I remember sitting in a dim edit suite ten years ago, staring at a documentary cut that looked beautiful but felt fundamentally broken. The pacing was off, the logic gaps were wide enough to drive a grip truck through, and the narrative voice kept tripping over its own feet. I had spent a fortune on…
I remember sitting in a cramped, windowless edit suite in South London, the smell of stale coffee and overheating electronics thick in the air, watching a progress bar crawl toward a finish line that didn’t exist. I had spent three weeks stitching together a documentary that felt like magic, only to hear that sickening, mechanical…
Read More “Backing Up the Project and the Media Separately” »
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Highlands once, working with a camera that had more scratches on the body than I had teeth, yet the footage looked more intentional than most of the $50,000 digital setups I see on YouTube today. People spend their entire lives chasing a specific “look,” convinced that…
I spent a week on a documentary shoot in a cramped, dimly lit basement in Dublin, watching a kid half my age try to fix a muddy, flat image by swapping out a prime lens for a more expensive cinema glass. He thought the gear would do the heavy lifting, but he was missing the…
Read More “Stop Chasing Expensive Glass and Start Understanding Aperture and Depth of Field.” »
I remember sitting in a dim edit suite in London, ten years ago, staring at a mountain of nameless folders and a hard drive that sounded like it was trying to take flight. I had spent fourteen hours under hot lights, only to realize that because we hadn’t figured out how to organise media on…
Read More “A Folder Structure You Will Still Understand Later” »
I remember sitting in a dim corner of a rental house in London, staring at a stack of expired 16mm canisters and a brand-new, high-end digital cinema camera. A kid, probably not ten years older than me, was arguing that the digital sensor’s dynamic range would make the film look “obsolete.” It’s the same argument…
I remember a shoot in a drafty warehouse outside of Bristol back in ’04. I had spent three days wrestling with a dying generator and a light kit that felt like it was held together by prayer, only to find out at the edit that the client thought “all usage” meant they could sell my…
I spent three weeks in a cramped, humid apartment in Naples last summer, sweating through my shirt and trying to capture a family’s history before the light died for good. I wasn’t thinking about dynamic range or bitrates; I was thinking about whether I could move my tripod without tripping over a stray cat or…
I spent three weeks on a low-budget indie set in the rain once, staring at a script that was technically perfect in its formatting but completely unfilmable. The writer had spent so much time obsessing over the “correct” way to use industry-standard software and font sizes that they forgot to actually write a story that…
I spent most of my twenties watching people panic over bitrates and dynamic range specs, convinced that a higher number on a spreadsheet was the magic ingredient for a good image. I’ve seen more “cinematic” footage ruined by poor lighting and lazy blocking than I have by a subpar sensor, yet I still see beginners…