Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Reshoot

The original cinematographer for Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Roy H Wagner ASC, teamed up with director Lukas Colombo and YouTubers, iJustine and Armando Ferreira to reshoot scenes of this slasher horror on an iPhone 11. Lukas Colombo talks about bringing YouTubers and Hollywood folk together and explains how easy it was to edit and color grade the iPhone footage in DaVinci Resolve 16.

Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Roy H. Wagner.

“I first met Roy at Blackmagic Design’s NAB booth in 2018. Roy just happened to be meandering around as I was concluding a presentation of a recent Cirque Du Soleil production we filmed using Blackmagic cameras. A mutual friend, Jody Eldred, introduced me to him and we have been friends ever since. I noticed that he was very active on social media and was continuously sharing his knowledge as a cinematographer, which I thought was very uncommon for a Hollywood veteran.”

Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Roy H. Wagner.

“I first met Roy at Blackmagic Design’s NAB booth in 2018. Roy just happened to be meandering around as I was concluding a presentation of a recent Cirque Du Soleil production we filmed using Blackmagic cameras. A mutual friend, Jody Eldred, introduced me to him and we have been friends ever since. I noticed that he was very active on social media and was continuously sharing his knowledge as a cinematographer, which I thought was very uncommon for a Hollywood veteran.”

“And so that's how I came to discussing with him this idea for a cinematography series aimed at the next generation of filmmakers. Roy said he had been wanting to do something like this for years, but had never found the right person to partner with. He has over 50 years of experience as one of the legends of cinematography in Hollywood, and is eager to share and give back to everyone.”

“So together, we launched a new YouTube series on the VideoVillagePro Channel that is free to anyone who wants to learn what Hollywood is really like. While I was working with Roy on this project, a friend and popular YouTuber, Armando Ferreira, started telling me about the new iPhone 11.”

“Roy Wagner had shot the original Nightmare on Elm Street 3 for Wes Craven”

“Armando suggested it would be really cool if Roy, a Hollywood DP, would shoot something on the iPhone as a bit of a joke or hook to attract viewership. He thought it would be really entertaining. So I started thinking about it and how Halloween was coming up really soon and how Roy Wagner had shot the original Nightmare on Elm Street 3 for Wes Craven back in the mid eighties.”

“So this project really started from a small idea of getting an ASC cinematographer to shoot some footage on the iPhone in their backyard, to let’s rebuild the sets from scratch and recreate an iconic scene from Nightmare on Elm Street!”

“What I really love here, was that we were taking something that was shot in 1985 and then redoing it with modern up-to-date tools. The story behind this project is to show how far technology has changed in those thirty years and how that has empowered filmmakers.”

“From shooting the original on 35mm negative with huge tungsten lights, to now shooting digitally on the iPhone 11 Pro with lightweight LED lights and on through to editing, color grading and VFX all in DaVinci Resolve 16! I mean, post production workflows were so different and complicated back then, whereas now we were just AirDropping files to the MacBook and then grading and editing on location!”

iJustine and the YouTube World

“Once we decided to make a full production out of this, word got around that we were shooting on the iPhone and iJustine caught wind of it and was excited to join us on set and experience this with us. She obviously has a huge YouTube following (6.2M+) that is very Apple centric and she has such a positive personality and energy so collaborating with her was a lot of fun.”

“Both Hollywood and YouTube are obviously huge in their own right, but they rarely ever cross over and work together. I had just recently started to learn more about the whole YouTube World and it was an eye-opener to learn about the amount of media that’s consumed and the number of opportunities available. So that’s what we set out to do here! This project was that first cross over from Hollywood to Youtube where we can all work together and have fun entertaining and educating.”

“The great thing about doing this sort of project with both a Hollywood legend like Roy and a famous YouTuber such as iJustine, is that you see the same thing but from very different perspectives. We have Roy’s piece which is more of a Doc style behind-the-scenes, and then you have the more raw and vlog style of iJustine’s piece. So here we have these two very different experiences of the same event; which I think is really great, because not everyone likes to watch the same thing in the same way.”

