I remember a shoot in the Highlands back in ’04, standing in a downpour with a production assistant who thought he could save time by shoving a $4,000 prime lens into a padded case like he was packing a sandwich for lunch. We spent the next three hours cleaning grit out of the focus ring…
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…