I spent three days in a windowless edit suite back in ’04, staring at a hard drive full of mediocre shots from a documentary that had no business being made, trying to figure out how to find the story in footage that felt utterly lifeless. I didn’t have a fancy AI organizer or a high-speed…
I remember standing in a beautiful, high-ceilinged loft in East London, watching a young director get misty-eyed over the “vibe” of the space, while I was busy staring at a massive, unmovable radiator and a window that faced a brick wall. He saw a masterpiece; I saw a nightmare of shadows and a total lack…
I once sat in a production office in Bristol, watching a junior producer try to build a schedule using nothing but a color-coded spreadsheet and a sense of unearned confidence. He had every scene accounted for, but he hadn’t accounted for the fact that the sun would be gone by 4:15 PM or that moving…
I remember a shoot in a cramped, dimly lit basement in South London—no bounce boards, no time, and a client screaming about “cinematic look” while I was just trying to keep the exposure from falling apart. The kid operating the new mirrorless rig was obsessed with the sensor’s dynamic range, but the footage looked like…
I once spent six hours on a documentary set in a damp basement in Bristol, watching a director scramble through a pile of disorganized notes while the sun went down and our only light source vanished. We had the best sensor money could buy, but we had no plan for how the scenes would actually…
I spent three weeks on a documentary in a damp basement in Bristol, working with a camera that had a sensor the size of a postage stamp, and I still got better shots than the kid I saw last month using a cinema rig that cost more than my first house. There is this persistent,…
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Highlands once because I thought a color-coded spreadsheet was the same thing as understanding a scene. I had every technical requirement ticked off—the right lenses, the right power draws, the right crew list—but I hadn’t actually looked at the story to see where the light was…
I remember sitting in a windowless edit suite in South London, twelve hours into a shift, staring at a timeline that looked less like a story and more like a graveyard of expensive mistakes. I had shot on the best glass money could buy, but because I hadn’t thought about the coverage or the rhythm…
I spent three hours last Tuesday watching a kid on YouTube argue that a 120fps sensor was the “secret sauce” for cinematic storytelling. It’s the same old song: people treat frame rates like a magic button you press to buy emotion, when in reality, they’re just looking at a spec sheet to avoid making a…
Read More “Why 24 Frames Looks Like Film and 60 Looks Like News” »
I spent three hours last Tuesday watching a kid on a YouTube tutorial explain how to plan a shoot by walking through a checklist of the latest $40,000 sensor upgrades and wireless follow-focus systems. It was exhausting. He made it sound like if you just buy enough glass and high-bitrate codecs, the story will somehow…
Read More “Planning a Shoot Around the Hours You Actually Have” »