Frame & Reference Podcast - 104: "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" DP Benji Bakshi

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Join us for an exciting conversation with Benji Bakshi, the Director of Photography for Season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. We delve into our creative processes, drawing inspiration from both internal and external sources. You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the use of cutting-edge AI tools to layer additional creativity onto the work, and the effort to keep it organic and human. We also discuss the challenge of seamlessly integrating the volume with the physical set, ensuring it doesn't feel like a prop. Next, we journey into the world of lighting. From utilizing millions of embedded LEDs in sets to the challenges of lighting the bridge set due to its design, Benji shares the creative processes behind finding the right looks for the show. We explore the use of different lighting equipment and techniques to create a unique atmosphere, highlighting how the crew's knowledge of the Star Trek universe informs creative decisions. Lastly, we touch on the relationship between music and cinematography and the importance of creativity and resilience in the industry. Benji shares how he applies his multifaceted background and the lessons he has learned from working on various projects to his work on Star Trek. This is an episode that shines a light on the intricate processes behind bringing a beloved universe to life. Don't miss out! (0:00:15) - Visual Effects in Star Trek Discussion (0:12:46) - Exploring Lighting Challenges and Techniques (0:22:21) - Lighting Techniques and Equipment in Production (0:30:07) - Star Trek Lighting Challenges and Choices (0:44:06) - Exploring Filming Techniques on the Volume (0:56:34) - Collaboration, Filmmaking, and 3D Printing (1:09:27) - The Connection Between Music and Cinematography (1:15:45) - Importance of Creativity and Starting Low ⁠Follow F&R on all your favorite social platforms!⁠⁠ You can directly support Frame & Reference by ⁠⁠Buying Me a Coffee⁠⁠ Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coast's 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, Kay McMillan, and you're listening to Episode 104 with Benji Bakshi, DP of Season 2 of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. Enjoy. I think I go through periods of surrounding myself with inspiration in periods where I allow myself to be decidedly uninspired externally, if that makes sense. Totally. Stay in my own headspace. So I'm realizing, as you ask the question, that I'm in one of those internal states because of the strike and slowdown, and I was just prepping. Season three of Star Trek, Strange New Worlds.

So we were deep in that. And I was in Toronto with my family, sort of ready to be Canadian for an extended period. And then we packed up and moved back. Oh, geez. So definitely unwinding. Yeah, I get the same. Like, I'll go through periods of, of, I don't, to be fair, I don't do a lot of, like, reading, fiction, but I'll go through periods of like deep, what I will call research periods, which

oftentimes are just fuck around periods, but like I want to absorb. And then, yeah, same thing where it's like you'll go months just going, nah, now that feels, that makes me feel ill. It's like being awake too long. You know, you're like, I don't need that anymore. Yeah, sometimes you just want to know that your instincts are yours and whatever you've digested is ready to filter its way through or not. I will say something I saw recently because I have a four-year-old who's just entranced by anything Spider-Man.

I brought him to see the Spider-Verse 2 in the theater, which was his first theatrical experience ever. Oh, well, fuck. And he saw the first one, which he loved. the second one you know was even more um expressive i really loved um beyond this sort of high intensity of it they would just like paint the rooms differently in each shot like this is how the characters are feeling i was like that's a really great sense of freedom where you can just really make up the rules as you go yeah and um i was actually inspired by that uh that you know

the visuals are giving you something at every turn. Yeah, that film must have been so hard for them to make because the first one, everyone harps so aggressively on the animation. And when you go back and watch that first one, it like feels kind of tame now. It's just, it's like got two tricks, and this one has like 107 tricks. Exactly, yeah.

So that was fun. That was fun. Yeah. That photo of her, or that scene of her dad, like, You know, and he's like trying to arrest it. Like just the way, I just, that painting, I guess, really stuck with me for whatever reason.

That was a very, like, powerful frame they put together. This, watching that immediately gave me the takeaway of, huh, this is, it feels almost AI generated. Right. It's that it was just so complex. It was an interesting thing to even say to myself that I think, think with AI tools, I don't know if you've messed around with them at all. Oh, sure. You're basically layering additional creativity on top of what you already have.

So I think that everything visual and in a way everything narrative, the bar is going to get, you know, pushed up even higher because if you were ever constrained by your own imagination, and that's going to get blown wide open. Yeah. Well, the one that I've started toying with right now, that I, it sucks to say,

because I should have thought of this before I saw it, but speaking of ingesting and digesting, is using the Photoshop generative fill for outpainting. So like, you know, you shoot instead of doing like, what would traditionally be a, what do you call it?

