Frame & Reference Podcast - 10: “Users” DP Bennett Cerf

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

On this weeks episode of the Frame & Reference Podcast Kenny talks with "Users" cinematographer Bennett Cerf. “Users” is a documentary that explores how humanity expresses itself with technology and the intended and unintended consequences of our tech dominated world. Outside of his doc work, Bennett has also worked on a number of big time films including as a AC on “Iron Man 2” and “X2: X-Men United.” Enjoy the episode! Liking the podcast? Leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast app! Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coasts leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs. Check out Filmtools.com for more. ProVideo Coalition is a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post. Check out ProVideoCoalition.com for the latest news coming out of the industry.

Hello, and welcome to this, another episode of Frame and Reference. I'm your host, Kenny McMillan, and today we're talking to Bennett-Surf, the DP of the film users, as well as a few others. This, obviously. I say that because this episode is not focused on the film at all. I was actually not able to get a screener for it. So we talk about nearly everything else. And by that, I mean four hours worth. We spoke for three hours and 42 minutes.

So this episode is going to be cut down quite substantially. But it's a lot of fun if you are a gearhead, if you're a nerd, if you are an owner-operator, if you edit your own stuff. We go through all of it. It's a very technical episode. We were, I mean, obviously it's going to be cut down, but we were thinking for all the off-topic stuff we went through, you know, maybe starting a side episode called Frame and Reference Martini shot, where we just put all the off-topic stuff.

But at the same time, this might just have to be a two-parter. We'll see. I'm about to go edit it now. And actually, if you're watching, my light just went away. It was really pretty there for like 30 seconds. Anyway, here's my episode with Bennett Surf. I hope you enjoy it. Yeah, we'll just roll into this intro.

Yeah, thanks. We actually shot users at 24 frames instead of 2398, because I think we just can all admit that we've been doing 2398 and 2997 for, really no reason for a long time. I mean, technically I am at 24 right now. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. I have this weird theory that we can tell.

Like humans can tell the difference? Between 2398 and 24. I don't know why. It's like the motion cadence thing, which I know is like it's more global shutter versus rolling shutter, but like in my head, that 0.02 matters for some reason. Well, if you're looking at a Sony camera,

it probably does make a difference. Sony's are definitely, I notice weird motion artifacting with all Sony cameras. It's not perfect. In Venice maybe is okay, but. You have an FS7? I do, yeah.

I think it's been a great moneymaker, but now... Especially for Doc. Yeah. And I'm not necessarily like a Doc filmmaker, but I've definitely had to make money doing doing stuff that it includes live events

because I just can make more money doing it for companies that that really do like they do higher quality stuff and the FS7 can pull it off depending on what kind of dynamic range your scene is. Right.

But man, I'm happy that these newer cameras have arrived. Like for instance, I even, this is what I should have used for this one. Somebody just sent me the commoto for a job that's coming up, which seems cool because I've got a commoto, but on the other hand, it's like, oh, there's no AC working on this right up front, so I have to do it.

Yeah, how do you feel about the commoto? I was trying to hit up film tools to, because film tools and Pro Video Coalition are under the same parent company, so it's kind of a right you're dealing with the same people and i was like hey you know part of my job at pro video is reviewing gear and uh i was like send me that comodo and they're like dude we can't even get a hold of one yeah it i don't they said that they did something special to get the company that i'm working for was able to get a storm trooper one i think that's what the white one is supposed to be yeah and those were like pre-orders so they already they i think they knew how many

they were going to make right yeah it's sounds like somebody maybe didn't like it and was ready to move on because it has a number of hours on it already, but maybe it was, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a pump and dump thing where people bought a bunch of them in pre-order and then sold half of them. I had a friend who did that with the, um, their phone, the hydrogen. Oh, geez. Kind of a, I mean, were you able to check that out? I don't know.

What's that? Were you able to get a look at that? Yeah, I saw it momentarily, and I was. Well, okay. I mean, it's just not, it seemed like their eyes were on the wrong thing. And they may have overestimated the wider appeal of a phone that isn't so niche. Yeah, I mean, especially the, like, there was a photo that they showed. me. I think they took a photo of me and my friends like outside a bar. A guy at the bar had

had it. And the photo with that cool depth 3D thing, that looked cool. And then we were watching video and I was like, this doesn't seem to translate for me. Yeah, yeah. I think it's a big promise. I feel like we're always watching camera companies try to achieve things that they can only do in certain circumstances, but not all circumstances. I think that's what everybody equates to secret sauce. Right. You know, it's like raw doesn't mean raw necessarily in any way, shape, or form. And I think that all the buzz terms like dual ISO are a little bit misleading.

and I think that ultimately what people are trying to sell you on is something that's going to break down because of their special sauce. It doesn't quite work in every situation. And man, you really just have to know your camera or else you're going to walk right into something and then directors and producers are looking at you going like, why doesn't it do this thing? And it's like, gee, you know, it was all sold on this particular premise.

But there's like, I feel like ARI is one of the few companies that makes their, their secret sauce relatively public. You can actually look at it, you know, easily like a nuke or whatever and take apart the image and see what it's really doing. Ridd, on the other hand, has gotten a little bit more transparent about it, but I don't think that they want anyone to know exactly what they're doing. no i mean they're the reason that that raw technology is so difficult to implement because they keep suing everyone who tries to do a version because what was their their patent basically says like any form of raw recording is red code right which is pretty insane i mean even apple lost a lawsuit with them to try to actually use their technology um but i mean with the comoda they've actually moved on.

They're not doing raw. It does prores, but it also does it's a different red raw now. Oh. Which is way more file size heavy. It's huge compared to what they were doing before.

So now it's actually easier for your computer to handle it. Hmm. So you're not having to get that $5,000 red rocket from back in the day. Yeah, exactly, because they've moved on, instead of wavelet, they're using discrete cosine, which is essentially getting closer to pro-res at that point. Do you find that shooting red you have to use, you primarily have to shoot red code or are you okay with their compressed? Because like, you know, log C pro-res is sick, you know, the XFA on these is dope.

the thing is i i haven't worked with a red camera i don't think they've made one yet that can record beyond 422 hq and that's that's roughly equivalent of like what my fs7 can do as far as the codec is concerned not camera wise uh or sensor wise so i find i find that i can't really use the prores for anything other than um proxies to give to post and we actually we shot on the Gemini on that movie users that was in Sundance and we found a slight a bug in the system just a logical bug which is that the proxy is one long file

but all the red files are broken up by four gigabyte right because they're just using standard SSDs in there aren't they in their fancy little box. Right. And that requires, because it's fat 32. And so it needs to break it up into four gigs, four gigs.

Yeah. In essence, yeah, that's the, that's the file size max. And so, yeah, like the,

even the UDP formatting is the same problem. So it's like, you couldn't use those to edit with. Right. Unfortunately. Which is funny because DJI has the opposite problem. if you run pro-res, the pro-res files break up when you run XQ, 444-XQ on it, on the Inspire 2.

I remember, I used to shoot a lot of commercials for DJI, and every time they would make a new format for their drones, I would try to use it because I was like, oh, this is so much better quality. and then the post team would be like, I'm pretty sure we're going to murder you if you come into the studio. It's like, guys, but like, you just made this. So anyway,

but it's like always, it's always a problem. And I think the bigger, like underlying problem is actually, what are we going to do in like 150 years? You know, like are we making content that even matters for 150 years from now?

