Latest news with #Steadicam
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Étoile' creators say cinematographer M. David Mullen was their ‘film school'
The man responsible for making Mrs. Maisel look, well, marvelous is Emmy-winning cinematographer M. David Mullen, who teams up again with collaborators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino on their latest series Étoile. Once again, he brings his brilliant, bright eye for detail to the world of ballet in both New York and Paris. (Pro tip: His Instagram posts are veritable works of art in themselves.) 'It's a true collaboration of love,' says Sherman-Palladino. Gold Derby: David, how did you first team up with Dan and Amy? More from GoldDerby Vincent D'Onofrio reveals what he is still learning about Kingpin after 10 years 'We don't half-ass anything': Simone Biles reflects on her Netflix docuseries and hints at 2028 Olympics 'Adolescence' sweeps Gotham TV Awards with 3 wins M. David Mullen: I interviewed for the pilot for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel back in the summer of 2016. And then we shot the pilot in the fall that year. Amy Sherman-Palladino: Yeah, and it went terrible. Mullen: Terrible, obviously. I blew it. But no one else was available. It went well, I guess. I actually interviewed with you guys the year before for the Gilmore Girls Netflix [movie]. But that was a phone interview, and Maisel was an in-person interview. So I guess I do much better in person than over the phone. Dan Palladino: Your physical presence is really powerful. Sherman-Palladino: He just sat down, he put a gun on the table and then just sort of sat there. We went, all right, we get it! Palladino: We actually had two people that we really trust in this business — there aren't many — that had known David or worked with David that gave him such a high recommendation and was saying, you guys are going to like this guy. Sherman-Palladino: They were saying, 'He's your people.' And they were right. So what makes him your person? What's the magic of David Mullen? Sherman-Palladino: David Mullen is a genius. We are not trained. We didn't go to NYU. We are writers who became directors so that we could protect our scripts basically. And so it's a lot of, 'Here's what's in my head and here's what I want to accomplish.' To have somebody be able to go along on that ride and then take what is in your head, understand what it is you're talking about, and then blow it up into this majestic piece that is so much better than you even thought it could be, that's very rare. He knows everything, by the way, which can be annoying for some people because there's nothing he doesn't know. I once asked him during the pilot, 'Do you think that this shot is a Steadicam or a dolly?' I've kept the email. It's a five-page dissertation on the evolution of Steadicam, who invented it, pictures of it on a warship, the initial [idea] that it was [built by] the military. I literally had to write back, 'OK, but is this a Steadicam or a dolly?' I'm happy to have people [tell me], 'You're an amazing director,' but I've got to tell you, David Mullen was my film school. He feels what you feel so deeply. He knows how much you want to do something. And he doesn't light women like he hates his wife, which is a big deal with DPs because a lot of them, I think, hate their wives. And then they come to a set and they look at the lead woman, they're like, this is the revenge that I can take. He lights the women so beautifully, and he's so actor-conscious, and he's so gentle. You think he's not a dictator and yet he totally is. Mullen: I take passive-aggressiveness to new levels. Sherman-Palladino: I love you for it because he can take things that I think like this is way too ambitious, we're never going to be able to get this, and then he'll add an extra layer of ambition onto it, and I'm like, 'All right, let's go!' Palladino: All the years of Maisel and this year of Étoile, there's nothing that Amy and I look back on and think, 'Oh, you know we could have done that but we weren't able to do it.' We realized everything the way we saw it in our heads because of David and some other key members of the crew. We were really lucky to gather all these guys together, especially David. Sherman-Palladino: David takes these unbelievable, beautiful photographs, because he'll wander off in the middle of the night, much to my terror. And that is the film you get. His eye is amazing, and I just wish he wouldn't wander off in the middle of the night with a camera alone. I want to have some muscle with him, because I can't lose him. He must remain alive for me. He's an artist in the purest form. And it's not about ego. It's about what the work is and what the world is and what we can make of it. It's just a delight every day to come to work when you're dealing with that sort of energy. David, what special challenges did set up for you? What did you have to accomplish for that tested your skills? Mullen: I think the challenge is