With the, I'm blanking on the name, when they would paint the glass mat painting um you just put you know you'd take i just did it with this shot because i'm like what if i want to make my apartment look interesting and i just framed i just cut out me and and told genera phil to make me like a cool apartment and it gave me like 20 options of like different ways that this edge could be cool or you could like you know make it smaller and paint out a whole relatively realistic looking scene as long as it's locked off um so that's been something i've been fucking around with sometimes

Yeah, I think with those things, the first application is always, let's do what we've already been doing and see if it's faster and cheaper and easier. And then when you get to that point, I think that the audience starts to pick it apart and say, hey, that looks like generative Phil. How can I make sure that I show that it's something real or custom or, I mean, real is now a different word, but how can I show that? I put more creative energy into it or it feels more organic or more human, and that's what the audience is probably going to want to see. So another example is on Strange New Worlds,

we're shooting on the volume. I was going to get to that, yeah. Yeah, we're always trying to put a lot of energy into making sure that the volume doesn't become apparent. So we want it to feel, we want to shoot it in a way where it feels like it's a background and light it in a way, where it all feels integrated, and there's a blend line between the physical set and the virtual set, and we need to always put a lot of care into making sure it's properly blended. So it's the same thing. You have a new technology, but it doesn't solve everything. It's still, even now, 100 and however many years later, from the first moving images, you're still trying to suspend disbelief. Yeah. And it's also, you know, to your point about like, oh, you could

point out that that's generative fill you know like mid journey seems to have a look but the volume does seem to have kind of a look i don't know if it's all of us just you know obsessing over when the mandolorean did it now we all kind of can pick out the faults in the same way that i guess you could say oh that was shot on film because of whatever halation gate weave uh you know grain that is different or certain colors but like versus digital um but the the volume does at this moment tend to have kind of a look that's that i you know well when people are running around in a hundred foot diameter circle yeah probably in but um we know we've been trying to use it for interiors and things that are not intuitive and have sets that are um especially moving forward

as we're preparing new seasons sets that are not the shape of the volume you know right because You might immediately think, let's get as much room as we can, but we're basically trying to mix it up because the audience is becoming more aware of that, and there's a tendency being propagated throughout the industry within the volumes, but also just to keep further enhancing the experience. As little as you can tell, it's been shot there, the better. Well, I remember in The Mandalorian, the one that caught me. off guard, and I think this is kind of what you're talking about, is the first season when, you know,

Mando goes to talk to Farner Herdslog, and they're in this, like, little imperial bunker. And I thought that was just an interior, but that's, like, all it was was the table and the rest of it was volume. And I was like, that, all right, that, that blew my mind because I was like, I didn't realize we were doing that. So that kind of sounds like what you're thinking about. Yeah, there's a couple of sets in, in the strange new worlds, which I don't even want to give it away, but when I first had access to see some material, I didn't think they were on the volume at all. And like their interior sets that were.

I was like, oh, well done, you know. So knowing, so your episode, well, so I don't know when this discussion is actually gonna air, but at the time that we're recording this, episode four just premiered last night. Mm-hmm. And I watched that and that was one of your episodes, correct? Yeah.

fucking wonderful timing for me because I'm already watching the hell like I love the show I think it's the best Star Trek since next generation um having a lot of fun with it so I was already planning on watching it at you know at midnight and then I was like oh great I'm talking this guy tomorrow um but I so obviously like the outside of the planet the exterior was volume but in what's his name Luke in his hut is that volume no that's an interior okay good it's an interior with like a sliver of blue screen out the front door but that was that was practically built on a stage okay because that was going to blow my mind if you did that one because that's the only one i could think of is there any more on that episode or is it just that exterior it's the exteriors that are like when they're in the um quarry right manual labor that's also on no it's whenever you see that snowy landscape okay cool um the castle was all practical well that that was something that was kind of uh cool about being able to talk to you with

this specific episode coming out is because the episode has what like five or so locations that are all we could dive into each one of them to talk about like lighting and and you know like It starts off in what, Pike's quarters and then goes to like a meeting room and then you've got the bridge and then you've got the volume planet and you've got the castle interior. Like those all, I have notes on my phone somewhere. I did want to kind of go through each one and talk about like how you've gone through because I've talked to a couple guys who shot Picard and they were talking about bridge lighting and stuff like that. But Strange New Worlds has a, it feels like a lot more built in lighting. How much are you relying on the interior lighting and just like putting in a key? Or are you doing a lot of like external or extra film lights?