Right. And on top of it, will any of these codecs survive? There's different flavors of every one. Like, you would have to write such an enormous protocol to try to open all the formats that we've got at this point. So, like, raw formats are going to probably be the easiest. But H.265 and certain flavors of H.264, like, it remains to be seen, you know. well there's certainly um you know like vlc and and uh are you on are you a pc or a mac guy uh i'm definitely a mac guy but i have dabbled sure i've just noticed in with pc it's a little bit

easier to just like shove a ton of codex in there and and uh there's a program called media player classic and then obviously vlc which kind of can just open anything right but there it does bring up that question of like like i just was going through i moved into a new office and I finally have an office and I found an old drive that was Firewire Oh yeah I don't have any firewire cards

Like I'm good luck getting anything off that You know right It's probably got a bunch of DV on it Which I if I found the tapes I got to go find my Excel 2 And use that as a deck And like It does bring up a good quite like

I'm a big legacy media guy And judging by the beard You can probably tell I own records And uh But, you know, like, Blu-Rays. Like, people are already talking about the death of Blu-ray. And I'm like, what are you talking about? That's the best format we've had.

Right. But is it going to go the way of, like, the Star Wars Laserdiscs, you know, where no one can get a hold of those. And that's, like, the holy grail of that trilogy. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, that was definitely the highest quality thing for a very long time. It was like the SR-71 Blackbird of the video world. Have you read Sledger? Oh, buddy, if you're into anything military at all, but especially the Blackbird,

one of the pilots wrote a book called Sled Driver. It's about that thick, but you can kind of find a PDF if you sail the high seas, is it what were. Sure. You mentioned two thoughts. One, you had mentioned the difference between commercial work and something else, and that had reminded me similarly talking about. the technology. What is it about the Alexa? Because I noticed I was looking at your website. You shot a lot of Alexa on what the like R's and the super speeds. So A, what do you like about those like ours? But B, the difference between red and Alexa, what is it about the Alexa that looks the way it does? Because on your on Haunted Swordsman, I've noticed a lot of like that really beautiful yellow and blue. And I feel like you can always get that with Alexa. Is that more coloring? um that's actually a good question um well so to answer the first question the lyca rs or something

that i was talking about yeah well it's good i mean you're it's only two i have good enough memory for two at least um the lyca ours are actually something i just invested in myself um actually bought them from a guy named uh stephen gelb who owns lensworks uh before he had really gotten himself up and running he was selling like our sets and so i started with a core set that he sold me and i was super excited and jazzed about it because i really liked the look of them because i think they're if you can get a relatively matched set that's a little bit older they have a sort of patina to them but also um the flares are a little bit softer but have this interesting little corona thing that happens with them

depending on the focal length they're just beautiful lenses and uh they've always been my standby when there's not enough money to get nicer lenses sure it was a significant it's like maybe eight or nine thousand dollars to get into it but uh but there were so many focal lengths versus say like the the contacts lenses um which are a little bit they're definitely a really nice look but there just aren't that many vocal lengths right so i just bought i bought the like ours as a way to ensure that i wouldn't have to i wouldn't have to get rid of a camera in order to to do the the job you know if i needed to have like a lens or whatever like i wouldn't have to spend all this money rental wise on getting the right

lens and then have to get a camera that I didn't like for instance. So that's why the like of ours have shown up so much and it's it's always been good luck for me when directors see those that are actually very visually attuned and into the gear when they see the like of ours and they go oh man I love the like of ours. I don't know maybe it's a blessing and a curse to actually mention it on my website for some people who are gearheads it's like a thing that becomes a point of interest and it could be a good thing or a bad thing but at the same time it sort of ties me to like yeah like maybe you could tell I didn't have the money so I went with that particular lens or whatever you know it may open people

to judgment of it but ultimately it's like well I think it's interesting to have it there to note that like yeah if this particular look for anyone who's trying to figure out what look I was doing then yeah maybe it's helpful and I am definitely a huge advocate of education and I feel like that's my job ultimately like I mean sure we're the execution of what we're doing is this film but that ultimately if somebody doesn't know something maybe I can help and or if they want to know something I went to AFI um and one of the main tenets of being at AFI is that that you really do in your communication with directors and producers and everyone is help educate.

That's the whole point. I think I got a real healthy dose of that when we started our drone company because there's a lot of rules to navigate and it can be frustrating if you don't know them. So a calm explanation of how it all interweaves is really helpful for production. So anyway, I'm a huge advocate of this. of being able to teach and hopefully i don't i don't uh overstay my welcome in that way usually um but in answering your other question uh why why a an alexa might have a different look than a red i have a theory because i don't think that there is a lot of information on what exactly is

happening inside the red this one is tough because I have been contacted by Red recently, and they're very excited that we shot users on the Red Gemini. Right. And I feel like it's the first of their cameras that I've worked with that had a pretty high quality color reproduction on it. I feel like the monster on the helium were not quite doing the job. and my theory behind all that, you know, you if you exclude, for instance,

noise and noise patterns and all of that that are associated with those cameras, my feeling is that the effort to create smaller and smaller photosites to create a higher and higher resolution image, you end up with two physical problems

one of them is that if your photo site can't be large enough there's more noise than there is signal when you get into the dark because it's the number of photons that hits the photo site that decides how much signal

there is so the smaller your photo site the less light you can accept and actually affect the diode by which it changes the voltage so if you're going for 8k and you have to make your your photocyte too small which is partly why I think they had to compromise and actually enlarge the sensor size in order

to pull this off you're just going to end up with more noise I think also there was a tradition in camera making probably 10 years ago where your image was super sampled from the sensor and that was pretty much given up, I think, by red. I think the quest to say 4K, 5K, 6K, K, 7K, K, 8K, K. was essentially achieved by using some fuzzy math in order to recreate the data that isn't actually there. Right.

Whereas, you know, for instance, there's this amazing short film shot by this guy who goes by the name McGregor, the backbone of the Sahara. This is an amazing short film that we actually use as a reference, or at least I tried to use as a reference for users. he shot that on the f35 and that was like one of the it's i mean it's beautiful it's an hd camera

but it's using a 4k sensor super sampled down and what happens when you super sample is you're actually getting a larger amount because of the bear pattern a larger amount of color information so i think that essentially with cameras that are designed to utilize the super sample, more efficiently, you get more nuanced color. And when you actually go into the coloring room, you can create natural changes in color because you have more color resolution. And all of these things are essentially happening inside of a container.

So you could have a 16-bit file, but if the source of it is not really 16-bit worthy, then you're not really doing much, but giving somebody a lot of replicated or synthesized data. Right. I don't know if that's too techy, but I would say that this in itself is why I have a huge respect for Airy because I feel like they couldn't figure out how to do anything more than what they do,

which is to super sample. uh and to to try to give the best color science that they can um and i i feel like it slows their whole innovation process down quite a bit and so they don't they don't output them any cameras um it's starting to change but it's they definitely do it very slowly and i for one as a cinematographer really appreciate that um and watching red release the gemini um I was surprised by their pricing structure because ultimately, sure, you can't quantify that 5K is somehow better than the 8K monstero,

but ultimately the image that they produce on that one, I think is actually quite significantly better and has less noise. So that was exactly why we chose it for our documentary. Yeah, I was really excited when the Gemini came out. I was a big dragon fan. I'm with you. I didn't like the cameras in the middle, but I thought the dragon looked really cool.

