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” »
I spent three hours last Tuesday watching a kid in a rental house argue with a technician about whether an 8K sensor would “fix” the muddy, underexposed footage he’d shot the week before. It’s the same song and dance every year: people treat resolution like a magic wand that can scrub away bad decisions. They…
Read More “Shooting 4k for a Video Nobody Watches Above 1080” »
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Hebrides once, shivering in a damp van, only to realize that the “perfect” sequence wasn’t hidden in some fancy plugin or a complex rhythmic montage technique. It was hidden in the way I’d failed to think about the space between the shots while I was still…
Read More “The Stages of an Edit and Why Skipping One Hurts” »
I once spent four hours on a documentary set in a damp basement in Leeds, watching a kid half my age stare at a $50,000 sensor readout like it was going to tell him how to fix a muddy, flat image. He had the most expensive kit in the county, but he hadn’t even looked…
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Highlands last year, working with a kit that had half the dynamic range of the latest flagship sensor, and I still walked away with better images than the kid I saw last month using a $50,000 rig in a studio with nothing but overhead fluorescent lights….
Read More “Choosing a Camera by What You Shoot, Not What You Read” »