Finding a Location for Elm Street

“We literally downloaded Nightmare on Elm Street 3 on Armando’s computer and we just scrubbed through it to see what would be cool, as well as being doable to film in a single day. Most of the scenes were pretty outrageous and had a lot of visual effects and special effects. And of course, the ones we wanted to do were out there and crazy!”

“I then spoke with Roy about where the original Nightmare on Elm Street was shot, and he suggested I speak to the original art director, Mick Strawn. Mick told me how they shot it in these massive empty warehouses and how elaborate their sets were. Originally they had planned to shoot one long ‘steadicam style’ of shot, so they had built most of this scene as one massive joint set, but we had the ability to break it up based on what’s seen in the final edit and save on construction costs.

“With less than a week before the shoot we did not have many options available as everything books up quick in LA but I found Studios 60 in L.A, which is this large warehouse building with several stages and loads of character. It was perfect! Within 3 days we had the whole place built up with sets and filled every inch of our 5,000 square foot stage. My Production Designer, Dave Hartwell, and I had to lay it out perfectly, to be able to fit in the foyer, basement, furnace, stairway and hallway scenes. The staircase we had to build up over their restrooms, so the space was very tight indeed.”

“We only had a few days prep on this project before we were onstage building sets on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, before shooting on the Thursday. Since we had the original film as reference all we had to do was build what the camera could see. This was an educational and promotional project so we certainly were not working with anywhere close to the time or budget the original film had 30 years ago and we all had to be incredibly resourceful in the build up of this thing. Our crew was fantastic!”

iPhone vs the Original Film Camera

“As a Hollywood cinematographer in 1985, you don’t usually operate the camera let alone touch it. But in this case, Roy Wagner actually shot the majority of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 himself. Back then, every shot would have been on a dolly with a jib arm running on tracks, because they were obviously shooting on big heavy film cameras. Roy would have relied on the dolly grip to push and pull the dolly at the right speed that he wanted. They would have rehearsed each move over and over again.”

“So the difference with our reshoot, was that Roy could walk around with the phone on a gimbal and get a really good feel for his shots. Roy was reshooting something he first did thirty years ago, and I know if it was me, I would probably want to improve on things. That’s just inherent in every artist. But I asked Roy to please just try to make the same mistakes again. So he was fighting of course with his inner desire to change it and make it better, which was this funny internal struggle he personally had on set.”

“The original movie was shot on Kodak 5247 tungsten film at 100 ASA and so we decided to also keep the iPhone rated at 100 ISO. Every now and then, we would change it a bit and went as low as ISO 32 just for the blacks and to keep things clean, and then went as high as ISO 400 for some of the slow motion shots.”

“By doing all of the post production in DaVinci Resolve 16, we could load the original film in and play our new scenes side-by-side for comparison. So when we were shooting the stairs or hallway shots, we could accurately match the timing of what we were shooting to what Roy had originally shot in 1985. I had them side-by-side and would simply hit play on my Resolve Mini Panel after calling ACTION so that we could see what we were shooting live, versus what was already in the original film.”

“It was pretty wacky for Roy to experience that sort of instant feedback on set. Roy actually commented that it was harder doing the reshoot than shooting it the first time, because everyone knows if you got it right or wrong. The scrutiny was incredible!”

Editing, Grading and VFX

“Our setup on set was actually very simple. We had a MacBook Pro, DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel and my Blackmagic SmartView Monitor. There was no extra hardware needed to handle the 4K files. What I immediately found working this way, was that Resolve really helped to inform my directorial decisions. For example, with the shot where the actress is coming down the stairs in the basement, we could easily compare it with the original at any time.”

“It also meant we could build the set to exactly what we were seeing in camera. If I needed to throw up a Power Window and make something go to black, I could do that quickly, rather than having the crew add more walls or foam core to the set. As long as the characters weren’t walking into that space and making it tough to rotoscope, I could just make part of the set disappear with Resolve.”

“I was able to remove the warehouse ceiling and a lot of grip equipment that you could see in-shot as well. I literally was doing this in Resolve while Roy was doing camera rehearsals. So we were able to make all of those sorts of decisions on set while shooting live.”

