Main Titles for “Up All Night”
In August I got a call from NBC’s “Up All Night” EP’s Erin David and Andrew Singer.
“Up All Night” is a Broadway Video show and so is Fallon, so they knew me from my work there. They were looking for ideas for Up All Night’s main titles.
Their goal was to create a 30 second open to play at the top of every episode which would showcase their stars, Christina Applegate, Maya Rudolph, and Will Arnett. And yes I realized that I just described what “main titles” are so cut me some slack if you are in tv and just got super bored for a second. There had been some discussion of wanting to evoke the idea that we were looking through a scrapbook of the characters’ lives from the time before they had a kid, back when they were young and wild.
I got on the phone with Erin, Andrew, and Lorne Michaels the next afternoon and pitched them a 6 beat story about the three main characters, Reagan (Christina), Chris (Will), and Ava (Maya) all told with still photos. The beats were:
1 Leaving A Club
2 Being Drunk On The Street
3 Going To Another Club
4 Dancing
5 Pregnancy Test
6 Passed Out With A Baby
Showing a sequence of stills is a technique that has been around forever and something I’ve used when appropriate. It certainly fit in with the scrapbook theme, especially if constantly wasted people kept scrapbooks of all the times they were wasted.
I shot a segment for Late Night called “Head Swap” and shot it entirely with stills. I’d typically shoot around 3,000 stills for every episode of Head Swap, then dump them onto editor Chris Tartaro’s computer and say “deal with this, jerk.” Then he’d laboriously, painstakingly edit a 4 minute video one still picture at at time.
Directing for stills is way different and for me much easier than directing for live action. Actors know that if I’m trying to catch a tiny slice of time, then they can act larger than life, and there is no pressure to carry a scene, say words, or give their emotions any context. They can bascially pose their way through the moods we want to capture in the photo. It’s a fun way to continuously get big performances from actors who normally prefer to be subtle and real.
Lorne, Erin and Andrew approved the stills approach and the story, with Lorne adding a beat where the Chris and Reagan are trying to put a baby crib together. I then spent a few days looking for reference photos on the internet. I scoured tons and tons of stock photos of people at nightclubs, people partying on the street, people being pregnant, and people passed out in their bed with children. That is literally a sentence made entirely of search terms I used in google for the 3 nights as I stayed up surfing for reference material.
At first I had a really hard time finding some legitimately cool photos of people dancing in nightclubs. They were either too plastic looking or too posed or not exciting. Then I found Caesar Sebastian’s photostream on Flickr. You can also see AMAZING images on his blog. The images of his that captivated me the most, like the one in the link above, were wild and colorful pictures of people dancing, where lights were trailing across the photo as if it were a time lapse, but in the center of all these swirling colors was a crisp and sharply exposed human form, with no trailing or blurring. I was amazed at the technical aspect of these pictures, because on the one hand there is clearly an open shutter involved, and camera movement which is what creates the streaking. But then how did he get the subjects to expose so crisply and with no trails? The answer is a setting called 2nd Curtain Sync, wherein the camera tells it’s flash to go off at the very end of the shutter cycle. So even if you have the shutter set to be open for a full second, the flash still pops at the end of that second. And digital flashes are so fast these days that film cameras like the Red can’t even register and entire flash in a single frame. The bayer pattern of the sensor doesn’t scan the pixels fast enough. I know this because I recently shot a scene with characters being hit with mutiple flashes at once (using 5 Canon 580EX type 2 flashes). And if you take a single frame of the Red footage where the flashes went off, there is clearly a large horizontal area in the image where there is simply no flash. It’s as if the flash was set off behind a shelf or a horizontal bar, which is then casting a shadow onto the subject. But what you are seeing is that area of the sensor, a millisecond or so later in time than the part of the frame which is illuminated by the light from the flash.
My point in going into all that is that if your subject is standing in front of you in darkness, then you can leave the shutter open for days and days, and sweep the sensor across the subject not get any blurriness or trailing because the subject is not emitting any light. But when the flash pops, even if you are in the middle of a fast pan, the dark subject in the foreground will show up crisp and in focus on the sensor because the subject is illuminated for such a short duration. And at the same time all the lights in the background continue to leave a trail across the sensor.