The answer to that question is there's, well, there's two answers. There's every other set except the bridge. And then there's the bridge. Yeah. Okay. Every other set except the bridge first, which is we rely on the built-in lighting a lot. And this was something that Glenn Keenan, who shot the pilot in a lot of the first season, and he came from a Star Trek discovery background, too. He put a lot of energy into designing that, and our lighting designer, Alita, was instrumental in that, too, and working with the production designer Jonathan Lee.

They had a really great collaboration in trying to really embed as much as we could everywhere. You know, you've got channels and tables underlighting people. And then you've got, you know, front light and top light all around the sets. And these architectural elements that we call ribs that sort of punctuate these larger rooms. They have strips of lighting on top and in the side. and things like that. So when I first joined the show, which was season two, the great thing about coming in on season two,

which I had never done before, all my other shows, I came in season one, and we had to sort of break the ground. But in season two, the fortunate thing for me, figuring out the volume, which every show does the volume a different way, and figuring out all the possibilities of these sets,

They had done a lot of the R&D. Sure. And it didn't mean that I was locked into established looks because the cool thing about this show is almost every episode is a new genre. And we have a lot of freedom to just do whatever we think fits the story. So, you know, I walked into these sets and Glenn was like, okay, you've got four million LEDs embedded into these sets. Good luck.

Have fun. Yeah, yeah. Your dimmer, I'm your dimmer operas? Greg, I, if I ever felt like I had too many options, that was it. Where does light come from or where does it not come from? And so I would spend a lot of time before I even shot my first episode, turning things on and off.

And I think I was driving, we have two gaffers on the show because they're alternating with us. I think I was driving them and the board ops nuts. Like, whoa, okay, we just thought that, but try the, this one now. Oh, what if this is cooler? And this is, and I just had to see it all to know who what was possible instead of start with a look from season one and go from there. There's literally like too many numbers to paint by to change. That is literally better to just turn it all off and start turning them on one at a time. So now I've got some Benji looks from certain episodes and know that I can start from here or there. And there was a particular day in one of the

episodes that at the end of it, it was a good day, you know, like felt like we did good work and accomplished everything. And the gaffer came up to me and said, congratulations, you pitched a no-hitter. And I said, what is that me? And he says, yeah, you didn't even realize it. You didn't put any lights on the floor. You didn't put a single light stand. I said, oh, yeah, I didn't do that. so that was pretty cool when I finally sort of got the grasp of things and it's not to say that that's the proper way to shoot this show but it just turns out that you know I had finally been comfortable enough and had the instincts enough to be able to do it when we need to well and that sounds like a huge you know huge kudos to the production designers absolutely yeah you know

and that is refreshing that there's a there's a big synergy there that we we won't like to to certain places, and they're doing everything they can to enable that. And it not only just helps the show and helps to look, but it enables us to do shots that we probably just couldn't do. In the past, I would probably have to set a light and have it painted out, which is a huge, you know, trouble. It's cost money, and everybody's got to be involved and okay, okay it. But now we just have the ability to light from the ship, as we say, we'll never need it.

So there's that, and then there's the bridge. And the bridge is basically borrowed, I believe, from early discovery or something like that. Oh, really? I don't know where it was borrowed from, but it was borrowed. It was altered. And we basically have to light it like we jokingly say, the nightly nukes. There's all kinds of lights up in a grid. surrounding this thing. There's a soft box there, but then there's lights below the soft box

because there's just not great ways to get light other places. There's consoles when people are at the consoles. We have embedded lighting there and generally can do a good job. It's a little more moody in the bridge, especially in like a red alert or something. But it's tough. And when I see it compared to the other sets, it feels like a more dated look where people just got a movie light on their face. So you sort of embrace it because that's maybe where the throwback vibe comes in. There's even things like there's a center feeling architecture and Captain Pike's chair isn't even under that. It's like perfectly not under it. And it's difficult to get like on him, even though you would think the set to be built so that he could