And my friend who uses Red all the time, he's still down with the Epic, the original MX sensor. He thinks it's their best. Hmm. Although... Go ahead. Go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say, there is the... I don't know if this is hearsay or what. There's that one guy who had like a whole vendetta against Red and made like a little YouTube series of like five hour-long videos. Oh, wow. His theory.

Well, because he made... made off-brand red mags and then got sued because they're just regular SSDs with like a little adapter right he was like forget this i'm going to make my own so then they sued him so then he went on the warpath and uh his theory is that it's been the same sensor this whole time and it's just been the firmware that they've been adjusting in the processing right that wouldn't surprise me to be honest because i i think that the hardware itself is really hard to make the sensors are hard to make and only a few companies can really pull off um such a specialized thing i mean Sony really runs the market if you look at one sensor yeah pretty much i mean

i think even most panasonics are Sony sensors and i might be wrong on that but i know for instance like DJI all of theirs are most cell phones right Right. That's true. The interesting thing that I learned, and this is totally aside, is that Sony does the same kind of thing that any of those consumer brand companies do to their customers. So, for instance, DJI has the option, for instance, when you buy the Inspire 2, you can, can get a version that can do um it can output raw it can output pro res but you have to pay for that right it's already built into the system's hardware but you have to unlock it just like you would uh raw or anamorphic settings on on the Alexa mini for instance so it's already there

but it's just access that you're buying Sony does that with their sensors too when they sell them to companies that create products around their sensors. So, for instance, DJI has to buy the rights. They can have, like, as much access to that sensor as they want. But they have to pay more per license, you know, that they do. So I always think that's kind of fascinating that it's not a grift, but it's like that pricing structure concept is all the way to business to business end of it, where everybody's just, like, doing it to each other, you know?

Yeah, I suppose, like, to a certain degree, you got to, I mean, if they're making fucking everybody's sensors, like, yeah, you probably need a lot of extra cash to make it. And especially the different sizes, you know, have you, have you been shooting a full frame at all now that all these, like, you know, the LF and the 500 here and the FX9 and all that are out in the Venice? Well, you know, actually, um, that actually tips me off to, to a point about the the doc users because we were we were actually planning to shoot on large frame because in a way we were doing an homage to baraka or kwanaskatsi uh in the sense that they were sort of formal fine art movies as much as they were a music video that's a travel log you know like it's obviously way more than that but it ultimately they're fine art pieces you know who's his name Ron Ron Fricky is a large format cinematographer that's what he's known for

like IMAX and 65 millimeter and things like that and so looking towards that we were like well what camera can can we work with and we had a company in Mexico city named Simplemente that Natalia, the director, had worked with on previous projects, and I had worked with them a little bit through Natalia. They offered us a whole bevy of cameras to just keep for the two years, or we didn't know how long it was going to be, but they were just going to give us cameras for as long as we needed it to shoot the dock, which is, that's huge privilege, especially for these level of cameras, because she, um, Monica at Simplemante was offering us a full-size LF, a monstro, a helium, and a Gemini.

And in the end, I thought, well, the way I've built my career, somehow I'm going to go on to a gimbal or I'm going to rig something. and that LF being 28 volt and being like almost 18 pounds just for the body and maybe sometimes not even having an AC I don't think that's going to be the way we want to go so we went towards smaller and I was like well then the monstros the next option and I started comparing the monstro with the helium and the Gemini and I could see the noise was very different between all of them and I realized that I'd rather

I'd rather something less noisy so the Gemini sort of fell right into that spot and I thought well they still want this big frame feel so I may have to do the thing that a lot of DPs do which is just go wide open on a really nice lens

and the master primes were like the first choice and I showed a few different options to Natalia I think we went through maybe eight or 10 options of lenses that would that would be good and viable, but I really wanted her to go for the master primes because I'd shot with them once and I thought, oh my God, it's like,

would I ever be so lucky as to use these again? It just started, there's something about them that is magical. And she chose the master primes. And I was like, well, okay, hopefully we can get everything we want with this set of lenses but every time we would rent anything because we didn't buy them we would rent only three lenses every shoot and that was it we would always have like a 35 is our mainstay and then we started with a 75 and an 18 and then eventually it would just shift around according to the to the shoot but pretty much 35 and then eventually the 100 macro was like everything for that film well because the large format Going back to the idea of like how people are just jamming photo sites on just, you know,

Super 35 sensors, I did a comparison of this, the C500 mark two and the C300 mark three for a review on pro video. And while the C300 had the DGO sort of Alexa-like processing, everyone was like, oh, it's better in low light. And I was like, no, it has a lower noise floor. But actually, when you crank up the ISO, the noise is way worse than the C-500 because the bigger sensor, a smaller noise pattern, you can correct it out way easier. Yeah, yeah. So I was just kind of wondering if you would experience that kind of thing.

I haven't used any. I've seen, oh, I guess I did shoot with the Venice a couple times. And the Venice is nice, actually. I like it a lot. I don't like it. It's a whole, it's, I think large frame is kind of a different way of thinking. I just feel like the, it's just. just focal length that I have to get used to.

But that ultimately, I don't usually see a lot of the difference unless I'm looking at a larger screen. Yeah. Or you're in like the grade. It's really like the only. It's just for me, like I've talked about this before. It's not, it doesn't change. Like you said, it changes the way you choose lenses, but it doesn't, it's just like higher detail if it's done right.

Other than that, it's no. No one's going to notice. It's not like your image then suddenly becomes more cinematic, which I hate that term. I'm throwing it in big old air quotes. I think that term came from the 5D. When the 5D came out and we were all shooting on, you know, half inch chips or micro four thirds like that AF100 that came out,

I had one of those. We suddenly had control of our depth of field without those wild adapters. Remember like the red rock and the lettuce and all that? Oh, yeah. so I think that term that like it's tell me if you found this the beginning of the internet sort of when it became let's say 2008 2008 seems to be the time in which all knowledge stopped like everyone's basis for cinematography and many many other things but we'll just keep it on topic seems to come from from there to now and if you pick up one issue of ASC, you've already learned 70% more than everyone else seems to be repeating. You know, it's this like someone finds one thing and then repeats it over and over,

then that becomes the truth. Right. I'm sure my, my, uh, my dad would love to hear you say that. I'll let you look him up to, to get a sense of, uh, context to that. But I, I do agree. I think, I think that, uh, because there's a lot of, incentive to echo everyone else in order to have um content. I think that yeah, that's that you're probably right that everything becomes an echo chamber when you can disperse it so heavily for

your own benefit. Um, but I agree. I mean, is AC magazine is like enough to give you so much information right off the bat and i think it's funny because i i think that uh the process by which we understand our exposure has changed so dramatically that's going to be my next question so write it out uh i feel like in learning how to shoot film like when i was uh interviewed to go to AFI, I was told in the interview that, or they, actually, it was a bit of a leading question. They asked me, do I think that learning film is important at film school? And I said, I think it is important for discipline, but I recognize that by the time I get out of film school, which would have been around 2014, that we probably won't be generally on film anymore

and that the digital process is equally as important as far as applicably what I'm going to be working in. They were very unhappy to hear that, of course. I still got in, thankfully, but I know that that was a rough spot in my interview. I feel like growing up in the film era, because I started as a loader in like 2000, on a movie with

Bramor Morgenthau in the Camp Pendleton Marine Base. It was such a crazy movie. Boris Whitaker and Patrick Swayze in this movie. It was so, it was such a weird, but it was mostly in Vietnamese.

