Description: Essays on Cinematography
Outside looking in, I stood on the step-side, clutched the roof rack with one hand and pointed the camera into the open passenger side window with the other, keeping my back to the gauntlet of young trees and branches trying to swat me off the side of the Range Rover, Marco Pierre White content to careen through the overgrown estate road at a fairly good clip. I had dived into the thorns behind him earlier, getting all cut up as we tracked a deer through the thickets and I guess that impressed him. Bourda
I was in bed, years later, outdoors on a second floor porch in Haiti. A hurricane was on the way and the occasional gunshot snapped into the neighborhood. I’d had a few rum punches, to no effect, and was laying in a pool of sweat beneath my mosquito net. Unknown to anyone, for the first and only time I’d accidentally erased some hard won footage in a moment of haste. I’d spent years in Bourdain’s world of no retakes and no second chances and knew gone was gone. I didn’t sleep. I thought about not miss
The camera person’s primary concern is capture: how to not miss it . This is the root decision of all lighting, blocking, and camera choices. 1» People agonize over camera choice. I’m often asked, what should we shoot with? I say, it’s complicated. Maybe the question should be, how will I not miss what I’m setting out to get? Every level of production is about capturing moments. Moments with someone, or something, some place, some atmosphere. Beautiful or not beautiful, fact or fiction, laboriously