Welcome Filmmakers and Cinematographers
Hi and welcome to this site, page, blog, YouTube channel. I’m here to offer tips and suggestions for filmmakers and cinematographers based on my own experiences and situations. On this site I plan to:
talk with other filmmakers in round-table settings
introduce tips and suggestions for getting better at filmmaking
talk about how we move up and through the ranks of filmmakers in a crowded field
discuss how to manage our expectations, challenges, victories, and ups-and-downs
offer workshops
About Me
When I was a kid, I had a toy from Fisher-Price that you could put little slides in and blast a picture up on the wall. For me, that was the first kind of movies and I would be up late at night looking at those while my family was asleep. I'd be watching little picture movies on my wall.
When I was 16, I took a train from upstate New York to San Diego and back to visit my sister and my uncle, who was a photographer for Cornell and a wedding photographer, gifted me with a camera, a film camera, and I just love taking pictures with that thing. And I loved the magic of getting that envelope back from at the time. The drugstores would do all the would do all the developing and seeing the pictures and reliving and just seeing things caught in time on film.
Later on I had a girlfriend that had a video camera and I went out and I filmed freight trains for for fun because I love freight trains. I always have. Don't know why I can't explain it. I filmed them and made DVDs with covers and all this other cool stuff and sold them to other people that like trains. And that was kind of a side hobby business.
But then I looked back at them later on and I couldn't believe how bad those videos were. Honestly, it took me a long time to come to terms with how they were so bad and how I sold them to people and people liked them.
When my wife and I got married and when I saw our wedding video, I said to her, “you know, I'm pretty sure I can do better than this.” And she said, “You should do it.” So making a very long story short, I had a friend whose friend was getting married and I shot their wedding for $300.
My First (real) Cinema Business
I turned that into a pretty profitable business shooting weddings almost every weekend throughout five years. And I learned a ton from that. And eventually I outgrew it. And I said to my wife, “you know, I think I can do more than this. I need to move on from weddings”. She was very supportive and I started my own production company and worked with clients like Mercedes, Prudential, Unilever, the U.S. government, financial institutions, educational institutions like City University of New York.
You know, I didn't go to film school. I'm going to put that out there right now. But I still think that the way I came up, the way I look at things, can really help other people understand the filmmaking business, the filmmaking process, and really importantly, how to do that with other people, something that I think iss not spoken about quite enough.
So, my channel will be less about how to do things, how to light scenes, how to run a camera, etc. I'm probably not going to be doing equipment tests either. I think there’s a ton of that material already happening. This is more of a personal diary of my time as a cinematographer, how things work in the business, and how I've navigated through the system of the filmmaking world.
So I hope you'll join me. Come on back. There will be more content other than just this video very soon. So mark me off, bookmark me like me, subscribe whatever you want to do, and I hope you get some good stuff.
Out.