So, yeah, it was a pretty amazing experience, I can tell you. But I've been through the film universe, at least from that era on, and I watched, change over to HD, and it was really confusing for a lot of people. I grew up with video, and so walking into the film universe seemed like,

oh, that's what professional is in video will never be a thing, even though I know it so well. I mean, I was using, you know, Premiere 1.0 to try to sync my audio because I couldn't get a big enough video card to work, you know, when I was in high school or whatever. So I would just use it for audio, like pre-pro tools or something. I was using Sony Vegas for the same thing. Really? Oh, yeah, I remember that. I never used Vegas because I didn't know where, like how to get it, essentially.

You could find it. You know, that's pretty much why a lot of kids, even today, you know, it's just one of those ones that's a little easy to install, let's say. Right, right, right. But it started off as an audio editor. So I was doing mashups, you know, like back in the day when mashups were really cool. I was doing those all in Vegas. Right. I mean, I think this is all the more reason to say that the Internet initially was going to be so democratizing.

Yeah. And then it led to sameness. Yeah. Oddly enough, it seems like usually the powers that be find a way to throttle the uniqueness. Yeah. Or at least make them unmarketable. Right. and that is usually the problem right is that in capitalism we can't just fund people on coming up

with wacky ideas it's like it somehow has to pay off that was a conversation i was having with another dp on an earlier episode which was uh the 70s when they decided like you know what let's just give directors some cash and be like go go right like ended up being the best time in film followed closely by the latter half of the 90s when technology made it everything more accessible. And they were just like, yeah, you with your wacky ideas, we don't even get it. Go. Right.

And now everything's very controlled. Like, yeah, there seems to be a bit of a wow and flutter to it, right? Like, it's, there's a, I think for a very long time when distribution channels became pretty narrow and there was a lot of conglomeration of media companies. I think that exact thing was happening. And I think as we've gone to streaming, it's broken up a bit of that orthodoxy in what you can make because more people are making those decisions.

It seems like Netflix and Hulu and Disney, they're all opening things up again and taking a few more risks. But it seems that ultimately, if we follow the same pattern that seems to always happen, That will all conglomerate one more time, and we'll go into a much more rigid, like, understanding of how to just make the money, and that might be the more important thing. But as far as film and digital is concerned, I feel like it's much, even though it is complicated in the digital universe compared to understanding just density.

and what not with a light meter. I think that it really allows people to learn so fast and create, because a lot of the math and science is operating in the machine itself. I think that because of the instant feedback, you're learning a pre-cut way of how the camera works so fast. because it's a lot of it, just like a film stock, for instance, a lot of the look of your camera is ultimately deciding certain things.

And so learning the deep innards of your camera is hard to do, so you kind of end up just doing a lot of the same. I think that when true visual innovation occurs, it's like gold and people go nuts over it. there was an interesting podcast conversation that I heard with and I may be butchering his name I feel really bad if I do

because he's I love his work Khalid Motaseb couldn't tell you he's a commercial cinematographer he was talking on a podcast about the the person the interviewer was asking him like

so you you pretty much did this whole slash eye light thing you know before anybody and now everybody's doing it and he like right away was like well i wasn't the first one to do that particular thing but the point that she was even making about it is like yeah this idea that you that an image uh a way to communicate through an image in a particular way becomes uh that innovation I probably should put it a different way. When somebody discovers a way to communicate a certain feeling or tone by doing something in your photograph with it,

whether it be lighting or something with the iris or a combination of all of the things together, somebody innovates that once and a million people use it as a reference. Right. and then that you see nothing but proliferation of that it and you watch these trends as they happen they play out like clockwork now because of the proliferation and it really does bring down the uniqueness and increases like you said the sameness um I'm co-opting what you are saying but ultimately but ultimately I do feel like there's a there is a sameness that's

created. And I think like any good writing, good photography usually hurts just a little bit. If you can, if you really want to change and do something new, it's going to be a really awkward and uncomfortable creative situation to be in because you don't quite know. I find that as I've become more experience as a DP, it's the only thing that has kept me from nervous breakdowns is having prior experience that allows me to say, if all else fills, I know how I can, I know where I got to put a light. I know where I have to put the camera and what kind of lens in order to get the general vibe of what I'm doing, the baseline. Right. And I think that that's easily relied upon. And because it's an industry, and this. And there's,

This isn't just art, there's a tendency for most of us to fall back on that when we have to make money because we need some guarantees just like we need some money. And I think that the most important thing that I've learned from the last few years is that it's okay to have uncomfortable situations if you're feeling a conviction that you can get something that that, is so specific to your photographic situation that truly communicates what you need to communicate and maybe hasn't been communicated or hasn't been put in this context or whatever. You know, you may you may find yourself becoming Chivo for like a minute where you're like, oh, I'm doing this thing that redefines how I do things. And suddenly other people see it and it click so well for them that they they they want that for themselves yeah it's hard to find a way to express yourself without knowing the various ways that one can express themselves right like

if you can you know how to hum but if you don't know how to pick up a guitar you don't know the notes you'll struggle to get what you want out and that friction um i think can stop a lot of people from amazing things, whether it be music or visually or whatever, any amount. I mean, fuck, man, I have to, like, design my office in a certain way so that, like, pencils are really close because, like, I won't take notes. If I, if I have to stand up, you know, like, anything, not being able to just grab something, what Adam Savage calls first order retrievability. If I don't have that, I don't do it, you know? It's over. Right. yeah i i'm a similar way i'm i'm i think even sometimes on set i'm usually more inspired in the

moment than i am in the planning but i can plan the hell out of things because i i do 3d sometimes i pretty light in 3d all sorts of things in order to get there you know um anyway sorry to to that note about um a baseline what uh for the education um what kind of lighting are you drawn to on like a baseline like how do you and secondarily like how would you expose how do you expose digital as opposed to film and like what things are you watching out for but like especially with your lighting how have you approached it um for like someone who's trying to just do a bread and butter job and make it look good and get out of there it's not you know we're not changing the world we're selling soap you know right uh i i think what has

occurred to me in the past few years is that three point lighting is literally not a thing and that when I was in film school originally that was a concept at least that was taught

and I don't think we ever quite moved past that. Lighting is tough to teach because it's really about intangible things, like feelings and tone, and it's open to creativity. So I think it's hard for a lot of people to innovate. For me, I guess when I look at my baseline, I think of things that have always added a certain gloss or a certain, have added to a certain level of giving me the full range of things in contrast and color. So there's always this thing in the back of my head where I wonder, can I top light? Can I top fill?

Because if I can, someone will be happy with that. I know for sure. if I do if I'm going to add any sort of fill or wrap onto someone I'm going to make sure that it's the softest thing in the room

and sometimes doesn't even have a light that it could just be as simple as bringing a beadboard in because ultimately people's faces are they just need much less arshiness to them in order to actually feel less lit and I think that my baseline is always to try to figure out how to get much more natural so that you don't really think about it as much and let the colors maybe do the work ultimately like production design or like color contrast with a white balance? I would say color contrast of sources that are moving in a room.

