I remember a shoot in a cramped, windowless basement in South London back in ’04. We were burning through the last of a precious roll of 16mm, the producer was breathing down my neck about the daylight robbery of the rental fee, and the director kept asking if we could “just try one more angle”…
Read More “Getting the Scene in Four Setups Instead of Nine” »
I remember sitting in a cramped studio ten years ago, watching a kid spend three grand on a high-end cinema camera just to shoot against a wrinkled, poorly lit piece of polyester. He kept asking why his edges looked like they’d been cut out with kitchen shears, as if a better sensor would magically fix…
I spent most of the nineties watching light meters dance and praying the film stock wouldn’t run out before we caught the magic, back when every frame cost more than a decent dinner. These days, I see kids scrolling through spec sheets, convinced that a $5,000 LED panel with a high CRI rating is the…
Read More “Choosing Lights by Colour Accuracy, Not Wattage” »
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Highlands once, watching a kid half my age try to fix a jittery wide shot by mounting a three-axis gimbal that cost more than my first car. He was sweating, fighting the motors, and still looking like he was filming from the back of a runaway…
I spent the better part of my twenties hauling heavy Arriflexes through rainstorms just to get a single usable shot, back when every foot of film felt like it was being pulled directly from my own bank account. Nowadays, I watch kids spend three months’ rent on a mirrorless body with a spec sheet longer…
I remember sitting in a dim editing suite at three in the morning, staring at a rough cut that felt fundamentally broken. The lighting was moody, the blocking was tight, but the pacing was a disaster—the “soul” of the scene was just missing. People often make the same mistake when they move from film to…
I was halfway through a lighting setup in a damp basement in Bristol—the kind of location where the humidity feels like a physical weight—when I noticed a cluster of dark, stubborn spots blooming across my high-contrast sky shot. I spent twenty minutes in post-production trying to mask them out, only to realize I’d been fighting…
Read More “Sensor Cleaning: a No-nonsense Guide to Not Ruining Your Camera” »
I remember a shoot in a drafty warehouse outside of Bristol, ten years ago, where the producer spent forty minutes arguing about whether we needed a more expensive wireless follow-focus system. Meanwhile, the sun was dropping through a skylight that we hadn’t even accounted for, and the entire lighting plan was dissolving in real-time. That’s…
I spent three weeks in the High Atlas mountains a decade ago, lugging a kit that felt like it was designed by someone who had never actually walked more than ten feet from a studio power outlet. I had the best specs on paper, but by day four, I wasn’t looking at the sensor readout;…
Read More “Stop Buying Gear You Don’t Need: the Truth About Choosing the Right Camera for Travel.” »
I spent twenty minutes last week listening to a kid on a set explain why he needed a specific set of vintage primes because of their “soul,” while he was standing in a room lit by a single, flickering fluorescent tube. It’s the same old song: people think that understanding different types of camera lenses…