get a lot of great light right so the bridge is definitely a love-hater relationship and it's absolutely surrounded by blue screen on like 180 degrees of it so we're always counting shots how many if the effects shots can we do and try to avoid the try to avoid the big blue screen it's like all right well what kind of angle can we get right so that's my answer to do we use embedded lighting it's yes absolutely everywhere including the volume except the bridge yeah well I And the other thing about the bridge two that I noticed, I just forgot I had my notes, was like around the doors, there's like these, I don't know if they're pulsing or if they're moving, but there's like two or three hot lights. I don't know what you want to call them that seemed to just constantly ping the lens. Like they alternate just hitting the lens. Are those movers or are they just getting more intense? Those are MR-16s embedded into articulating but not moving. uh the picture so they're dimmed to various uh levels timing and that is basically like

the icing on the cake of every single shot that's like right okay we're gonna light the character now we're in mr 16 mode and it's funny because they're so specific there's so many these fucking things and then any that are off camera i'm like okay we got to turn those off because they're just going to blast shadows and do weird things. Especially when you're in a moving shot, you know, it took me an episode or two to be able to realize, okay, we got to cue these because they're just so complicated. Why would you want light coming from weird places in really spotty ways?

Right. But they're there to flare the lens. They're also really interesting backlights or accent lights. So when Pike is sitting in the chair, you've got two or a couple places some of those MR-16s can really nail them as a backlight. which can be cool because that gives them a sort of heroic feel

but then it turns off. So there's that and I'm I've got to the point where I'm the one going over and hand articulating every single one to be like

I want this one to hit it here I want this one to back Ortegis when she does that and I want and so it's funny because the Gafford their names are Dan and Hugh and they joke about how

oh yeah Glenn does that too you know well he's got to be the one to go do these little specials because you've got so many options you're sort of figuring them out as you do it and they get really hot i'm always burning my handle because they're because they're right yeah that's the it's funny you know that i keep quoting a dpa interviewed he was like the fifth interview i did uh three years ago alexe al-a mojia and he had quoted one of his teachers of saying if you have two lights you have two problems if you have one light you have one problem it sounds like you are

surrounded by problems. Well, when I first got on the show, I was definitely, you know, like, I felt genuine anxiety. I hadn't shot an episode yet, and I was there in prep, there to sort of absorb a lot of things. And I had this feeling of like, there's light everywhere. Right. How do I make sure it doesn't look like there's light everywhere?

There is, but you don't want it to feel like your characters are lit that way. a lot of head scratching and yes it always comes down to like one light one purpose and i've finally familiar enough that when you have basically like 50 different sources what are they all doing you know right it the one that comes to mind is the the hallways but definitely the hospital set seems you know it's just white white everything everything's white How do you work within those, you know, confines? How are you getting contrast in the majority or even trying? Like, how are you keeping that looking, quote unquote, cinematic?

Yeah, we're always trying. It can be negative, Phil. At first I was like, well, to turn this off, turn this off. And I was like, oh, my gosh, there's so much to turn up. Let's just put up a solid, you know, it's just take care of that. Because even if you turn it off, the surfaces are kind of reflective and can push it back. There's that. and then you're hoping to stage scenes around certain sources like the sort of medical tables

are all underlit um the um chairs or beds that people lay on have a sort of halo over top but there's also floor lighting uh underneath we're using um a lot of astera products with with every single interview without I'm just going to do a super cut of everyone saying and then we use the tubes totally we use you know diffusion boxes I fell in that with one called the V box from Matthews which to me just had the perfect form factor wasn't too big some of these some of these like three tube things are as big as a sky panel and I'm like well it helps you in some regards, but not in the footprint. So the V box was cool because you put one tube in

and it almost just like has like double the area, which is slightly softer and it defuses well. But we could still clip it onto things and make it really low profile. So we're basically taking the existing lighting. And once again, credit to the production designers and Alita Keenleyside, the lighting director or lighting designer and Glenn to set this up

where a lot of the built-in lighting has sections. So this side is brighter, the other side is darker, and you take it to a perceptible or imperceptible difference, but it shows up on camera. So shows up on the subject, rather. And the same thing with Pike's Quarter is you've got these little triangles in the ceiling, which make these sort of, you know,

postmodern shapes. And we call them chicklets, you know, like little pieces of gum. and you can really get away with a lot up there, like take one section to 100%, so it's hitting one side and take the other ones down to like 8%, or whatever the lowest level is

to keep them from flickering. And you've got a huge lighting contrast that when you aim the camera at it, maybe you could see it, but you're usually not looking at it because they're all illuminated. So you can sort of hide contrast in different places.