I think that oftentimes it's more important to me to know that perhaps a face is a little bit warmer or more face tone and whatever is hitting them from behind is a little bit cooler. For instance, you've got a slightly warmer light on your face right now and the sun. I was going to say the sun moved behind a building or something. So now I'm looking very lit. This is not natural at all. I mean, I think at the same time, though, the nice thing about it is at least the quality of the light that's hitting you from back there is like perfect. That's like that's the kind of thing that's understated and feels like when you're looking

at somebody in a conversation, it feels right. And in this case, it is natural. So, of course, it's perfect. Um, but I, yeah, I would say like, uh, my friend, uh, Ed Wu and I used to joke all the time in film school that, uh, when in doubt, if you can't figure out what to do, you can just go ahead and silhouette it. They're going to be probably just fine. It's moody enough. It'll give you what you need. Um, but that's not necessarily. I can't really think of many times when I've done that. so I would say that's my last that's like when I'm at you know

DefCon 1 and things are bad and it's like all right I've at least got something like that in my back pocket yeah it's funny bring up top lighting because I that I wonder I wonder where that top light has existed since forever but it does seem I'm wondering if it's like the light mat or what technology made it maybe Keynos because we're doing it a lot like like top light is fill if we if we had to use a three point lighting you know as a thing and that just seems to be the thing and I love it I've when I sort of realized I could I that was the thing that I liked I was like oh I'm putting that on everything right right I think that there's two facts to it that I think people are comfortable with

with that's just psychologically comfortable with one of them you can basically say sure like the original lighting like how we walk around throughout the day there is always a top fill the sun could be wherever but we always have some kind of top fill and i think that we're our eyes are designed to feel comfortable in that um because that is the most natural state i mean it's It's why every camera manufacturer wants to shoot tests for their camera during, like, sunlight, you know, the end of the day when the sun is just low enough to give proper sculpting on somebody, but you also have this nice top fill that's always happening. And I think the other fact is before we had lights that were powerful enough, that was how people lit it anyway. if you were inside, you know, studios used to just open up the top. And that was how people lit it originally.

And that in itself just makes the most sense. It's the most natural way that we see the pattern of the human face. And I think, you know, it has its obvious advantages. You know, it's like Gordon Willis figured it out, obviously, pretty quickly. And I think the way we, the way you can control light in a room to allow the ambience to still exist while not necessarily having to have lights coming from every perfect direction to, you know, squeeze people in, pretty much set with a top fill. Yeah. And that, I think, is the way, the way to think more often anyway when lighting is that if the space is the way you want it, it's not. not necessarily about the little moment when the person walks into the right spot.

That's more of the accent than anything else. But the space itself being lit the way you want it to fit the tone is exactly how you communicate in lighting, I think. Yeah. Oh, I think I interrupted you before I let you get to the point about exposing film versus digital because I still shoot film photography and I learned on 16 mil, but at the time I was shooting 16, I didn't have enough institutional knowledge. I hadn't worked long enough to really get it.

I was shooting it like I was shooting mini-d-V or like VHS, you know. Because, yeah, digital seems like you don't, A, you don't need as much light. It seems way more sensitive. Is it just a matter of bringing in a lot more nag or like, how do you, how do you conceptualize that or like even expose for a sensor, you know? Right. I think in general, if I haven't done already some kind of, I guess, what do we call those now? They're not density tests because that was film.

What do you call it now? I guess a dynamic range test. Yeah. Yeah. I think now if I haven't done a dynamic range test on a camera, I generally know if the camera is, going to be able to record a latitude that's over like 12 stops. And ultimately, film is kind of in that zone of 12 stops, but reacts more powerfully when overexposed.

Whereas the digital side of it can work generally a little bit better when it's under-exposed because ultimately you're not dealing with a negative in the process. that'd be my simplest explanation but i i don't know if that's so basic that everybody already knows that right well and i think that it'd be important for certain people listening like under exposed meaning not as hot as you would shoot film not underlit right right like your contract your ratios are probably more in a three to one kind of thing instead of like an eight to one or right well and i guess it depends on what kind of ratios you're talking that always confused me like i always thought of it was it was in stops and then people were like no it's

it's some other math it's like i don't want to learn math tell us tell me in stops right right yeah i mean there's voltage and there's there's code values and all that stuff yeah yeah i you know one interesting thing that did happen to me in coloring for users this was a very different experience for me. I shot a series last summer called Kinderfanger for Crypt TV. That trailer looked cool. Oh, thanks. It was definitely, it was super exciting for me to do this for two reasons. One, the director is a good friend of mine and a good DP. And so being able to work with somebody so visual was such a kick in the pants. I was so happy to just be able to wrap back and forth with him and oftentimes because he had to kind of let me do my own thing uh because he had to

obviously work with the actors too um it gave me a chance to try to impress him as much as i could and that became you know underneath it all like that was the gratification i was going for it was like this person who appreciates visuals too like i can't wait to make something that maybe just piques their interest even a little bit because I know he's seen so much. The other thing that was really powerful about working on that project was that main actress is deaf and I am the child of deaf parents and so this this was like catharsis for me to make a movie even if it was just a horror movie you know, or a horror series

that, you know, probably a good number of people saw, but it's just the catharsis of being able to tell a story of a deaf person. Yeah. I think that was super powerful. I mean, I probably

wouldn't admit this in public, and I don't know why I'm admitting it now, but I can tell you on our rap morning because we had worked all night. I don't know if it was the sleep or, you know, the lack of sleep or the stress that was finally getting relieved, but I had a big long conversation with Angel, the actress, and I think I was like almost sobbing in front of my crew.

I was like, oh, this is embarrassing. Like, somehow I feel like she kind of gave me the freedom to have my feelings about my parents and growing up with them. So that was really, that was a big deal for me. But, what's that? That's awesome. It's funny actually because Koda is a movie that came out at at Sundance this year that was about child of deaf adults. And I've really, I've connected a bit with the director of that.

I kind of can't believe it. She's like, that movie swept, which I don't think normally happens at Sundance. She got the best director, best feature, best writer. She got like three or four awards. words something like that um i have to check it out yeah uh it's definitely worth checking out um but the post process on kinderfanger was covid-friendly so i was having to be in a separate room from the colorist which was not so bad that was a tolerable experience for sure they were very good colorists users we were doing something very different they were

were our color and post onlining facility was in Mexico City. And they calibrated a Flanders 35 inch that was prepared for 1,000 knit HDR because we were doing Dolby Vision first. They sent us their calibrated one that was calibrated next to theirs. and we shared and did a remote grade and resolve from Mexico City to San Francisco in this special room that Natalia and our producer Olivia built

they didn't even want me to get involved they were like, we just want to surprise you I was like, okay. Sick. So I showed up and I have to say I was very impressed. I thought, oh good. This is exactly like the whole room is properly blacked out and it was great.

the whole setup was really nice um but i can definitely tell you i can't wait to be done with covid because remote grading is the very worst experience and it's not so much the the team that did it it was just more to get proper results to do what we were doing it was a really it was a perfect storm of doing hdr for the first time so it's a Natalia didn't quite know what to expect. And I had a little bit of a naive understanding of how it was going to work as well. But you run through the process where you do HDR in BT-2184 color space. Right.

And you set everything to 1,000 nits. And then we do it all in ACEs. and the ACE's color transform. And once you're done with that, then Dolby gives you this piece of software that's part of your color tab and resolve that allows you to do colored trims where essentially their software analyzes your HDR

and then creates an SDR version and then you make manual adjustments according to what you think is right. with the manual adjustments, it almost feels like old like panels or paddles for like doing like, you know, printer lights or something, you know. It's pretty straightforward and simple. You can do primaries and secondaries and all that stuff. But it's not quite nuanced in any major way.