that it wasn't an obvious approach to it. When we did Maisel, it's a period film. So you get all these elements you can draw from period movies to period photography to just the amazing architecture and fashion of the late '50s in America. It's a wealth of information that you can pull on and build a look around. When you do a modern story, what you do with modern settings is filter out all the stuff you don't like about the modern world. You don't like the color of these stop signs or these billboards. It's much more difficult to pin down in a modern setting what you want to do and don't want to do. In this kind of theatrical setting of dance, it was always a question of a documentary approach do we take to the lives of dancers and the behind-the-scenes world and how much do we take the theatrical approach of the world of theater and music. And there's no easy answer there. I think we kept trying to lean more towards the realism of it, the pain and effort these dancers go through, but also lean away from the reality that when you go behind the scenes at the Lincoln Center, it's nothing but cinder block corridors and fluorescent tubes. It's very brutalist in a way, but that's not the reality we wanted to embrace. Paris was a lot easier. Paris is just gorgeous everywhere you go, inside and outside. I think our basic thing that evolved was that Paris has this kind of naturally, old world reality to it. So New York has got to be perceived as modernist visually, just to have a contrast. You know what city you're in just by the shapes and the forms and the colors that you get in both cities. Paris is inherently warm. It's all sandstone and golds and painted things. So I wanted to play New York the opposite, which is sort of blues and greens. So it became more of an old world, new world look. There's a modern art feeling to New York, in terms of the shapes and the walls and the furniture, more pop art in a way. And Paris has got that patina of paintings of 18th, 19th century paintings. Amy and Dan, I love how you always manage to set up a new challenge for David and the crew. Was there a moment like that this season? Sherman-Palladino: I've been bugging David and Jim McConkey, our Steadicam whiz. I keep saying, 'Where's my dance cam?' When I did the telephone operator thing in Maisel [with the switchboard scene], they invented this thing that I call the McConkey wonder stick. It's like a tube and there was duct tape and they hung a camera, and they MacGyvered this thing that was so great. And they kept perfecting it. I kept saying, I want something that allows me the max amount of dance flexibility, so where's my dance cam? They're still working on it, but they did come up with a version of the wonder stick, when we did the one-shot in the pilot of the girl doing her fouettes and I wanted to start with her feet and I wanted to go up and I wanted to go over her and I wanted to come around to the back and end behind her. And there was some duct tape involved in that. Mullen: The problem is, to really fly something around, it has to be a smaller, lighter camera. Lately, some shows have been doing stuff with these smaller, pro-sumer kind of cameras, like Adolescence, like we used for the traffic jam sequence in Maisel. They stripped down their wonder stick into a Sony camera with a lighter boom pole. The trouble is we do a lot of visual effects work to our stuff in post, and that camera is fine if there's going to be zero visual effects done to the shot. But if we have to do extra work, our visual effects supervisor doesn't want us to use the cheaper, smaller, lighter cameras. We have to use our regular, heavier Alexa camera. That's been our one limitation is dealing with just mass and weight. Amy's always pushing what I call basic Newton physics. Anything that weighs a certain amount, it's hard to move and it's hard to stop because of inertia. And you always run into that with anything of any weight at all. We had that problem with the underwater ballet sequence in Maisel in Miami because we were trying to fly a camera underwater and then fly up over the water, look down on the pool and come back down on the other side of the pool. We discovered that you balance this 50-foot technocrane for the weight of the camera, except the moment the camera hits water, it stops being heavy, it becomes buoyant. So they couldn't balance the crane for both underwater and above the water. Essentially once it hit the water, two grips had to take a piece of pipe and shove it underwater and then hold it down like a drowning victim and then would let go and it would pop out of the water again and fly up in the air. We were just fighting basic Newtonian mechanics there. Palladino: On our first date, all she did was complain about Newtonian physics. Sherman-Palladino: I did. It's been bugging me for years. Mullen: Yeah, we've got to appeal the second law of thermodynamics. Watch our other recent Dream Team stories featuring Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, plus the two creators with star Luke Kirby. This article and video are presented by Prime Video. 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Daily Mirror