Same thing with the underlight from tables. You can really pump one side and slow down the other. So that's how I start. You know, it's really turned things off, see where we can push light. And if we have to, the last resort is put a light on a stand. Right. I was going to say that do you know what the inbuilt lighting is? Are they just like LED ribbons?

Or are they using specific fixtures built into the set? I believe it's Moss LED products, which are made for embeds. So I think that's what they used a lot of. Gotcha. And our scripts, and sometimes I think they're little panels. Sure. Do you know, were you guys using any? I kind of cut you off when you said Astera products.

Did you just mean the tubes? Because I know, we never talk about like the little bulbs they have or like the little square panels. They come out with a bunch of new stuff. I can we use everything at a certain point. You know, we're using the little pucks, as we call them. We're using their essentially little, what do you call them, par equivalents. Yeah. We really use a lot of them depending on the needs.

And it's true with a lot of, you know, other things too. We're getting into cream source. Oh, the vortexes are so good. Yeah, they really are. I got one over there. a lot of solving a lot of problems for people we also use felixes and then we're using movers too you know because like again um elita our lighting designer comes from a sort of rock and roll background so she's got a full gamut of experience with a lot of different types of lighting so on one episode

we we had something imposing a sort of active lighting outside the ship and i wanted it to make its way through the windows. So we had a combination of Felix quads like pulsing and also these esprees moving fixtures with like really intricate gobos, you know, like pushing in. So there was just like this soft slash hard melding moving light happening. And with the atmosphere, it was really, I think, pretty unique. So we're trying to, you know, do space travel justice. with lots of different lighting options and put a 20K outside a big window which we also do

sure it is definitely like I said it's certainly my favorite of the Treks and I think you guys really have built like a very I don't want to say unique in the sense that it's so wildly different than anything else but it does have its own

it feels very much like its own thing while still staying within that universe Thanks. Yeah, I think that's something that we worked really hard on is the tone. And credit to the showowner's Akiva and Henry for knowing enough about Trek and pouring in a well-rounded team that also does that. We don't have a technical advisor on the show or anything. Considering, you know, like a Star Trek expert or whatever. Yeah, it's such a, it's such a intricate, fictional world that, but it's almost has more rules than a non-fictional world. We have, you know, the Roddenberries and everybody involved, you know, Alex Kurtzman and his team. So there aren't, the scripts get vetted, of course. But even for the details of the props, the costumes, and everything, we're all sort of, weighing in and there's there was a part where um we were shooting an episode and we had a

technical question about canon or how something might work and all we have to do is just ask does anybody know if and the crew just flocks in and they're like based on this episode of this and this and this so everyone is holistically keeping each other in check i think chrisenzo who shot Picard said the same thing happened to him where it was like everyone on set was just like huge Star Trek nerds and they could fill in for him because he didn't he'd never watched the show yeah especially our you know season two um we shoot in Toronto and um that's where discovery is also based and so literally the schedules are coordinated where discovery finishes we You go to Strange New World's, you go finish, Discover, Strange New World's finishes,

crew goes back to Discovery. So it's just long Star Trek life. If you're a fan, I bet that's the greatest possible, you know, job, finally, and I get two of them. Exactly. Yeah, just non-stop. Yeah. I did want to ask, you know, with, talk about the ship, obviously, all the stuff's built in, but for last night's episode, today's episode, whatever you want to call it,

that little castle, little miniature castle set, obviously no built-in lighting there. So I was wondering how you approached that both during the night scene and the day scene. Because they both look very nice. I liked the kind of green, fill,

warm key thing at night. Like the purple outside looked pretty cool. We approached it by making the producers very sad because we had shit tons of lighting. Yeah. It was a, it may have looked sort of contained, but it was a huge cathedral.

And it was extremely tall. So, you know, the typical problem of, hey, we're shooting this cathedral, which has lots of windows, and you'd think,

well, hence natural light should do the job, but of course, movie schedules are what they are, and we have to protect for losing that light. And in fact, when we shot there it was like snowy and cloudy welcome to Toronto and so we knew we had to

protect for that so we had I don't know like five or six LRX lifts you know with just basically one big HMI per window and um on the that was on one side of this sprawling cathedral was going to be the key side and of course there was a rotunda at the end where we sort of had to fill them all in. Then on the, we'll call it the fill side, we built scaffolding that was tented so that we wouldn't get any extraneous light and we put sky panels in every window there,