But the analysis in theory is supposed to take care of the lion's share of the work of getting it to go from HDR to SDR. the problem is at the moment there's no way to do that remote so we can't watch it live as it gets changed they would have to do it we'd have to trust them and then they would send us uh or they would put on their hard drive that we could access through an ftp server basically a full uh rendered version we'd have to download that for like eight hours or something right And so we'd have to make notes on the whole thing, hope that they, those tiny little, you know,

little too magenta here, a little too green there, could get translated through their eyes as well. And then they would put it on the hard drive. And then eight hours later, we could take a look at it. So it would take like a whole day to get feedback. Yeah, I'm currently coloring a documentary and then a short, not a short feature, what the hell am I talking about?

which is an indie feature but the indie feature was shot on a Z cam in 709 so I'm really just kind of balancing it like it was a burned in 709 look which was that an accident or on purpose I didn't ask they just said that's what it was and I wasn't about to be like well you should have done it you know

they're at picture lock so what am I going to do you know I mean it sounds like they're almost a color lock too yeah yeah I'm just going to make some things match you know they're kind of aiming for like a film look so doing a little bit of that like grain and color manipulation kind of squeezing everything and whatever but uh yeah for the documentary that I've been working on uh you know multiple cameras uh it was shot on to see 100 so not a ton of room to manipulate anything you know that 8 bit 420 um but the notes like I just have to send them like a 720 because who the hell wants to download a 20 gig 40 gig file for an hour and a half

So, yeah, it's like a 720 sort of screener, and then he just has to manually type notes into an email. Although there's stuff like Evercast, but then I don't know if their stuff is calibrated. We learned four rounds of notes in that he was watching on QuickTime and not VLC, which I thought I had suggested what I may not have. And so he was giving me all these notes like, it's not contrary, you know, it's too saturated or it's not contrasty enough. Now it's too contrasty. And I'm like, and then at one point I was like, are you watching on QuickTime? And he goes, yeah, why? And I was like, fuck.

This, oh my God, yes. This, that exact thing happened to us where they had sent the monitor to us from Mexico set to 100 nits instead of 1,000 nits. And Natalia was like, oh, I think it looks okay. And I'm like, it's looking so dim, like, it looks murky. Like, this can't be the way this movie looks. Right. it took us three days of coloring before they were like can you do us a favor and just change on the monitor I was like okay I changed it to a thousand I was like oh my god it looks so good that changed everything

um but you know what's funny though is right after that experience like after we finished all the post on users, I had shot a short film called Love and Brooklyn for this guy who I really liked working with. He was like, we did literally no lighting on the whole thing. And yet still, I was like, this actually looks really good. And on my FS7, which was a surprisingly good combo somehow. Were you gripping at all or was it literally just angles and location? It was mostly just, yeah, angles and location.

time a day. And we shot like a 12-page thing in one day. Wow. Didn't go too late. I think we went 13 hours or something. The actors somehow had all the dialogue dialed in. Like they were and they were really good. It was fantastic. It was a very inspiring experience. And then we got to the point recently, because that was shot about a year and a half ago, we recently, I had the opportunity to use the same coloring systems. I thought, well, maybe I'll just try to do that real quick and just spend a day or two coloring it for him. So I went through, did an initial past showed it to him, and he was like, this is a horrible man.

I was like, oh, okay. I was like, crap, I just spent all night working on this. I was like, okay, well, and he was very specific. And he has a very good visual sense. Like, he's a photographer as well. Definitely, I think he's a really good photographer. Yeah. But in the process of trying to figure out, because I knew, you know, what were we going to

to be able to do he doesn't have a calibrated monitor on his end and things are looking fantastic on this 35,000 dollar landers you know how do I translate that you know I can't just say oh trust me it looks great because every time I would upload it to vimeo it would change and so this was the problem this was one of my main problems was that I even bothered with vimio for color checking and contrast checking because their compression definitely adds contrast and shifts colors just slightly. And that's nothing, nothing against Vimeo at all. I love Vimeo.

But I think as a color checker, it was not a great way to go. And I learned pretty quickly, like, I don't think there's any way I'm going to be able to communicate what I'm doing to him. And he's not going to be able to see what it is that I'm doing properly. Right. And it was frustrating, to be honest. um he ended up just coloring it himself because you know he has the proper reference on his end he did it in final cut pro i think he did i think he did a good job i think he's maybe this is

if directing doesn't work for him yeah it can work out you know that that was actually a question that um the team i was talking to earlier uh they did um searchers which for a second there i didn't know who i was talking to because searchers and users i was like wait hold on which one do i yeah yeah um but uh they were both curious as to so i'll just ask you because i hadn't asked anyone else and it's stupid on my part uh uh sundance being virtual this year how do you color for that or how you know obviously you don't shoot for this but how do you how do you prep that for display when you have no clue who's watching it on what uh well i think the only thing you can do And I think this is the general idea behind color anyway.

The only thing you can really do is find the best monitor you can to give you the most accurate representation of the data that you've got. Make that look as good as you can. And then once you release it to the world, there's not a lot you can do. Because they were talking about. doing the whole like the music production thing of like chucking the chucking the tape in the car and driving it around to see what it sounds like

out in the world you know like getting a um iPad watching it on the iPad doing right right trim trying to find that balance between what is it you know quote unquote objectively perfect and what is likely to be seen right yeah we ended up just looking at it on our laptops for the most part um which is probably pretty good, you know, in general. If your laptop screen is calibrated, you know, to 709 and all of that. So quick plug for ACER. I calibrated this monitor for on my laptop.

Uh-huh. Very minor adjustments that display cal had to make. It was actually pretty accurate out of the box. And that's not because it doesn't have the choice to do certain levels of, of like, discrete detail, or do you think it's just, they just nailed it, basically? I think they, you know, who knows, it's like a 120 hertz panel and whatever, whatever. I think panels are just getting nicer. But, yeah, using the I1 display and display cal, it kind of just did its automatic ICC profile.

And it wasn't a giant, it was a noticeable shift, but it wasn't a giant one. So I think even, because this is like they're not, you know, their predator system, whatever. But I think displays are getting nicer even outside of the Apple ecosystem. which we all know is pretty nice. Right. But also less unified. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, in general, I feel like we,

what's interesting is that we were actually, our Resolve machine in San Francisco that we were doing to color for users was somewhat prototype new Mac Pro. It had some special quad GPD, thing in it but we had that XR monitor I think it's called the XR monitor yeah yeah the XDR XDR extreme dynamic range oh that's what it is it looks amazing but it runs best in P3 so it was really confusing at times when we would look at things on that versus our proper monitor but

resolve also I don't suggest to anyone to run resolve without a monitor that's got some kind of SDI or HTML output proper because of the way it it operates on a monitor, you know, like a laptop monitor, for instance. I did buy a new full frame zoom. I've shot everything on the 18 to 35, the Sigma. Right. Love that lens.

Like literally everything for five years. Oh, yeah. When I went to full frame, I was like, oh, shit, I got to find a new, like a new everyday zoom, you know. Right, right. the because I shoot on a Nikon F2 I already had a set of those Nikor primes so I just 3D printed some lens gears and stuck them on they don't they're not all the same size which might take me a little more effort to like the like you know how they like do close

will make the ones where they yeah just leave the gear and right they're all the but uh the problem with those Nykors they I love them but they're too they're very very thin so you can't really get a like it needs a focus motor you can't get a handheld one it gets too close to the camera body uh like the arm from the follow focus can't reach far enough yeah yeah yeah that's a pretty typical problem right because those are the old school ones it's like the housings are so it's like so nice they're so tiny you know it's so so slim and yet doesn't quite work for cinema i guess in that way um Yeah, so let's, I don't even, I'll have to find some way to wrap this up.