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Kevin McCloud admits major Grand Designs change that even die-hard fans missed
A new series of the beloved property show is now airing on Channel 4 Grand Designs' latest series is now well underway, spotlighting more radical self-build projects and revisits to some previously featured homes. The Channel 4 show celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024, with the anniversary special episodes attracting two million viewers. It resulted in two more seasons being announced for 2025, with the second expected in the autumn. Meanwhile series 23 is currently being shown on Channel 4, featuring a floating home built using never-before-tested technology, as well as a pensioner with plans to create a mirror image of the beloved home that her mobility issues are forcing her out of. Long-time fans of the show might have noticed quite a significant change that has been made to the programme that is especially apparent in recent episodes, though it appears to have passed many people by. Presenter Kevin McCloud, who has fronted the show since its first episode in 1999, explained the huge change that has been made behind-the-scenes. Speaking to the Mirror's Screen Time team, he shared that they now use a cutting edge camera that allows the team to capture some truly impressive shots. The change first came in during filming of last year's autumn series. "We started using the same camera that they're using [in Netflix's Adolescence]. The reason is because it's got a Gimbal, rather like a Steadicam, which was invented for Stanley Kubrick for The Shining... and it allows you to walk down a corridor and instead of the camera bouncing it gives a beautiful smooth [shot]," Kevin shared. "It means we can push into a building really slowly and navigate round the building cleanly without worrying about whether we're going to see tracks on the floor." He continued: "It's an amazing camera so we're using it quite a bit, pretty well on every location day. We call it the chicken because as you step it does this [gestures] and it's like a chicken walking." Fans of the series are marking their calendars for the latest Grand Designs Live event spanning May 2 to May 5. The exhibition sees live talks from previous contributors to the Channel 4 series, as well as advice for those planning their own big build. This year Kevin will host an event first, with the launch of the 'Flatpack Olympics'. The event will pit people proud of their DIY skills against each other as they attempt to build everyday furniture in record time. Kevin McCloud was speaking ahead of Grand Designs Live at London ExCeL, the UK's premier home and design exhibition, taking place from 2-5 May.
Los Angeles Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Every song and dance in ‘Emilia Pérez' tells a story — and that was a thrill to its DP
'Emilia Pérez,' director Jacques Audiard's movie musical about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to a woman, obviously has a lot of different things going on. It's appropriate, then, that Oscar-nominated cinematographer Paul Guilhaume applied a kaleidoscope of techniques to the gritty, noirish, sometimes satirical and operatic melodrama's Spanish-language song sequences. The sequences, staged for the most part at Bry-sur-Marne Studios near Paris, required close collaboration between Guilhaume and Audiard, who had previously worked together on the much simpler, black-and-white romantic misadventure 'Paris, 13th District.' Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet, film editor Juliette Welfling and, of course, performers Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez were crucial to making each production number pop. 'Some sequences, like the opening in the market where Zoe does her first big performance, Damien had plans for the right point of view on the choreography, where the camera should be at each moment,' the tousle-haired Guilhaume explains in a video chat from his home in Paris. 'We rehearsed it in advance with iPhones and small gimbals. Then Damien, Juliette and I pre-edited.' Plans proved futile, however, for Saldaña's later big song and dance to the tune of Clément Ducol and Camille's Oscar-nominated 'El Mal.' 'The fundraising gala, where Zoe's dancing among the tables, was much more improvised,' the cinematographer says. 'When we first filmed the sequence, it didn't have the energy the choreography had: We were staying too distant; the planned blocking disappointed. So we went with a much shorter, 20-millimeter lens on a Steadicam. The Steadicam operator, Sacha Naceri, Damien, Zoe and I just tried to find the right position for the camera on almost every one of her moves. Zoe's character kind of dictates the camera and lighting movements.' Audiard's overall aesthetic, Guilhaume says, is focused more on movement than rigorously controlled cinematography. 