like a bunch of 360s and, what are they called, 120s, things like that. So it was just a shit ton of light. And we had to outpower the, natural light. At one point the clouds broke and the sun just exploded into the rotunda, which

looked cool, but it was a very different lighting level and I'm pretty sure a lot of those takes made it into the cut. I was like they got a lot of backlight you know, we'll just go with it, which is cool. And it was like flaring the lens and all the kind of stuff's like

all right, let's do it. Because we couldn't really change it. And it was like, are we going to sit here and wait forever? um we just went with it and i i did trust the post-production team that like if something is really out of whack they're going to use the takes that makes sense for the night scene it was the opposite so our hMI side what was the key side for the day stuff basically um you know dropped the level and we turned that into this magenta light that was this iconic color of the Rigel 7 sky.

Right. And we got to show a night color, which I don't think was in the original series. They established this sort of maroon, maroon magenta mixed for the light. Because that was one thing. They kept referencing, like, last time we were, was that in canon in the original series? Because I didn't watch that. that was the first episode ever oh okay of star trek not not the i love star trek but i'm not the biggest fan yeah yeah if you watch the original series it's basically the pilot gotcha okay cool

captain pike was fucking cool then yeah captain pike was the the captain pike was the captain in the first few episodes of the original series until he had this um predestined thing happen to him, you know, spoiler, he, uh, gets like disfigured and is no longer able to serve. Right. So in Discovery season two, our Captain Pike, you know, is sort of reintroduced to this fate that he, he lives life knowing his fate. I remember that. I did, I did watch Discovery.

This is brought up in our series, uh, from time to time that he's basically living with a death sentence, but he sort of, you know, embraces it. Yep, I remember now. Robles is a big anxiety for Captain Pike that he returned to. And it's also, it's great, I think, fan service, too, to return there and make more of it. So anyway, we had this red, maroon thing going on. So our fill side of the cathedral with the sky panels, we then flipped to this color. So we had these kind of wild party color.

streaming into this cathedral, and you can see that in the night scenes. And then we had like, you know, 200 medieval-style candles glowing to the background. Right. And these, like, flame pots. So you've got like flame, magenta,

red maroon, and all this kind of stuff. So it was this very womb-like, kind of disturbing interior castle. Well, because that was going to be, my follow-up question is, uh, how much play was all that, fire doing? Were you augmenting the fire?

Was that just let the candle do its work and leave it? We were augmenting it because of the size of the space. I love using natural firelight on Bone Tomahawk, which was an indie feature I did a while ago. It's Western I had

I had experience with propane, you know, flame in the past and flame bars. Yeah. I was dead set on using that as much as possible. I want to light these scenes with flame because the flicker effect, you know, is always very erratic and no matter how many magic gadgets or sky panels or whatever you're...

LEDs can't do it. No one's programmed a good flame effect. You know, the interesting thing about the flame bars is they'll blow around if there's any, you know, slight wind and things, and they'll change their shape, hence become a harder source, but now they're softer, and it's really just organic and erratic. So I wanted to use as much natural flame light as I could to light the night and sometimes we were like dialing it up to 11 and getting the bars right on the edge of frame and doing what we had to

in this case though because of the inverse square law they were just too far away you know every cinematographer's fucking nightmare yeah inverse square law fucking physics we were using you know LEDs to augmented it, but I think it blended in pretty well because when you light up LEDs, it have like slightly

different patterns and there is natural flame light. I think it balances out. Totally. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't tell. That's why I asked. Though, was there, if I remember, there was like a green fill? Was that just like, hey, we're going to make green because it's the opposite of orange? Or was there like a motivation that I missed for that? We ended up, it was when we shot it, it was like extremely red because those were the colors. And in post, we basically wanted to dial some of that out. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think that's really what happened. We didn't impose any green in camera. I'm going to have to go back and watch that then. Great job color department. Because I literally thought you had like a green

light behind him. We had some coolness. We had some coolness to try and offset it. But I think we dialed that more green to fight some of the magenta because it just felt too magenta-e. Yeah, the magenta and the more. Probably getting muddy, yeah. Yeah, and that was sort of the struggle with establishing this sky color is you've got this total red, warm palette, and you have to offset it. Yeah. Just checking. I'm looking at my notes again because I was like, we really went through all the spaceship stuff.

