These are intermixed posts that associated with my work as a cinematographer. They may or may not actually show you actual clips of my work. To best view my work, watch my demo reel.

I’m excited to announce one of the most intriguing and powerful projects I’ve had the chance to work on, 24 After. It’s a mind-bending story set in the 24 hours after death. Our character must choose what he will hold onto as his life’s relationships and memories are purged.

This is my AFI Thesis film. I’ll be shooting it on 35mm Kodak 5212 and 5260—thanks to a generous donation from Kodak. It will go into production in March of 2013. We are currently developing it and raising funds.

This project has incredible personal value to me. Not only is it the cumulation of my time at AFI, but it also has a story that resonates deeply with me. The visuals are going to be an immense task to create, but if we are successful, it will be immensely powerful short film.

In order to make this short with the level of production value and story-telling typical of AFI short films, we’ve set out to raise a lot of money—$50,000 to be exact. And that doesn’t come from some magical place. It comes from friends and family. Visit 24after.com/support to find out how you can help.

This is my second post in a series I’m doing called DP Decisions. It’s intended to break down the choices I made and why I made them. This time, I’m dissecting a project I shot for AFI with choreographer Arlene Yuan. This is great place to dig into something cinematographers must always work under: limitations.

You will never get the time, equipment, and manpower to do the job the easy way, and that was certainly the case on our 16mm MOS assignment. For this project, Dance, we had to use our own money (or loans) to self-produce a short film. It had to tell a story and work within a few parameters:

• 200′ of 16mm film

• Photographed in chronological order

• No sound

• Cannot leave campus

• 5 working hours

Usually the starting point for any project is the story, but sometimes, I’ve found that the real starting point for DPs is in knowing the limitations. Instead of asking, “What do I need to tell the story?”, you must ask, “What story can I tell with what I have to work with?”

As I always have a few ideas that I can’t get out my head, that’s where I started the creative process for this short. And at the time, I was mulling over the concepts of:

• Black and white

• Light transitions

• Dance

So, I built a story around those ideas.

With concepts like this, the rules are out. You can do anything. I decided to tie the lighting of the world to the psychological state of the dancer. As she got into “the zone” the lights would slowly fade into stage lighting.

While I pushed the limits of the lighting, I did the opposite with the camera. I decided to limit it. It would always stay frontal and only move on the z-axis. The ballerina and lights would move in front of it.

This was partially due to my location limitations and partially a creative choice. I only had a small part of my soundstage to build on and limited time in which to do so. Logistically, the stage wasn’t big enough for me to move the camera around a lot. Creatively, I believed that practical limitations actually made space for creative freedom. Because my brain was free from having to conceptualize camera movements, it was free to conceptualize lighting changes. And given that I only had 5 hours to shoot, fewer decisions meant better decisions.

I designed my lighting to create 4 looks: two “practice” looks and two “stage” looks. The two practice looks were soft, overhead lighting that could fade from back to front. So, either the ballerina was dark and the background was white—or the opposite. I used a row of China Balls behind her for back light. And a row in the front for front light.

The two stage looks were hard, stage lighting that could also fade from front to back. The front light was done with a simple Source4 with an operator using it like a follow spot. The back light was a row of Tweenies flaring the lens.

The following video is a previs I did using Cinema4D. It very quickly moves through the lighting setups: practice-back, practice-front, stage-front, stage-back. Apologies in advance for the crude attempt at simulating dance…

I took all of the lights and plugged them into a ETC Sensor Dimmer Rack 12×2.4K which was controlled via an iPad running Luminaire.

Because every light was in place and just had to be dimmed up or down, we never had to relight. This allowed for a nice workflow on each shot: block the dancer, set the lens, set the initial lighting setup, set the end, set the duration, rehearse, and shoot.

Before the shoot, the choreographer and I came up with a general flow of how the dance would go. We decided when major lighting changes would happen and shifts in the style of dance. The rest was crafted on set.

Despite the fact that we were limited to a 5-hour shoot and had only 5 minutes of film, we got nearly 20 shots and had time to discuss each shot…all because we worked with the limitations instead of fighting them.

Take a look→

Dance was selected to be feature in the 2012 AFI Visual Essay Review.
Post about the Visual Essay Review
More Stills

And a special thanks and shout-out to Satoshi Mark Noguchi who scored the piece.

My 16mm MOS Project, Dance, was accepted to the 2012 Visual Essay Review. For first year AFI cinematographers, this is an honor as only 4 were chosen, Connor O’Brien, Sara Ross Samko, Eddie Salerno, and myself.