Yeah, well, I mean, let me know how, what would work best for you. And I'm definitely going to send you all this stuff. For sure. So, yeah, any which way you want to do it. There's about a thousand more topics you and I could easily probably wrap about. Obviously, I think you and I have like a, have like a gear fascination thing that I could probably, we know. I was literally about to go into like 10 minutes about the Sigma 18 to 35. Would you like to?

Because I'll fucking, I'll clip that and put it on something. I mean, I think what's fascinating about the Sigma actually, uh, the Sigma art lenses, I can't even remember who introduced me to them. It was probably like five years ago or whenever they first came out,

somebody mentioned them and I said, well, the fact that art is in the name is kind of lame. So I, I wasn't, I was a little skeptical. And then I used, I used one and thought, oh, yeah, this is like weirdly cinematic compared to most other lenses that I've used because it's a zoom that's faster than a two, at least F-stop-wise. And the focus roll-off is really severe.

You really feel it when it's out of focus versus when it's in focus and it's pretty sharp. and your flares are unique. It doesn't really breathe either. Yeah, you're right. It doesn't really breathe. I don't even think that the cinema version does much breathing at all. No, the 50 to 100 does,

but the 18 to 35 is pretty locked in. I actually went in whole hog and got the 50 to 100 as well because I was like, oh yeah, if I'm going to start shooting stuff super fast, quick and dirty I need to have that second one I can't tell you how often though I've I've just been wondering I wish I could just have a 40 it's like the one it's that one in between that you can't have I bought the cannon 40 pancake oh really it looks ridiculous on the

C 500 oh I'm sure it looks like a lens cap right like a body cap yeah yeah yeah I mean the the the sigmas are fascinating also because because I know they have so many spherical elements in them, but the majority of their lenses are actually still old manually handground. Like they don't get very sophisticated, and that's how apparently they keep it inexpensive. Maybe the master primes have maybe a flatness that's a little bit different. Yeah, the master primes definitely compose an image in like a very,

I think flatness is his word. Yeah, it's like 100% rectalinear. linear pretty much i i really notice some interesting things shooting users with them because when you go wide open on them the the myth of it the lore of it is that it's exactly the same it's not really it actually does some really pretty things uh the your bouquet kind of goes almond shaped on the edges and things like that i think it's uh there's just so many things about those lenses that I don't even know what to say

like skin renders really nicely if you have the right lights it has this really smooth roll off layers are kind of pastely it's just like I don't know it's just pure cinema I haven't seen any lenses as good as that or like they have that kind of

perfection yet character built into them even the signature primes really Yeah, because otherwise you're going full character Like Cook S-4s or Although I suppose what's the one that Venture uses all the time? The Lica Sumiluxes? Yeah.

Apparently those are pretty neutral. They're extremely neutral looking. I used them on the Kinderfinger thing because the director, Bridger actually owns a set. Oh, nice. Not even Sumacrons. We had Sumiluxes. It was, it was very nice to use those as well.

Very lucky considering it was a very low budget show. We really stretched the budget. I think we actually made the one point, whatever million look like plenty more. Dude, I did not know it was that low because even that, that character, that character is super cool looking. We had a really, a fantastic visual effects, like creature effects person um in fact yeah she's done almost all the crypt tv stuff as well um oh i

forgot you said it was for them i did a shoot with them a photo or we did a documentary my friend uh nick mim directed something called uh i can't remember what it was for but it was for crypt tv and we were interviewing like local people who were kind of like horror enthusiasts and did um you know one girl did, like, uh, her own makeup effects for fun. There was just like vignettes of, of, of people in LA who liked horror. I think it was in Cript like first launched. Oh, so it was two, three years ago maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I really like the, the team at Cript. They seem cool. Yeah. I mean, for as low budget as we had to kind of push things, part of it was because of COVID. I really feel for them. If you ever want to have empathy for a person, make them a producer on a COVID show.

It's like, oh, it's just too much, I think. But I really found that, man, they gave me a lot of freedom. I kind of couldn't believe it. I felt like I was somehow protected from something, which never happens to me. That's kind of the thing with lower budgets, right? Like when there's nothing at stake people just go like have fun well i had heard that you know in general in the low budget universe that like if if there's like a corporate sponsor that it actually becomes really complicated or you know what i haven't done a lot of them so i can tell you that much but i have done a few series and i definitely felt really throttled on some of them because uh i was given style instruction

and it wasn't what I believed could be done I had one really strange experience where I had to make a short film with a director in order to be considered

to shoot a series and so we rushed yeah it was like a contest essentially and all these directors were like competing to make short films and and uh so we made a short film and they said you can't do you know a b c and d and i was like

yeah but like if this is going to be good like and watchable i think that visual variety and the ability to put the camera in a place that that uh surprises you a little bit is going to be a benefit i mean I'm not giving you any context by which to describe all of this. But ultimately, I broke all the rules and a company-wide email went out directly following our submission saying, this is how you do it. I was like, oh, okay. So I was like, well, we had all these rules. We had all these rules. It was like the amount of time we had to shoot it and all this.

stuff like how you shoot it and the style you shoot it in you know and it was like they said handheld for everything you can only shoot it over this period of time blah blah and i'm like running around with my gimbal and we're doing shots in the ocean like underwater stuff and you know all sorts of things and in the end they were like this is fantastic right i was like that's what a fI taught me there's a lot of there's a lot of rules because afi has to follow certain rules and they tell you not to do a lot of things and then when you do them people judge the thing not on what rule you broke but what the final product was somebody in their Sundance thank you for an award came up and they had said something that I think is

it's a little bit of a truism but it's I think it really is true actually uh The happier team, you know, the healthier team is going to be, is going to make a healthier, better film. I feel a little bit like users, for instance, very small team. We were relatively well funded, but I think, you know, in the grand scheme of docs, we were definitely well funded. But I think Natalia chose to make this a family affair. There's only really like a few people that weren't in our family that were really closely involved in the production of it. And, you know, that leads to little tensions that are family related

and it leads to other things, make things complicated. But I think at the same time, she managed to always be a good leader in that she saw what we were doing and she would she would definitely try to take the best of what we could do by complimenting us and trying to treat us like human beings all the time and I think there's something inherently amazing about when that happens because it makes you emphasize the positive and that's the only thing you can

think as a human you can offer to anyone else his confidence yeah that was uh i i got to right before a f i got to um my brother had done some volunteer work in uh darmsala india which is where the dalai lama and the the government the Tibetan government and exile operates from and he was working for the uh volunteering for the archive of the Dalai Lama and they archive everything that he's ever said basically via recordings so audio recordings and video recordings ever since the very first one and they were digitizing all of it and he convinced me you know since i was about to start a if i like my life was about to shift he was like well since you have a little bit of time before you go

come with me to India, he was going a second time, and we'll go work together. And he said, can you teach these guys cinematography, the monks, who already shoot for VOA, which not everybody really knows in the U.S., but is known around the world as Voice of America, where video and radio is made in people's home countries, then edited in Washington, D.C., and then rebroadcast out locally again. Interesting. It was started during World War II because it's a little bit of a psychops

in that you want to show that Americans, for people that you may have some complicated relations with, you want to be able to show that Americans and American values are generous. And that was their idea, was to point out that, like, yeah, the Germans may hate us, but ultimately we have values, just like they probably have values. Right.