'It's very Jacques Audiard to film dialogue scenes with handheld cameras,' Guilhaume says. 'He likes to bring movement and accident to something that wouldn't have them if shot on a tripod or dolly.' The scene where Saldaña's lawyer Rita, who arranged for narco Manitas' transition to Emilia (both played by Gascón), encounters her years later at a dinner party is a subtle masterpiece of ever-so-slightly floaty lensing, dimmed-out backgrounds and frame masking as the characters sing their concerns to one another. 'Jacques is the kind of director who has a signature shot, like Spike Lee's dollies,' the cinematographer notes. 'He calls it the manhole. It's like an iris but moving and vibrating in front of the lens when you're deeply connecting with characters' emotions. In the studio, we could just switch off the rest of the world on a specific line and be able to light two faces. It's both in the continuity of Jacques' mise-en-scene and the revelation, in this case.' Some looks were relatively simple to achieve. A toy bought online swirls laser dots around a child's bedroom to magical effect for 'Papa,' which one of Emilia's young sons sings to her, unaware (yet also intuiting) that the father he's long thought dead is his new auntie. As Manitas' unsuspecting wife, Jessi, brought back to Mexico City from a Swiss hideout to live with this in-law Emilia she'd never heard of, Gomez expresses the character's sense of entrapment in 'Bienvenida,' jumping between solo selfie shots in her bedroom and an all-black stage where her rage is expressed by writhing backup dancers. 'It's another key moment that relies on the light changes to enhance the character's emotions,' Guilhaume says. 'There is a missing wall that separates the bedroom from the all-black studio. We just put two very strong, flat lasers there, and as soon as Selena crosses it, you can see the laser light on her head. When she jumps from one side to another, the light effects switch on and off.' In the sequence for the movie's second Oscar-nominated song, 'Mi Camino,' Gomez and Édgar Ramírez, who plays Jessi's love interest, turn a karaoke club performance into a tableau of longing, splintered personas. 'Jacques' intuition was that the walls had to be screens here,' Guilhaume notes. 'When we tested that, we realized that we could use a video feedback effect. It's the same as when you put mirrors in front of each other, and you see the reflection multiplied an infinite number of times. So at first you see Selena from this frontal point of view and her multiple images in the background, and the sequence almost ends just filming the screen.' What music video veteran Guilhaume found most thrilling about visualizing this oddest of musicals was how narrative was always his main concern. 'Jacques wanted the drama to unfold during the production numbers,' he says. 'It was very pleasant to work in this aspect because you always had to treat the scene like you'd treat a fiction scene. What new information or emotion do you get from the sequence?'
New York Times
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In the Footsteps of the Enslaved
The terrifying first capture in Africa. The deadly crossing of the Middle Passage. The brutality of slave markets and servitude. It's almost impossible to imagine, let alone depict, the full horrors of American slavery, although writers, directors and artists have tried. But there's one moment that seems to have caught their attention less often: the first encounter of kidnapped Africans with the strange new land where they were marched into enslavement. In a remarkable exhibition called 'Stony the Road,' at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, the artist Dawoud Bey takes us on the path that tens of thousands were forced to walk, from the slave ships that landed at the James River's docks to Richmond's slave pens and markets. With 14 still photos and a vast, two-sided video projection, Bey explores the Richmond Slave Trail that extends for several miles in Virginia's capital. At Sean Kelly, Bey's stills are the first art you encounter. Those deluxe black-and-whites, almost a yard across, show various wooded spots along the trail, avoiding any details that speak of our era. (In fact, the trail now crosses many modern settings.) We get a view of trees and ground, of bits of river and patches of distant sky, such as an African might have encountered 250 years ago. The images were shot on old-fashioned film and printed on traditional photographic paper, so we're treated to the velvety blacks and sparkling whites of landscapes by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and other pioneers of American photography. It's tempting to linger with those tasteful, orderly images — in the gallery, and in this review — but I discovered that they get a whole new meaning after seeing Bey's video at the gallery's rear. That video is titled '350,000,' an estimate of the total number