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 a shoot in a cramped studio in South London, twenty years ago, where the producer spent three hours arguing about which high-speed sensor we were using, while I sat there staring at a blank piece of paper. We had the best gear money could buy, but because nobody had actually sat down to…
I spent a decade watching people mistake a pile of expensive adjectives for a coherent plan. I’ve sat in production meetings where someone spent forty minutes describing the “ethereal, cinematic quality” of a scene, only to realize they hadn’t a clue how to actually move the camera or where the light was coming from. If…
I remember sitting in a dimly lit production office fifteen years ago, staring at a spreadsheet that felt more like a work of fiction than a business document. I had just finished a three-day shoot where the light was so abysmal we spent six hours just trying to find a single window that didn’t blow…
Read More “Quoting a Project Without Undercharging Yourself” »
I remember sitting in a cramped production office in Bristol, watching a client point at a perfectly composed wide shot and tell me it felt “too expensive,” before suggesting we just make it brighter. They didn’t want better lighting; they wanted a way to feel in control of a process they didn’t actually understand. Most…
I once spent three days on a documentary set in a rain-soaked valley, waiting for a single, perfect sliver of light to hit a subject’s eyes, only to spend the next week fighting with an editor to make the silence feel meaningful. Fast forward a month, and I’m in a windowless Marriott conference room, staring…
I remember a shoot in a cramped, humid studio back in ’04—we had the perfect backlight, a soft wrap on the subject that looked like something out of a classic noir, and a take that felt like magic. We spent six hours chasing that specific glow, only to have the entire project mothballed three months…
I remember a shoot in a cramped, unventilated basement in South London, twenty years ago. The light was terrible—just a single, flickering work lamp—and the crew was exhausted, irritable, and looking at me like I was the one who’d decided to ruin their lives. I realized then that you don’t win a crew over with…
I remember standing in a drafty community hall in South Wales twenty years ago, clutching a camera that felt like a lead brick, watching a subject walk out of the frame because I’d spent ten minutes fussing with a tripod instead of watching the light. People love to talk about how documentary shooting differs by…
Read More “Shooting What Is Happening Instead of What You Planned” »
I spent three hours last week watching a kid on a YouTube tutorial explain how to shoot dialogue simply by listing the dynamic range specs of a new cinema camera and the bit-depth of a specific codec. It’s exhausting. He made it sound like the secret to a good scene is a bigger sensor or…