Jerry and I got on the phone together and clicked through Caesar’s Flickr photos, and Jerry could pick out which photos were shot with 2nd Curtain Sync, and which were shot with 1st Curtain Sync, where the flash is triggered at the beginning of the shutter cycle, as opposed to the end. Using 1st Curtain Sync, the trails of light seem to emanate away from, or out of the subject. With 2nd Curtain, the photos show lights trailing behind the subject, creating sense of forward motion.
Jerry also suggested some awesome ideas like zooming in while flashing with 2nd Curtian Sync, which creates a Star Wars hyperdrive effect.
Jerry Ward sent me a bunch of lenses, and another awesome Canon guy named Jung-Jin Ahn sent me a 5D mkII body, a 1D mkIV, and a whole case of lenses including Canon’s new 8-15mm L series fisheye lens.
Incidently, I didn’t use any cool effects on the pictures of Christina Applegate being pregnant, because the reference photos I found were hilariously boring, and so I kept those photos normal looking. There are some slobs out there on the internet who took unflattering, poorly lit pictures of their pregnant wives. They also inspired me.
To shoot most of the setups for our 6 beat story, I had to trail the Up All Night production for about 2 weeks and steal the actors for 10 minutes at a time between scenes. All of our nightclub shots, however, were done in one morning at Spot 5750 on Hollywood Blvd. This shoot was tightly choreographed because time with the actors was severely limited and we had a lot of setups to do. I went down to the club a day early and took reference photos of every setup we planned. Spot 5750 waitress Evelyn Stepp and camera assistant Zack Marchinsky were kind enough to serve as stand-ins. Below you can see an example of a test shot and a final shot.
While I was preparing for the nightclub shoot I was hanging out with composer Martyn Lenoble. Martyn wrote the music for the main titles and does a lot of other scoring for the show. He’s married to Applegate, used to be in Porno For Pyros, and has played with tons of bands you’ve heard of. I mentioned to Martyn that I wished I knew what music all the actors liked so that during the nightclub shoot I could surprise them with some favorite tunes and maybe photograph some genuine reactions. The dude instantly wrote me a list of Christina’s favorite songs! Cool husband alert. So then I had people email me playlist ideas for Will and Maya. I mean, obviously these guys are all great performers, so we would have gotten our shots either way. But I’d like to think this made their jobs easier, and they did have great expressions whenever their special songs came on.
As the season goes on you will see some of these photos change, as the producers want to keep updating the open. I’ve done one refresh already so if you watch the show this week you will see some new photos taken by me and some by NBC photographer Colleen Hayes.
He Has These Rules For Language That Are Totally Inconsistent
Photo of Johnny Sneed Laughing
2011 Emmy nomination
Woke up today with 7 nice emails in my inbox, all saying “congrats!”. I had no idea what it was for, but I was pretty sure I had done something awesome.
Now I get to see my name on this web page, which I’ll admit feels pretty good.
The above screencap is for our writing nomination. Late Night was also nominated for Outstanding Variety, Musical or Comedy Series, and for the website.
A Letter To Snyder’s Of Hanover Regarding Honey Mustard And Onion Sourdough Nibblers
Dear Snyder’s Of Hanover,
I’m writing to let you know that I love your Honey Mustard and Onion Sourdough Nibblers. My corner grocery store in Manhattan recently switched from stocking the 25 calories of fat per serving bags of Sourdough Nibblers, to stocking the 60 calories of fat per serving bags of Honey Mustard and Onion Pretzel Pieces. The bags look nearly identical, so I assumed that you had changed the recipe and I was heartbroken. Days turned into months. Months turned into 3 months. Then I moved back home to Los Angeles and to my delight, I found bags and bags of your 25 calories of fat per serving Honey Mustard and Onion Sourdough Nibblers at the local Gelson’s.