of enslaved people who passed through Richmond's trading markets. (The piece was originally commissioned for a major Bey show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 2023.) Ten minutes of black-and-white footage appear on a screen that bisects a big space and reaches almost to its high ceiling. It shows the same wooded path as in Bey's prints, but to utterly different effect. The piece works hard to put us in the place — physical, but above all psychological — of one of Richmond's newly disembarked. The images are projected at 'life scale,' Bey told me, so that the path's tree trunks and branches are the same size on the screen as they would be if they were there before us in life. And the trip down the path is captured in a single take, without edits, by a Steadicam held at an adult's head-height, giving a captive's-eye view of the passage up the trail. But the goal isn't to create a crisp, immersive substitute for a past reality. (Bey insists that his piece isn't about faking some kind of long-lost documentation.) It's about using the visible artifice of fine art to encourage a trip into a past we need to confront. In some ways Bey's video has more in common with a poet's evocative description than with a Spielbergish attempt at historical re-enactment. So Bey's cinematographer, Bron Moyi, shot all the footage with a century-old Petzval lens, once used for dream sequences in silent movies. It blurs all but the middle of the scene it shows, giving an almost drunken effect to Bey's footage, which is also shown in somewhat slow-motion. Real vision never really works quite like that, but the Petzval provides an excellent metaphor for the kind of disorientation Africans must have felt on first being shoved ashore in Virginia. They couldn't have known quite where they were going, or what the endgame might be — most couldn't understand their tormentors' language — and '350,000' has a similar lack of plot or endpoint. Its camera's 'eye' rarely looks straight down the path toward some far-off goal. Instead, it veers from earth to treetops; from river, down at right, to undergrowth that hems the path at left. No one knows if captives would really have looked anywhere but at their own stumbling feet or at the back of the chained figure ahead, but the camera's wandering eye evokes the fracturing of any normal they might have known. Even the flora in Bey's video, sure to strike most Americans as an average woodland scene, must have seemed foreign. Bey makes his disjunctive technique stand for the utter confusion — physical, cognitive, spiritual — that captives must have felt. A soundtrack, commissioned by Bey from the dance scholar E. Gaynell Sherrod, adds to the effect: It's a mash-up of random footfalls and birdcalls, of heartbeats and hoofbeats, of grunts and sighs and clinking chains. It doesn't quite reproduce what the enslaved might actually have heard, but it sometimes adds Hollywood melodrama that the visuals smartly avoid. However, Sherrod's soundtrack, and its lack of obvious sync to Bey's visuals, maps onto how trauma can fracture our perceptions. In a final touch, Bey gives art viewers a more immediate taste of that same bewilderment: The occasional visitor who peers around to the other side of Bey's screen will eventually realize that the view there is actually the same path but seen on a different trudge down it. That gives a sense that Bey's installation doesn't recreate a single moment in someone's pain; it condenses all the moments that thousands of subjects might have suffered on the Richmond Slave Trail. And then, leaving the video behind, you encounter Bey's stills once again, and now they seem to play a different role in his story. After witnessing the splintered sights in his video, his stills now seem to stand for the very firm and settled present that today's art world lives in, at so many removes from an enslaved person's view. They give us something like the stable, settled view favored by Europe's artistic culture, circa 1800, when wild nature promised escape from the everyday into the sublime. It's almost as though Bey's prints offer a bright light at the end of their forest path, so that, as in many an Ansel Adams photo, the white of the immaculate silver print becomes the white of escape and transcendence. The prints have a stable authority, in their confident choice of subject, the snapping of the shutter, their deluxe printing, that isn't there in the video. Bey's show gets its name from a passage in the second stanza of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' the hymn by James Weldon Johnson that premiered in 1900 and is known as the Black national anthem: 'Stony the road we trod/Bitter the chastening rod.' Here's how the stanza ends: 'Out from the gloomy past/'Til now we stand at last/Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.' Now, 125 years later, Bey's gloom seems to cast new light on art's gleam. Through Feb. 22, Sean Kelly Gallery, 475 Tenth Avenue, Manhattan, 212-239-1181;