The AFI Visual Essay Review is a screening and reception showcasing the MOS projects of first and second year AFI Cinematography Fellows. The public screening is Wednesday, June 6, 7:00 PM.

Basically, it will be non-stop, mind-blowing, visual storytelling.

If you’d like to attend, RSVP here.

I’m back, and new stuff is on it’s way. I do apologize for the total disapearance. Since starting in August, I’ve been completely consumed in work at AFI. They have the cinematographers moving non-stop shooting and crewing. To further isolate us, everything we shoot the first year is sort of a trial. We aren’t allowed to publicly show any of the short films we make. One project is an exception to that rule: our 16MM MOS projects.

In these cinematographer-produced 16MM projects, we showcase our ability to visually tell a story without dialog. We can collaborate with anyone of our choosing, but its completion and quality are solely our responsibility.

I chose to work with an outside director and choreographer, Arlene Yuan, from Beats and Feet. She brought with her an incredible dancer and a great vision.

Currently, the project is in post-production getting a score. For now, here are some stills.

One of my good friends who is outside of the film industry recently asked me what blogs he could visit to read up on cinematography. I poked around through my bookmarks and was surprised by how few links I found for him. Combine that with my own longstanding desire to start sharing some of my techniques online, and I have decided to write about some of my past projects.

This is the first in a series of blog posts about cinematography that I’m tagging with “DP Decisions“. These posts will mostly focus on the lighting side of my work as that is really the heart of cinematography. My hope is that the information I share will help inspire new techniques—that you will, in turn, share with the interwebs.

The first project I want to break down is Loves Me Not. It is the story of Helena, a 20-year-old girl and her lover Jon. What seems like an ordinary day spins out of control when Helena has a flashback revealing that she had been kidnapped. Loves Me Not explores the world of love from the perspective of a woman with Stockholm Syndrome.

When writer/directors Rebecca Hodges and Ewa Pazera came to me with this project, I immediately knew it was exactly the sort of story that I’d love to shoot. It was dark, gritty, and almost schizofrantic.

The scene I want us to look at in particular is the kitchen. This is the context for the entire film. The 20 minute short starts and finishes here. But inside this space, there is a whole range of emotions—from bliss to fear to hatred. Most of this happens within the mind of Helena who is experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.

To view select shots edited from these scenes, scroll to the right.
This scene presented me with a lot of challenges. Here we have a very vivid image of beautiful sunlight flooding this room. This is certainly great for the opening, as only a few lines later, it turns into a love scene between Helena and Jon. However, two pages later, the audience is taken back in time ten minutes in the same kitchen where they witness violent domestic abuse. Things get dark quickly.

From a visual standpoint, I wanted both of these scenes that happen in the same space to be each emotionally rich. Scene 1 needed to be full of love and beauty; scene 2, dark and hateful. But both opposites had to coexist in the kitchen.

To overcome this problem, I employed a few techniques to film one space several different ways.

The first time we see the kitchen is during the love scene. So I shot this mostly in close up with longer lenses with the window in the background. This did several things. One, the grunginess is cropped out and blurred. Two, the window light would often flare up the lens, reducing the contrast and making it an overall softer scene. And finally, the bright window in the background brightens the frame—literally and emotionally.

These techniques combined work to clean up the kitchen. One of my favorite still photographers, David DuChemin, says that what’s more important than what you put in the frame is what you leave out. In this case, that is very true.

For flashback, I flopped these techniques around. I used wider lenses and filmed perpendicular to the windows. The wider frames revealed more of the filth. And now the same lighting as before is hitting them from the side. This gives everything a bit more contrast.

Additionally, we moved a lot of the action into the corner of the room near the fridge, which was intentionally the dirtiest part of the set. I placed two sources over here. One, a lamp with a yellow shade. This cast an eerie vibe on the actors and messed with their skin tones in a uncomfortable way. The second source was a different boarded up window. The art department gracefully allowed me to personally attach the boards to give me the exact sort of slits of light I was looking for.

To light both of these scenes, my lighting package was simple. Two 5K fresnels. One out each window. One practical lamp on the fridge. Then there were several other small fresnels that I moved around and softened with silks for particular shots.

Loves Me Not won Boyd the 2011 ASC Student Heritage Award for outstanding cinematography in an undergraduate project.
Write-up in American Cinematographer
Full Sail Press Release
More frame grabs