I was like, Ortega's room. Oh, that was one thing. How do you approach daylight, what I would call daylight interior on the spaceship versus nighttime interior? because that is that but it's all technically night time that that's what i was sort of conversation i was bringing up when i was digging in i was like well day doesn't have to look like day and night doesn't have to look like night so day and night like night like for the circadian rhythm aspect of the crew is just sleeping hours and waking hours what's outside the ship might just be empty space, but they're probably still going to have a daylight feel to their

ship, and they're going to have higher light levels. Usually in an episode, there's something outside the windows imposing something. So in episode two, which was this courtroom episode, they were... Great episode, by the way. Good job on that. Thank you. Yeah. The director I worked with Valerie Weiss, we had worked together on two other shows, and they were asking me if I had any directors to recommend for Star Trek when they first came on, and she was really high up on my list, and they loved her. So they brought her in, and we were reunited, and that was both of our first Star Trek episode ever. We were the virgins, and the reviews saying it was like one of the best of you know recent times and possibly ever it yeah we didn't

know what we were doing enough that we like made it really good well and also it felt like very in the there's kind of kind of two sides of Star Trek that I think everyone it seems to enjoy it again I'm not speaking for the ultra passionate fans but you know there's like that medieval wherever the medieval episode from the first season and then there's also the court room scene which is very reminiscent of the uh you know is data human episode from next generation and stuff and sort of those more heady ethical episodes and i think you guys threaded the needle on uh having that be not you know there's there's obvious allegories to our current day situation but it didn't feel you know preachy or pushy or anything like that it felt like dead on star trek

absolutely yeah credits to the writers on that and the my approach to that was to just basically get out of the way. I mean, there was definitely moments where I tried to make the wider shots beautiful and expressive and dark because the Una character is in a really dark place, which is great that we get to get that deep in a sort of otherwise utopian show. But it was really to just honor the character. And Valerie and I set up a lot of rules to the language of the episode that like this equals. family and togetherness and this equals isolation and oppression and things like that and I think that it was mostly invisible and helped the tone get across so we had a

great time on that but um yeah I just derailed that whole thing sorry you were saying in this episode something about the lighting in the courtroom or shit you can Yeah, I'll cut out big pauses. What the fuck we were you talking about? There was the light, oh, daylight versus nighttime in space, circadian rhythms, and then you said episode two. Okay. In episode two, they're orbiting Earth.

So it became, oh, we're sort of Earth. We know this. There's a sun, right? And it's awake during the day and it's asleep at night. Even though we're like, but which side of Earth are they orbiting? and isn't the light going to shift every, you know, 30 minutes or so? And it was like, you know, we're just going to go with day is bright, night is dark, you know, because it's sadly all we know.

And to say, oh, it's nighttime. It's like hard light coming in. First of all, they do need to sleep so they could just shut their windows, but that's boring too. I don't think I've ever seen shutters or blinds in a Star Trek anything. I do have what's called blasts. shields, which can be applied to the windows as a covering. And that does sometimes happen where they're like part of the way down, almost like as a shutter.

Right. But the day night thing I've accepted as a sort of convention and we'll find a way to make it feel more mooney at night. Yeah. Well, I'm sure it's not just, well, maybe it is. uh you know switching the interior LEDs from 6,500 to 3200 or 27 or whatever exactly yeah it's like turning a lot of things off there was an episode where uhura is sleeping and we really wanted it to be like she's in deep sleep and she gets awoken and she has a sort of clean rock lamp you know this like

super warm kind of source i was like i think that's just the source so we accentuated everything with this amber kind of glow and then when other lighting happens it becomes a very stark difference yeah because there is a point at which if you want things to look super pretty in quotes all the time you're turning everything on and it becomes this movie sleep or movie dark and certain scenes need to go beyond that and feel like the character really is you know almost in darkness yeah is there uh any particular obviously there's you have two more episodes coming out right yeah episode six and episode nine how do they decide on the distribution of those because the couple of the people have interviewed from other star tracks like they get grouped up you know it's like two

three four and five six seven or whatever they're doing blocks and we we don't do blocks we alternate but we also have three dPs we had three dPs on season two was me, Glenn Keenan, and Ian Anderson, who Ian Anderson was, I believe, on season one doing more second unit work, and now he's getting into the rotation. So he did two. I did four and Glenn did four. And they broke up this distribution partly because of the anomaly of the 3DP system, but also because of COVID. And there were certain episodes that we were all supposed to do. And then at one point, Ian got COVID and Glenn had to cover him, then vice versa. And then Ian had basically an emergency, like a medical sort of situation that wasn't serious,

