on standby with the bounce I just wave them away like we don't need to bounce and uplift the eyes like the characters are having this no difficult process let's see the you know the shape on the face see how it's created or if like a special like area and like the character walks in and out of darkness is it acceptable to be dark back there or

does it need a light and i think finding that kind of restraint was like really important um especially through this process to learn when to basically stop or not light yeah uh something that stuck with me is something that alexander of maya maya said uh which was someone told him like if you have uh two lights you have two problems if you have one light you have one problem that's a good idea and sometimes i've gone into like eight problems yeah yeah it seems and you hear this a lot through other cinematographers like it says like if you have a problem start turning off lights and that's really true but i think to implement it it takes practice and but it's like it's taking restraint learning to want to take

risk because you know you want your light to be beautiful on the actors and it needs to be as to i guess everyone's certain acceptable palette um but just trying to gauge that you know with your grab collaborators working with the actors what is the acceptable level of what this face needs to look like in this specific scene and it's a complex question um with many complex solutions but trying to learn what that right path is and i think that's kind of like the process at least for me is discovering like who i am as a cinematographer yeah um oh second question i was like where was i going with this uh if purple hearts was going to be in a double feature what would you make the other film?

I would reluctantly say polite place beyond the pines. That's a high level, especially for myself, of someone like the best filmmaking I've ever seen, but it's probably the film I watched the most preparing for this project, the color palette, Sean Bobbitt's camera work, the way they did close-ups,

the way they did frames, the way they held compositions, the way they walked around with their feet, it's by far one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I would like to say it could play with that, but probably play second. But who knows where it's going to be considered in the next couple of years. Hey, man, you're programming the double feature. You get to play it wherever you want. Well, thanks again, man.

That was a lot of fun. And weirdly enough, I learned a lot. So it doesn't always happen. Sometimes I learn a little. Yeah. It's cool that you do this. I think it's important for people to find it, hear it, and learn from it. Frame and Reference is an Owlbot production. It's produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan, and distributed by Pro Video Coalition.

Our theme song is written and performed by Mark Pelly, and the Ethad Art Mapbox logo was designed by Nate Truax of Truax Branding Company. You can read or watch the podcast you've just heard by going to Providio Coalition.com or YouTube.com slash owlbot. respectively. And as always, thanks for listening.