This week, I got my chance to be DP (director of photography) when I worked on the set for my classmate Loan. We had a good crew, good actors and a fun script, so we were off to the races. We created the set in our sound stage here at BDFI and had all of the lights and equipment at hand without having to drag everything to another location, which was nice for a change. Also, now that I’ve seen the results of shooting several other projects, I’m becoming more aware of camera work and lighting strategy. My goal was to nail the angles and framing and make sure that we got the camera positioned as accurately as possible for each shot. I think we did that… or at least improved on previous efforts.

Figuring out how to get the right amount of light from the right angles and make it look natural is an art, and I suspect one that will take a while to learn. Things that look good to the eye, look way different on screen. Our brains ‘fix’ these problems in real life and we don’t notice, but the camera is stupid, so you have to tell it what to do. This requires learning to over-ride what your brain sees to understand what the camera is really seeing, then figuring out how to compensate for that from shot to shot. There’s nothing like getting on the set and doing it. As we’re all finding, the big learning experiences come from trying to figure things out yourself, without an expert around to guide you and instantly answer all of your questions. (Question of the evening: ‘Should we move that key light, or not?’) Fall down, get up, try again. We’ll see what happened in the edit room!