David Lynch Directs PlayStation 2 Spot

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Scott Billups

David Lynch Directs PlayStation 2 Spot


Describing David Lynch's creative process is best left to wordsmiths better than me. The man Mel Brooks so aptly dubbed "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" has made a very good living exposing the dark and hidden meanings in everyday life.After working with Lynch on his latest movie, Mulholland Drive, I was beginning to shed my own conventions in favor of his unique and innovative style.His palettes are richer, denser, and far more textured than those in the homogenized safe zone of contemporary production. His disturbing reverence for the magical textures of smoke and fire often provides context for the menagerie of shadowy characters he retches up from his psyche.From his 1977 classic film Eraserhead to the psychotically compelling worlds of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, Lynch's creations both repulse and seduce us. Even his sojourn into the Milquetoast world of television resulted in the hauntingly arresting underbelly of Americana known as Twin Peaks.So when Lynch asked me to shoot a commercial that he was directing, I accepted immediately.Knowing his propensity for alternative methods of expression and his growing infatuation for digital tools, I expected to shoot on a Panavision-adapted Sony HDW-F900 HDCAM camera, which I've had quite a bit of experience with recently.Man, was I ever wrong.During the filming of Mulholland Drive, Lynch wanted a small camcorder to create content for his soon-to-be-launching Web site at http://www.davidlynch.com/. I had recommended the Sony DSR-PD150 because of its image quality and versatility when used in DVCAM mode.



A custom camera plate gave our Sony PD150
extra mass for smoother movement.


Lynch wanted his Web series Rabbits to have a look that echoed palette preferences similar to those created by noted cinematographer Peter Deming for the texturally rich Lost Highway. Therefore, I calibrated Lynch's PD150 to a dense, film-like profile.Lynch views emerging digital toolsets in an artistic way. "It doesn't really matter what way you work, or what medium you work in. It's all about ideas. Every story, every idea wants to be told a certain way. With digital cameras, the really great thing about them is the amount of control you have afterward to fiddle around, and start experimenting, and get even more ideas."So there we were, preparing a commercial for the worldwide media rollout of the Sony PlayStation 2 game console--a project that would eventually become one of the most frequently viewed commercials of the century, playing in well over 100 countries, including China, Japan, and Europe. Nearly everywhere, in fact, except the good old United States.And as we were prepping, Lynch said that he liked the look he was getting from the PD150 so much that he wanted to shoot the commercial with it.Terry Wordingham, producer for the London-based agency Great Guns, took Lynch's tool choice for this commercial in an upbeat British timbre."We were a bit shocked at the format choice initially. Then, of course, if we'd wanted to paint solid yellow lines down the center of the road, we quite simply would have looked elsewhere, and perhaps gotten less."Aside from the format and camera, the shoot was essentially one of those full-blown, multiple-day, Hollywood-type productions that any big-time agency creates for a big-time client.Big sets, big crew, big gear. Bigger, in fact, than many motion pictures I've worked on.




Just another shoot?

For the past 50 years, the classic film crew system has evolved around the physical requirements of a 35mm film shoot. After several meetings with key gaffer Mike Mickens, we decided the best approach for this project was to ignore the camera's small size and treat the entire production as though we were pushing around 80 pounds of Panavision.At least that was how we planned it.Like the edgy surrealism of a whacked-out Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, everything that Lynch created has unusual, seminal aspects. Our commercial's particular gunnysack included flamethrowers and spinning blades in claustrophobic, narrow sets with impossible lighting scenarios and 100 gallons of liquid nitrogen just waiting for show time.Then there was the script. To start, it called for 24 rather major visual effects in 60 seconds.



(top) The design of the two sets provided
many logistical challenges.
(bottom) One challenge, lighting the hall,
was met by hanging dozens of lights along
the lighting rig.


