I remember standing on a dusty shoulder in the High Desert, the heat coming off the asphalt in waves, watching a junior operator try to rig a gimbal to a moving chase car while staring intently at a monitor instead of the road. He was so focused on the dynamic range of the sensor that…
I remember sitting in a cramped edit suite in South London, twenty years ago, staring at a monitor that felt like it was vibrating. I had just spent six hours trying to fix a dialogue track that sounded like it was recorded inside a tin can, convinced that if I just bought a more expensive…
I spent the better part of my twenties lugging heavy Arri kits and worrying about the cost of every foot of 16mm stock, so seeing the way people approach mobile filmmaking today is a bit of a trip. There is this pervasive, almost frantic idea that if your footage looks amateur, you just need a…
Read More “The 7 Best Essential Accessories for Mobile Video Creators to Level Up Your Content” »
I spent the better part of the nineties sweating through linen shirts in humid locations, praying I hadn’t wasted a single frame of expensive Kodak stock on a shot that didn’t have enough light to breathe. Nowadays, I watch kids spend three hours scrolling through LUTs and grain overlays on a $5,000 monitor, trying to…
I spent three hours on a rainy pier in Cornwall once, watching a kid half my age try to fix a jittery shot by adjusting every setting on a $2,000 gimbal. He was sweating, swearing at the software, and completely oblivious to the fact that the wind was hitting the sensor and his feet weren’t…
I spent three weeks in a humid, mosquito-ridden corner of Southeast Asia a few years back, carrying a rig that felt like it was trying to win a wrestling match with my spine. I had the latest high-bitrate beast, a sensor that could see in the dark, and enough glass to outfit a small studio,…
I once spent four hours on a location in North Wales watching a production manager attempt to coordinate a complex move using nothing but a high-end digital scheduling app and a frantic, misplaced sense of urgency. We had three grip trucks idling, a lighting kit that was costing us a fortune every minute it sat…
Read More “Stop Buying More Gear and Start Learning How to Manage a Professional Film Set.” »
I remember sitting in a dim edit suite ten years ago, staring at a rough cut that looked technically perfect but felt completely hollow. The lighting was right, the focus was sharp, but the rhythm was broken—it was like having a beautiful camera setup with absolutely no sense of blocking. People often make the same…
I was halfway through a sunset sequence on a documentary in the Highlands when I noticed it: a tiny, stubborn dark spot blooming in the corner of every single frame. I spent the next hour cursing my high-end glass and wondering if the sensor was failing, only to realize it was a single, microscopic grain…
Read More “The Sensor Cleaning Myth: a No-nonsense Guide to What Actually Matters” »
I spent a decade watching people walk into rental houses and ask for the most expensive suite on the shelf, only to realize they didn’t actually know how to tell a story with a single cut. There is this exhausting, modern delusion that if you just buy the software with the most plugins and the…