| |
 |
| © Paramount Pictures/Michael Muller |
| Iron Man in full regalia. Click photo for more images. |
Unlike most other Hollywood photographers, Muller also does his own post-production work on individual images, whether for movie posters or ad campaigns. And most of that happens with the RAW file. "Ninety percent of the look I get comes from how I process the file," he says. "I'm really the only one who can decide, at least from an artistic perspective, if the image would look better in black and white or could use a greenish feel." He does pull the processed image into Photoshop, but that's the easy part. "Once I get a file processed I probably spend about five minutes on it, adjusting curves and burning and dodging with a Wacom pen," he says. "You don't have to put your hands in butterfly mode like in the darkroom and burn in little spots one at a time."
Muller says he wouldn't like it, though, if he had to shoot movie posters day in and day out. "I'd get a little crazy," he says. "I love the challenge of new stuff." That said, his movie poster experience has affected the way he thinks about his other work -- especially sports subjects such as surfing, another of his specialties. "Surfing's been shot the same way for 20-plus years," says Muller, who has also been photographing snowboarding since its baby bonks in the early 1990s. "I'm going to bring my cinematic approach to my surfing photography." To that end he's having underwater housings built for his Profoto strobes, and plans to do multi-light setups both on and under the water. He even wants to use the same technique for his ongoing photography of (gulp) great white sharks. If we were him, we'd stick with superheroes.
Lesson 1 Improvise
When Michael Muller did the poster photography for Hitman, the recent Fox movie starring Deadwood's Timothy Olyphant, the improvisational skills he cultivated on the set of the latest X-Men film were put to the test. The concept for the main Hitman poster called for Olyphant to pose in front of a bullet-riddled wall with light pouring through the holes.
The Hitman crew was shooting on location in Bulgaria. "Right before I left I was arranging to have my set designers build a wall and fly over there to set it up," Muller recalls. "The studio ended up nixing that plan because of its cost. So when I got to the set I found and photographed a room they'd blown up, shot some bullet holes, then did Timothy standing in the right pose. And when I got home we created a comp of it all. We saved the studio 25 thousand dollars and ended up getting the exact shot we wanted." Muller also saved his client the trouble of compositing the final image.
Lesson 2 Digitize
"I shoot all my movie posters digitally," says Muller. "I love the aesthetics of film, but the time constraints require instant results." He uses the 17-megapixel Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II for much of this work, including the Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man posters, and says the camera's image quality is good enough for the biggest tasks, literally. "If you upsize the right way, you can make an image that will hold up on the side of an eight-story building."
Depending on circumstances, and when he has more time, Muller also uses a 39-megapixel Phase One P45 digital back. That rig yields 120MB images that are especially suitable for "plates," the generic backgrounds or background elements (sky, landscape, buildings, weather) that are comped together with so-called hero shots of the actors themselves.
Unlike other poster photographers, Muller shoots -- and likes to shoot -- these kinds of pictures. He did so for one of Sony's big summer movies, Hancock, which stars Will Smith and Charlize Theron. "The movie takes place in L.A.," Muller explains. "So we rented a helicopter and flew over downtown, and I hung from a harness so I could shoot rooftops."
|