The script

The commercial's storyline starts rather normally as a classic Lynch character--I'll call him LynchMan--enters a tight hallway by walking through an industrial-strength flame. Then it starts getting strange.Continuing down the hall, LynchMan (played impeccably by Jason Scheunemann) begins to violently hallucinate as the walls turn into a thicket of thorny trees. Glaring loudspeakers boom Lynchian stream-of-consciousness sound design while the camera maintains an eerie, over-the-shoulder, voyeuristic presence.As LynchMan walks down the hall, he meets a man on another dimensional plane, strange fleshy letters loom out at him, and a mysterious pink woman floating through space signals for him to be quiet.LynchMan looks down and realizes that his right hand is missing and sees smoke billowing from his jacket's arm. He looks up and the missing hand smacks him in the face with a meaty thud, bores through his cheek, and then forces itself out of his mouth before flying off into the smoky distance.Apparently impatient with the pace of its tortured body, LynchMan's head floats off and follows the dismembered hand down the narrow hall toward a mysterious cloud of smoke.When the headless torso catches up to the floating head, the smoke clears and reveals another LynchMan looking back at himself. Then LynchMan is sitting on a velvet couch with a Duck Man and a Mummy in a long, golden room. Oh, and the arm is then growing out of the floor.After a few beats, the Duck Man turns to the camera and quacks, "Welcome to the third place."You don't want to be the person who tells David Lynch he can't do something he already sees in his head. The chance to work with a director like him keeps us in this business. He gives those professionals around him a rare chance to push their creativity to a new level.





Special effects boss Gary D’Amico and his team
used tools such as flamethrowers, welding equipment,
and liguid nitrogen to create the fire and smoke
needed in the PlayStation commerical.


The budget dance

After the script was sent to all the department heads, we started cross-pollinating. Nearly every approach to every task made things easier for one group but harder for another.With a half-dozen departments (e.g.,Set Dressing, Construction, Camera) each sporting a full crew, the resulting Dance of the Budgets was truly a thing to behold. Left, right, left; left, right, left. The dance began.Jack Fisk's unique production design called for hard slashes of light along a dark hall.The Set Dressing department decided that multiple strings of tensor lights lining the inside of the hall would do the trick quite nicely. But Construction didn't like the idea because the lights would then come out of its budget, and Camera didn't particularly like all those hot light points. Left, right, left.Since the lighting had to come from either the camera or the ceiling, construction foreman Todd Young worked closely with set dresser Peter Jameson. Their eventual solution was to create a series of horizontal louvers that would not only create the needed hard slashes of light, but also could be adjusted as the camera moved to prevent stray shafts from hitting the lens. Left, right, left.The Camera department said yes, mounting the lights externally gives us far more control, but now the lights come out of its budget. Left, right, left."David treats all the different departments as blocks of clay," Jameson said. "He just keeps molding and forming everything until it starts generating the look he wants." Young nodded his head in agreement, adding, "You've got to be pretty confident in your abilities to step so far outside the box so often.I've worked with Lynch before, and no matter how far out he takes you, he always brings it back together."Veteran special effects maestro Gary D'Amico has burned, crushed, and blown up property for a number of Lynch's projects. "I think my favorite gag was blowing up that cabin in Lost Highway," D'Amico said as he tightened the nozzle flange on a flamethrower.When asked about the PlayStation 2 project, he said, "Don't know when I've had so many gags that played so tightly together, though. We've got gags here that are still playing while we're triggering another, and this tiny camera lets you get right into them. Lots of unusual vantages should make for one heck of a look."



Lynch and his team confer.


Lighting

Key gaffer Mike Mickens noted, "Since the lighting needs to help develop and define the urgency of the story, we worked out a system that let us animate the entire lighting rig. For the hall sequence we hung several dozen small pepper lights from a swinging pipe so that a small push on the rig created dramatic cycles of movement within the set. The hall shoot was all about using a lot of small sculpted sources rather than a few large diffused ones."The other main set was designed so the practical special effects elements (i.e., blowing up stuff) worked seamlessly with digital visual effects elements (i.e., making stuff look like it blew up). Anytime you mix practical and digital effects, you get spectacular results--spectacularly good or spectacularly bad.Mickens said, "The principal gag that ends the spot has the three characters sitting on a velvet couch in a long, golden room. Without the budget to create a really huge set piece, we knew that we were going to rely on some sort of postproduction comp effect."It's nearly impossible to pull a good chroma key in an environment as tightly packed and lighted as the one we worked in. The best you can hope for is to maintain an edge on your foreground elements so that you can cut clean mattes in post. So we timed the background to be about 6K warmer than the key light. This pulled the character element toward the audience, and also created a rim that made cutting mattes a heck of a lot simpler.