And so this spread over time, I think now they're at a point where it's like over a hundred countries have VOA, and it all pumps through one office in D.C. It's amazing. But VOA for the Tibetans is really important because they broadcast it back over the border. between India and China so Tibetans can see their own government's news ultimately

so anyway we were there and during that whole period of time I have stories about some terrifying things that I experienced but one really surprising thing was that they were determined to have the Dalai Lama meet

my brother and I and it was like yeah but he has so many things going on what even five minutes seems a little bit lame like he should be concentrating on things that aren't the surf brothers you know like coming to help with the archive but they they made it happen regardless and he was like finishing a teaching of which he does usually somewhere between around eight to 12 hours a day he still does teaching every day um and meditates for three to four hours in the morning um he like walks up to us what's that discipline oh man that's the name of the game he's he's

amazingly disciplined yeah um but he he just like walked up to us and put the the white silk around our necks and and you know he said ah i heard what you've been doing and it's so fantastic i'm glad you're here thank you for for helping and i was like you know kind of speechless, like, yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having us. This is amazing. And then he just kind of sort of, you know, put his hand on my shoulder and he said, you know, there's one thing that I feel like I've learned. Because as you know, you know, I am the physical form of empathy. This is what my job is. This is what I do is my existence. And, and he said to me, you know, the one thing that we can give each other as human beings is confidence he's like i've been meditating

on this for a long time and that's what i've come up with that's what i see now and i was like okay like well bye and you like takes off and ever since then i've i've tried to come at that different from different angles it's i've never fully been able to digest exactly the breadth of what he might mean but I know that when I think about it I think about being a leader and being a human being to work with and to be around for so many hours a day that yeah confidence is the only thing you can really give you know like you can't help much else than that I can always offer assistance I can be a listening ear I can be all sorts of things but ultimately what i can give to people is confidence because ultimately when they're

confident starts to spread and we actually produce things from that confidence yeah that's that's a really excellent uh because i because i definitely um in my youth which ended maybe about 15 20 minutes ago um i uh i was very quick to react uh really um i wasn't i wasn't i wasn't good to work with because i have this sort of thing that's like well no we can do better not not like you're doing it wrong but it was always like why are we not try like i'd get really angry when people like angry when people wouldn't try harder but at the same time i was hypocrite because in my life I wasn't trying very hard but it was very specific things that I would want to like send it on and and you know filmmaking was one of them and uh so I was not a good

leader and I had to I had to you know getting into film as a career I had to I was getting hired a lot to be a director because you know when you're an owner operator they're like can you just do it you know right I guess and so I had to learn how to be a leader and so there's that I don't know if you've heard of this Navy SEAL named Jocco Wilnick wrote a book. Dichotomy of Leadership and Extreme Ownership. And that was kind of a lot of, that book really helped me be a better director. Like, that's what I got out of it. But leave it to the Dalai Lama to succinctly put like two books worth of knowledge into.

Because it's not gassing people up, right? Giving people confidence isn't, oh, you're doing great, sweetie. you know, it's like treating them like people acknowledging fault, but then not, you know, it has to be a teaching lesson and it has to be quick, but you're also not correcting people. You know, it's not, yeah, that is something you kind of have to meditate on. Well, I think my latest version of it is actually kind of where you were going for a second with it, which is just an acknowledgment, I think that the reality is, like, I think there's an insecurity by association that happens when you first start.

If you are insecure, you know, not everybody is. I think the most successful people just have, are just like, whatever, I'm not worried. Yeah. And I think that I think that I felt very insecure at the beginning of my career and found myself saying the same thing, which is like, come on, guys. It's like I'm putting everything into this. Why are you not putting everything into it? And it was really just an insecurity of being associated with something that couldn't be as amazing as what I imagined I could do or that I was trying to do.

With no proof, at least from me. I had this idea that I would be amazing, you know? Yeah, I think that's the thing. It's like, it's really hard to have like podcasts and, and, and, and schools where you hear about people talking so much about how it's like, I just did this and then here I am. I got three Oscars, you know? And it's like it's not that easy for everybody.

Some people, it's quick. But as you go along, I think for me, what I've learned and sort of to tie it into what I think Dali Long was telling me in that moment, hopefully I'm interpreting this, right? but maybe his goal was exactly this is for me to never stop thinking about it. I think that what I got from it in my most recent iteration of it is that confidence is knowing that you're going to figure it out because it's not result-based. It's just confidence in your existential push. to do something and if you are like okay like we wanted to look a certain way right and we walk

on to set and we're like here we go and we start the lighting process and it might take two hours to get your uh your condors out and your 18Ks out and then you're like ooh it really doesn't look good and i don't quite know what i did to make it wrong but now it doesn't work uh but it's in those moments that you have a choice to say okay confidence right now is to say it's all right if this isn't working I can figure it out if you can't figure it out then at least believing that you can try to make it better than it is is also confidence you know like whatever you can do to basically not uh not let your ego tell you what's right and wrong.

Yeah. You know? I think that's the thing. It's like, it's funny, this director on Kinderfinger, there was one day

that I was like, oh, it's not working the way I wanted to. We were shooting in this tunnel. And he just walked up to me, very worried about time. And he said,

he said to me quietly in my ear, which he did, this is grace, I think. And somebody just doesn't make a big deal out of it. He walked up to me and he was like, hey, I think this is taking a long time. I think you need to let go of what it is you thought that it's going to be and try to make it as good as you can now.

And I was like, okay, he just said exactly what the truth is and what I needed to know to let go for a second. And it changed everything in that stuff, I think still looks amazing. I think it ended up looking really great. Would you say that confidence then is the, permission to fail oh yeah yeah i mean i i've yeah roger deacons has keyed from the wrong side and he said like oh sorry we got to redo it he's admitted that much i've seen it happen it's fine you know like he can do it so I think it's okay

I think I think that those moments are the ones that bring you closer to the people around you it's like nursing during an interview your struggle just brings your team closer to you and the harder they see you struggle to try to do the right thing the more they kind of have your back

if you haven't been you know overly expectant of what they should be you know so that is it from me and Bennett thank you so much for listening or watching we will definitely have Bennett back on because he and I both agree that we could and did go for hours about all kinds of topics so the reoccurring guests are piling up for frame and reference which is great

Yeah, like I said, at the beginning, a lot of the stuff I had to chop out was kind of off topic to a degree. Not all of it, but, you know, I had to find an hour and a half to cut out somewhere. So I'll probably be putting together, you know, a couple, for this episode and going forward, off topic, quote unquote, episodes for you guys to listen to if you're interested. So if you are, let me know. I'm probably going to do it anyway. But it'll be nice to know if there's actually an audience for it. So yeah, once again, thanks for listening. And thanks again to Bennett for spending that time with me.

And as always, you will hear or see me the next time you choose to do that in your listening or watching venue of choice. It's a real weird sign off. Anyway, take care. Frame and Reference is an Owlbot production. It's produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan, and distributed by Pro Video Coalition. Our theme song is written and performed by Mark Pelly, and the F-At-Art Mapbox logo was designed by Nate Trurax of Trax branding company. You can read or watch the podcast you've just heard by going to ProVidio Coalition.com or YouTube.com slash Owlbot, respectively. And as always, thanks for listening.

Thank you.