In a perfect film set world (real world), you shoot for the day, send the film to the lab that night to be processed, return the next day, shoot some more, and then during lunch (or beginning/end of the day), you watch what you shot the previous day. These are called dailies, because you do [...]

Yes, we got 91 set-ups1 in 3 days. That’s about 30 a day. The 6 day show had 106 set-ups. Bottom line is we got a shit-ton of shots.
And this was despite company moves, lots of extras, a tired crew, and broken/missing equipment. The odd thing is no one brought up any objections or said [...]

Here are a few notes I dug up from an early cinematography class. They’re short and good to keep in mind.

Eye first looks at what is moving, then what’s brightest.
Film is a 2-Dimensional medium. The idea is to create the appearance of 3 dimensions through composition, lighting, and camera movies. Tilt, Pan, and Zoom are [...]

Yesterday was our first cinematography class. We had to choose the worst shot from the F3 we were Director of Photography on, bring it in, and discuss what went wrong. It was a good idea, and a good way to learn.
My shot (not the one pictured above) was this clunky 180 hand-held we tried. [...]

The footage I shot as DP has returned. If we play by the rules, we are supposed to wait until this Wednesday for dailies when the entire crew gathers and we watch the footage, synced with the sound in script order.
I was going to go along with this until I had to digitize audition footage [...]

It’s 4 AM and I’m about to shoot a movie in two hours, but I can’t seem to go back to sleep. So I’ll write!
It seems that Director of Photography is the most nerve wracking position. It’s a blend of using your technical knowledge to create artistic images, while managing a bunch of people and [...]

January is going to be a busy month for me. As I said before, three films are down, four to go. These four are all ATL jobs, and are every Friday-Saturday for the next four weeks when school starts up again on the 7th.
Week 1 - Director of Photography
This is a sci-fi period film, taking [...]

New show. I’m now First Assistant Camera (1AC). Above in the photo is Matt, my second. The first day is done and we have one roll to download, Matt’s first full on downloading experience.
Of course I’ve told him all about my previous experience, and tried to give every pointer to avoid spooling, but I must [...]

Charles’ F3, the one that I redeemed myself on, went pretty well last Sunday and Monday. The house we shot at was amazing, all ten cast members arrived on time and were great, and even Goodwood went off without a hitch. Of course a show can’t be perfect, which is why we had a little [...]

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been having camera tests for our F3s in our Cinematography Lab. Camera tests give us a chance to try out different film stocks and techniques so we can get an idea of how we want to shoot our F3. The idea is this is the chance to experiment [...]