The camera

The Sony DSR-PD150 is a great little camera, but it needed a few modifications to fit our needs. For example, the field of view is unusually narrow, so we fitted our PD150 with a Century Precision Optics 16:9 Widescreen Adapter.With all of our pyro effects and hard slashing lights, we needed to reduce the camera's light sensitivity. So we layered several neutral density (ND) filters over the wide-angle adapter, dropping the sensitivity to the equivalent of about 100 ASA.Making these simple modifications--and, of course, carefully lighting the scene--let us work with a small video format such as DVCAM while eliminating the visual clues that people generally associate with home video.One of the great things about some of the newer DV cameras is their wide latitude for calibration. By using a good camera chart such as the DSC Labs CamAlign and the software waveform monitor included in many software NLEs, you can tweak a camera's gamma curve, histogram, and color density range to create a substantial number of different looks. On the PD150, you can save all of your presets on the supplied Memory Stick removable flash memory.According to Lynch, "With this project, we tricked the camera and forced it into a profile where the look approached that of film. Once we added those ND filters and adjusted the camera settings, the look started to get real pretty. It forced the camera to go to work."



Because of changes to the tight shooting schedule,
the costume department had almost no time to
transform one actor into a mummy.


Camera movement

In our redesign of contemporary cinema methodology, the first things we ditched were the camera dolly and rails because there was no place for either. After several conventional alternatives failed, key grip Shawn Crowell decided to use a cable dolly fitted with an apple crate to sit on. The gaff crew rigged a boom light off of the back of the dolly and ran a small Kino Flo light panel off the front that sat between my legs.Inertia is one of the biggest give-aways that you're using mini-grade equipment. Perhaps more than grain or resolution, it is motion that tells us what we're watching.So Crowell built camera plates and mounts to give the little PD150 camera a more massive heft. "Like every other department on this production, we were constantly adapting and modifying our methodology," said Crowell. "Tiny cameras quite simply move differently from big ones, so the rigs that we built were all designed to add mass and give a better sense for aiming at arms length."Lynch added, "While there are definite benefits to the simplification that digital offers, I think that there are still a few critical tools that need to be developed and refined. These small cameras don't move cinematically. They're light and flimsy. The industry needs a really nice little Steadicam, and more tools like the rigs we made for this commercial: little stabilizers, little dollies, and cranes to make moves real smooth and cinematic.Then there are the obvious tools that filmmakers need like follow focus, and more mechanical interaction."



Lynch prepares fleshy letters for a shot.


Camera setup

The biggest drawback with using a prosumer-grade camera is not so much the resolution as it is the manual ability to control those operations that demand a high degree of precision. Auto focus and auto iris are fine for some projects, but only the most adventurous videographer would rely on them for any high-end production.Like most of the better, smaller DV cameras, the PD150 allows you to turn off nearly all of the auto functions. There is, however, the matter of the focus ring from hell. I've never been able to figure out why the manufacturers of such quality gear continue to create focus rings that never stop turning. On the PD150, it is virtually impossible to pull focus in a dependable manner.Even though we had timed and tweaked the tiny DV camera to perform at its very best, and even though the clients and everyone concerned were happy with the image and resolution, I kept a Sony HDW F900 HDCAM camera prepped and ready, just in case anything went wrong.