On the surface, it may seem that the distinction between a Sourdough Nibbler and a Pretzel Bite is negligible, as they are the same shape and size, they come in yellow bags, they are both flavored with Honey Mustard and Onion, and they both require frequent finger wipings if you are eating them while working at the computer. But the similarities end there. First of all, the Sourdough Nibblers are slightly crunchier. Also the Sourdough Nibblers are about 20% less tangy. And finally, the Sourdough Nibblers have 25 calories of fat per serving whereas the Pretzel Bites have 60. If I were a New York City grocer, who knows if I’d appreciate the difference. Of course I’d like to think that I’d be the type of grocer who “got it,” but with all my other grocery duties, it’s hard for me to say that I’d have time to appreciate such a contrast.
I think it’s the intangible things that make one city more “home” than another. People ask me why I love Los Angeles so much, because I got mugged twice here and I never got mugged in New York. But all the same LA is my home, and for all the times I have left, each return feels sweeter than the last. Finally I am back for good (for now) and your 25 calories of fat per serving Honey Mustard and Onion Nibblers are both my reason for and methodology of celebration.
Home At Last,
Michael Blieden
To My Coworkers On My Last Day
Tonight we will have drinks and celebrate what I am calling my False Goodbye, because I’m back next week to finish Jersey Floor. So I’ll see all of you, often I hope. But my life and the way I spend my every day will change drastically. To be honest, emotionally I’ve been a bit numb as my final day draws near, but my back has been killing me. Every day it’s been getting worse. Then I read this new agey kind of book about the faults of western medicine and the basic premise is that some people create back pain as a way to distract themselves from emotional pain. All I know is, saying goodbye to you people is murder on my back. I even had to get a referral from Bronson’s dad.
I remember how dazed I was my first month at Late Night. I left my wife in Los Angeles, rented a room with two 25 year old girls in Hell’s Kitchen, and walked to 30 Rock every day. One of them was in a bad relationship at the time, though I hear they are still together. Not important. Anyway, I remember watching the last Conan in Jimmy’s office, and on my way back to the girls that night, it really clicked that this was going to be one of those experiences I would talk about for the rest of my life. And that’s what it has been.
From now until the day my mind crumbles, or decays, or is merged with a synthetic consciousness then accidentally erased by the collapse of the nearby star which was supplying power to the small moon which housed that synthetic consciousness, I will relive the successes we had and Shoemaker’s speech about civility. I will remember our first shoot, standing in the bitter cold on the corner of 51st and 11th with Jed and Chad, neither of whom were even remotely dressed for the weather. We pulled an office chair down deserted streets with black twine. Then we put a feather boa on the chair and placed it next to a prostitute and had them stand in traffic. Then we put the chair in a crude cardboard shelter in the lee of a building and scattered old needles and empty beer cans around to make it look like the chair was addicted to heroin and living on the streets. We buried Gerard in Cocoa Puffs. We made Jeselnik act. We spent a lot of money on Real Animals Fake Arms. Go into Brian McDonald’s office and ask him for the exact dollar amount. It will make him uncomfortable, but don’t let him laugh it off. Push it until he gives you at least a ball park figure. We made Miles look fuckable. We put Robert Pattinson in a tree, and made Questlove have to figure out a comedy alternative to doing the limbo. We made Jimmy look like a woman and a vampire, put him in blue tights, in a Bieber wig, in a bar dressed as Roger Federer, in a gay bar, in the freezing cold, and in a rodeo arena with 72,000 people waiting to watch Selena Gomez. We spread the pages of Sarah Palin’s book and asked a human being in the art department to slam the Twilight book repeatedly against the spread pages of the Sarah Palin book to simulate intercourse. In 2 years and 2 months we shot 117 short films.
And we did Kickin’ Stuff.
But not only will I brag about the successes. I will brag even more about the difficulties, and the personal bullshit, and the cramped quarters, and the endless hours. I will brag about having slept in my office, the days I only ate froyo from the commissary, how when the interns came around asking if we wanted Hale and Hearty I called it Stale and Farty, how Ozols and I cried to each other in my office more than once, and how Tartaro had a blowout when he came for his first interview. Those are also things that were good. Those are the things that forced us to huddle together in the conference room, or in our offices, come up with creative solutions, and find the joy in what we were doing. Those are all the things that made me love you people, and I am going to miss everything that made this job hard.
For the rest of my life, I will brag about having been here.
Love,
Blieden