“The other thing, was that the grade on the original film was very contrasty and crunchy. So with Resolve I added that similar look in easily from the footage Roy shot which had plenty of latitude to manipulate. We did not use any LUTs in this workflow as with this grade we are trying to imitate a predefined look and I needed as much control over the image as possible. I think if we had baked something like that into the iPhone footage, which has its own look, I would have been fighting against it for most of the shots.”

“I found it wasn’t hard to get the iPhone colors to look something like the original film, by just playing with the color temperature, green and magenta tint slider and balancing out the exposures. I further tweaked the shots by adding Power Windows and playing with isolated hues. It was all pretty straightforward and usually took less than five nodes per shot.”

Grading the iPhone Footage

“The original film was shot on 35mm, whereas the reshoot was off a tiny iPhone sensor, so you’re going to notice the depth of field differences right off the bat. I could have gone into Resolve and added some masks and blurred bits of the background to look more like 35mm, but that would have been faking it. This was meant to be more of an educational thing, so we thought it was important to keep those authentic differences in the shots.”

“With the iPhone everything is very sharp and has deep focus, so the main tool I used was Resolve’s Temporal Noise Reduction. This was incredibly helpful because it really improved the way movement looked in our shots. I am not sure how Blackmagic’s algorithms work, but by removing some noise and grain from the image, it had a huge effect on the way the characters looked when they were running or moving. It made everything a little softer, smoother and felt more pleasing to watch.”

“The other thing which helped was bringing down the midtone detail on most of the shots, especially when we were close up on someone. On the Resolve Mini Panel, you are able to adjust this parameter quickly from the dials. It simply tones down the mid details so that skin doesn’t appear so sharp, to the point where you see every pore and blemish. It was remarkable to see the differences these two things made to the images while I was turning them on and off.

Cutting in Resolve

“I have always used Resolve to do all of my color work, as I am sure most of the industry does. But if you’re not cutting in it by now, then you are adding a huge amount of unnecessary work to your project. Gone are the days of importing and conforming XMLs and EDls. Editing and grading can be done all on the same platform and timeline now. There is no more converting footage, rendering or creating proxies because, Resolve just plays everything natively”

“We only had the 2 day weekend to edit and finish this project before we released it for Halloween, so having Resolve as both an editing and color grading tool on set was crucial. I don’t even want to think about what it would have been like using another editing application.”

“Resolve also has a really cool feature, where it automatically audio syncs. Our audio was recorded separately on set and there wasn’t a way to import time code into the iPhone. Resolve just automatically synced it all up for me. We didn’t have to find any of the claps from the slates, so it really got rid of that work done by the assistant editor. So there is no more administrative work needed now, it is all straight up creative work! That is one really cool feature for sure. You can just right click in Resolve and you know it’s in sync, via their waveform tool.”

“There is no more administrative work needed now, it is all straight up creative work!”

“Resolve is really all about speed. We could not have completed this project as fast, if we were having to jump through the usual hoops rendering this or that. With Resolve, you’re in the color, edit or cut page, and then you just jump straight into the export page. That’s as hard as it gets. From the export page, we just sent out all of the masters to the different formats and it was all done from within the same application.”

“Another cool thing about this, was when we had to perfect Freddie’s swipe on set. Trying to get the timing of that claw swipe right was going to burn a lot of time, so we decided to cheat it in camera splitting the scene into two shots. With those two shots in Resolve, we simply opened up the Fusion VFX page as a split screen and then masked the two shots and layered them together. That was really nice, because it was all done within the same application, again without rendering or exporting.”

“The sound design, we did as a standalone piece using a sound designer and composer who did their bit in Pro Tools. However, they could have done all of the sound work in Resolve as well, using the Fairlight page which is also in Resolve 16 now. It’s insane that we have all of these tools and it’s all free too!”

“Because of how fast this project had to be shot and delivered, this was really the first time when I truly thought: I couldn’t use any application other than Resolve. This opened my eyes and mind to the idea of actually moving all of our projects across to this one application for all of our post production.”

“I'm pretty picky, and I get frustrated with things if they aren't working the way I want them to work. And I didn't have a moment where I was like that on this! To be able to stay in the same UI and the same program for everything, just made it feel super easy.”