The prep

The day of the shoot came much too soon. Set dresser Jameson complained that the paint in the entry way wasn't fully dry. Lynch walked over and gave it a light touch with his finger. "Yep, still a little tacky there, Pete, but a damn fine job," he said with his undeniably Midwestern twang. "I'll set right up when Gary hits it with his thingamajig." Then he and I were off to see other sets on other stages.After a beat or two, Jameson realized that the thingamajig was Gary D'Amico's industrial-strength flamethrower. "But that paint is five coats thick!" hollered Jameson. "Who knows what it'll do when the flame hits it!"Without slowing his springy stride, Lynch turned to me and smiled, "Well, Scotty, guess you better get that one on the first shot." It was shaping up to be one of those days that you live for in this business.We walked to the back set where LynchMan sees his own reflection in a piece of glass. As the light level in the adjacent room rises, he sees through the glass to the three characters on the couch.The walls of this room needed to be replaced in post, so again we relied on splitting color temperatures to create our matte rim line. We timed the large diffusion panel to 33K and then brought in 27K Kino Flo lights for front fill.In addition to creating the classic store-window effect, the huge piece of glass also served as a barrier for the enormous amount of smoke we planned to pump into the space where LynchMan was standing.




First day's shoot

Our first shot was a tilt down from an array of flashing lights to the point where the blowtorch blasts through the wall. The camera movement meant we couldn't just lock off and trigger remotely. So while everyone else was enjoying their iced lattes in the safety zone, I was in the hooch holding the PD150 with oven mitts.Lynch called "Action," the lights started flashing, I panned down, D'Amico hit the flames, and Jameson was right all along. That wall went up like a six-foot matchstick. It even melted the PD150's small matte box that was holding the extra ND filters. "Kinda gives it a nice crispy look," remarked Lynch, as he ran his hand over the now blistered wall. "That's just money in the bank boys. Let's keep it."



The narrow hall limited us to a cable dolly with an
apple crate seat and a Kino Flo light panel.

While we waited for the art department to stabilize the blistered set piece, we headed over to the chroma key set to try to knock off another shot.That other shot was an element for the sequence where the girl in pink floats through space. We shot it a number of ways: girl against black, then girl against green, both on the sticks and handheld.




Because the shot was only one element and would be aligned vertically, I turned the camera sideways for several of the takes.In the end, we used a simple handheld take shot against black, not for any technical reason, but because it was simply the best take.The folks working on the hall set said the protective coating they had just applied to the entryway wouldn't dry for at least eight hours, so we started prepping the Golden Room set.By moving to the Golden Room set, we had effectively shaved a good four hours off of the costume department's schedule. So while they started frantically wrapping the actor who was playing the mummy, we tried various techniques for filling the room with smoke."For a gag like this you want a smoke source that has a short but dynamic hang time," said effects boss D'Amico. "In other words, the element doesn't last too long and it has a lot of texture to it. Liquid nitrogen fits the bill quite nicely and has the added advantage of not making you hack up fur balls like many of the chemical and combustion solutions do."While D'Amico created some smoke layers by tossing some liquid nitrogen out on the floor, the bulk of the effect was generated with far more control.For the room where LynchMan views his own reflection, D'Amico rigged a 12-inch pipe on one side of the mirror that pumped in the smoke, and another pipe on the opposite side that sucked it back out. The resulting swirls of highly detailed clouds were quite dynamic when lighted from within by a single 2K light.The mummy showed up in a timely fashion, so we fitted a blue hood onto the actor who played the Duck Man, tweaked the lights a bit, and fired away. Then we called it a day.



Lynch had to quickly direct Jason Scheunumann,
playing the spot's main character, before he was
enveloped in smoke.


Second day's shoot

Finally the hall was dry, so it was first up on our shot list. D'Amico had beefed up the hole the flame shot through and Jameson's crew had added a few more coats of flame retardant.Having enjoyed this shot so thoroughly the day before, I graciously allowed gaffer Mike Mickens, who is a very accomplished camera operator, to man the camera. After several takes, Lynch saw the shot he wanted, and we moved on to the next setup.Emerging from the still-smoking set and noticeably displaying a few singed hairs, Mickens grinned widely and said, "Man! What a wild, frigg'n ride that was!"Lynch was already working on the fleshy letters in the next shot, so the camera crew started setting up lights and building the dolly rig for the hall's tracking shots. After a bit of experimentation, we settled on attaching an eight-pound plate to the PD150 for ballast and rolled out some dry runs.The trick was trying to thread our rail-less dolly down the narrow hall without scraping up the walls or letting our back-heavy contraption tip over. "The beauty of rails is that you don't need to aim your push. You can just focus on momentum and proximity," said key grip Shawn Crowell. "By the time we get all the gear loaded on this thing, not to mention our rather hefty DP, I'm pushing 300 pounds down a hall with only an inch or two of clearance."We ended up putting tape markers on the floor to help guide Crowell. Since we were shooting MOS (Mit Out Sound), I could call out positions as we moved.We finished out the second day shooting the rest of the inserts that would build the final composite. Many shots contained smoke, flames, or some sort of dangerous element so we couldn't ever relax on the set. The flip side was that there was always something going on, so the client was never bored.



