I remember a shoot in a damp basement in Bristol back in ’98. The generator had died, the client was breathing down my neck about a schedule that was already a fantasy, and the only light we had was a single, flickering tungsten lamp that made everyone look like they were decomposing. I spent forty…
Read More “The Day Everything Goes Wrong and You Still Shoot” »
I remember sitting in a dark rental house in South London, staring at a spinning beachball on a screen that cost more than my first car. I was trying to scrub through 8K RAW footage of a documentary subject, and every time I moved the playhead, the computer groaned like it was being asked to…
I spent three hours last Tuesday watching a junior editor sweat over a bitrate calculator, convinced that if he didn’t hit a specific, arbitrary number, his work would look like it was filmed on a potato. It’s the same nonsense I see every week: people treating the export window like a high-stakes math exam rather…
I once spent three days chasing a specific, golden-hour backlight in a coastal village, only to have the entire edit scrapped because the client hadn’t secured the proper permissions for the background music and the location’s incidental talent. It’s a gut punch that has nothing to do with your aperture or your sensor’s dynamic range,…
I spent three hours last Tuesday watching a kid in a rented studio tear his hair out because his “industry-standard” 8K sensor looked like mud in a low-light corner. He had the specs, he had the resolution, and he had a credit card that could buy a small car, but he didn’t have a single…
Read More “Interview Cameras: Colour and Codec Over Resolution” »
I remember a shoot in a drafty warehouse outside of Bristol back in ’04. The light was coming from a single, dying 2K through a silk, and the mood was even worse. We were twelve hours in, the heating had failed, and the AD was trying to motivate a tired grip by promising “great footage.”…
Read More “Feeding and Resting a Crew Is Production Planning” »
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.” »