I spent the better part of last Tuesday watching a kid in a coffee shop stare at a spreadsheet of sensor readout speeds and bitrates, looking like he was trying to solve cold fusion rather than figure out how to capture a decent interview. He was convinced that if he just found the right spec…
I spent most of my twenties watching people blow entire production budgets on “super-glass” only to realize they had no idea how to actually shape a scene. You see it every week now: someone buys a $2,000 prime because a YouTuber told them it looks “cinematic,” but they haven’t even considered how that focal length…
I spent the better part of my twenties lugging heavy crates of glass and lighting rigs through mud and grit, learning one hard lesson early on: the gear doesn’t make the shot, but the wrong gear will certainly ruin it. I see people heading out into the field today, eyes glued to spec sheets and…
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I remember a shoot in a cramped studio in Bristol back in ’04. We were trying to get a subtle push-in on a subject, and the kid on the camera insisted we could just “make it work” with a cheap little track. He didn’t realize that a tiny, jerky movement in a tight space looks…
I watched a kid on a documentary set last week spend forty minutes wrestling with a motorized stabilizer, sweating through his shirt, only to realize he’d forgotten to check if the light was even hitting his subject. He was so obsessed with the smoothness of the movement that he completely lost the soul of the…
I remember a shoot in the Highlands ten years ago where we spent three hours arguing over the kilowatt-hour rating of a portable generator, only to realize we hadn’t even accounted for the voltage drop caused by the fifty meters of heavy-duty cable snaking through a damp field. We were so obsessed with the specs…
I spent three hours last week watching a kid on a YouTube livestream argue that he couldn’t get a cinematic look because he didn’t have a $2,000 spectral light kit. It’s the same old song: the belief that more expensive photons equal better stories. He was looking for a magic button, but he didn’t realize…
I remember a shoot in a cramped basement in Bristol, ten years back, where we were fighting a losing battle against a cheap LED panel that looked fine on the monitor but turned the lead actress’s skin a sickly, bruised shade of grey. We spent three hours trying to fix it in the grade, only…
I spent most of my twenties watching people panic over bitrates and dynamic range numbers as if they were holy scripture, convinced that a higher price tag would somehow compensate for a lack of vision. I’ve seen wide-eyed kids walk into gear shops asking how to choose your first mirrorless camera based entirely on a…
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” »