Giving direction to the girl in pink for
the greenscreen shot.


Sound design

Few directors believe more strongly in the power of good sound design than David Lynch. His own sprawling mixing studio is crammed with state-of-the-art equipment. Lynch's studio manager, veteran sound engineer John Neff, has a long and colorful history in rock and roll music production and has been mixing Lynch's motion pictures and commercials since 1996."For this commercial, David wanted to treat the track as if it were a small movie," Neff said as he punched up the base on the studio's 24-bit Pro Tools audio system. "Most of the elements were created from scratch while David played synth for the music underscores and a girl and I did voice-overs."We ended up with 31 tracks of elements and voices, some of which were pitch-shifted and reversed for that otherworldly effect. David is a big fan of reverb, and we always create new acoustic environments for each of his projects. For this spot, we created a small enclosed feel for the hallways and a spacious atmosphere for the Golden Room," Neff said.



Reflectors on C-stands helped control
light in the set's tight confines.


Postproduction

We transferred the takes through FireWire into a dual-processor Mac G4/500 running Apple Final Cut Pro. "I'm a Mac guy," Lynch said with a smile. "I like Apple, I like the way they think. It's a really great thing to just pump video into your computer.No scanning, no conversions, no worry about matching back out. And unlike film, you don't need to deal with gate weave because the images are already rock solid. You can just shoot and then go to work in the computer."We converted the selects to uncompressed QuickTime files and made initial chroma suppression, gamma, and histogram settings in Adobe After Effects 5.0. "I've now fallen in love with the magical After Effects," said Lynch. "This program has become my new best friend. I'm using it to build a lot of the things for my Internet site."



The PD150's small size made grabbing
some shots easy.


Because the agency was in London, the client was in Japan, and we were in Los Angeles, we used Wamnet's compressed video service to shuttle the rough cuts over the Internet. We did all of our domestic review with Betacam dubs that were output from the G4 with a Pinnacle Systems CineWave board.Although we made the vast majority of our composites in After Effects, we performed our final color timing in Discreet combustion so the project settings could easily be imported into the ad agency's Discreet inferno system.Once we reached a consensus approval, the director's cut and subsequent elements were burned to DVD-ROM and delivered to the client as an uncompressed PAL QuickTime file with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Although the commercial played in numerous markets in black and white as an homage to Lynch's classic Eraserhead, the director's cut (which you can see at www.PixelMonger.com/screeningroom.html) still maintains his preferred color and density palette.As with any art form, the tools are only a means to an end. It is craft that makes art.



In addition to the practical special effects we shot on the set, we created digital visual effects with desktop tools, including Adobe After Effects.

Scott Billups is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker. You can read a sample chapter of his latest book, Digital Moviemaking (Michael Wiese Productions, 2001), on http://www.pixelmonger.com/.


Copyright 2002, CMP Media LLC


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Eve link do videoto:

PS2 - The Third Place


(Inaku go nema vekje na sajtot na Scott Billups)

Zemeno od www.lynchnet.com
David Lynch: Commercials, Adds and Promos

Go ima i na Tube ---> Link



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Posle ova odeme kaj FIVFMD'D* na chastenje.
Neli ima ista camera?

Pozdrav

Igor

* FIVFMD'D = Former Idi Vidi Forum Member D'Dalton

Игор, со вакви постови фали титл.

Изменето од Александар_А - 10.Април.2008 во 09:41