but ended up, you know, he needed to be covered. So I was on my down period. basically doing early prep on my ninth episode and then I had to step in and shoot for him. I did his blend. So the interesting thing about the volume is there's always a very important day when the set is put in because the sets have to be turned over episode to episode. Right. All the unreal worlds are made and they're there for you to essentially pre-light, which is what we call a blend, to make sure that the practical set and the, 3D set looks right and it can take all day so we're doing each other's blend because one person's either shooting or prepping or not available uh let's where you get to do your own blend as they say

so we were all covering each other in various capacities and uh just turns out that you need to have like an episode gap and switch from the evens to odds or vice versa and glenn did episode one and episode 10 so he was sort of had more time in the middle um so it's different from other shows where i'd either alternate back and forth and you're either the evens or the odds dp or on some shows i was just the sole dp as the only dp and then you get very little prep but it's kind of cool that you just like always shooting yeah yeah i bet that's pretty nice i've never worked i did i was the second unit dp on one movie that's all the like major stuff i've done the rest of my shits like corporate or music videos or whatever so it's always fun to hear like the very because you know

i've interviewed plenty of dps who shoot an entire series just by themselves and then like your situation where it's like three people yeah it's very much educational mostly there's there's an alternating block uh rhythm with what you call premium tv or streaming where you do like two episodes at the time because they bring a director who does too and it's like a month of prep a month of shooting and it feels a little bit like indie feature rhythm but yeah there's some that like do the whole show and some that are just like pure episode to episode alternating yeah i did want to uh when you're talking about the blend it reminded me i forgot to ask about the volume because i think a lot of people um are interested in that and i do know that a lot of i mean they don't

get a lot of listeners on this podcast it's like a few few hundred maybe we're up to like a thousand but uh i do know that a lot of them are are the guests so so i've had to start asking higher level questions instead of thinking it was all beginners but um a lot of people are interested in the kind of nuts and bolts of working on the volume and so i was wondering if a uh you know simply how are you adding additional light to the system because obviously the LEDs aren't if the LEDs were powerful enough to light everything. thing Keno wouldn't have made the mimic. And then also, was there anything that when you started learning how to shoot on the volume

that popped up that surprised you were maybe that you would maybe want to warn another DP about? Well, first of all, I said earlier different shows do the volume in different ways. And you've got true Star Trek shows, Discovery, and Strange New World, both using the same volume space. it's one that like CBS built for these two shows and what we do is we have an LED ceiling and that's for like reflections we do a lot of lighting within the ceiling and we just embrace it as

this sort of naturalistic element and discovery one of the first things they do is they like rip out the ceiling and put in a lighting grid oh right so there's two completely different approaches I believe Mandalorian did a 360 volume and but that really messes with your sound and you're ADRing all the sound but when your when your lead

wears a helmet it's probably not a big deal right um wait it messes with your sound because it's echoey because it's echo yeah there's certain parts of our so we built a teardrop shaped volume so we have an open end on on the backside and that helps for

access of things and also you really don't have the sound issues at least not near as bad. So we embrace the like surround LED sort of experience and look. And we are doing a ton of lighting from the volume walls and ceiling. So you mentioned that like if the LEDs are bright enough, in my experience, they are. Oh, cool.

The reason to do an augmented effect is basically like lighting ratios. So if you want something to play on somebody but not really. like wash out the floor because you're if you're lighting from the walls or ceiling it's going to be farther away and it's going to influence a lot more and even though it's they're not really directional you know they're going to be soft sources ambient sources um so if you don't want the effect on your surroundings that's when you have to bring in something closer and contain it or you make the lighting ratios what you want because milking out the walls of the volume is always a concern.

We put around the edge of our ceiling, like a black layer. Like we basically have a, call it a curved gradient, which we call the horseshoe because of the shape that it makes, just to make sure our walls aren't getting milked out from the ceiling itself. So it's that whole game of contrast versus, you know, fidelity. versus interesting lighting, things like that. Right. So we do use a lot of mapping, pixel mapping. We sometimes stick several sky panels or other sources up in the top of the wall and they're mapping whatever ambient, you know, imagery we're seeing.

By pixel mapping, you mean like, finding an XY coordinate for a color and putting it in the light? Yeah, and like an RGB response. sure okay yeah but we could have which we've done like in in riddle seven there's flame in the wall meaning like in the 3D world so spoiler

the gate of the episodes out they're in these cages and then the gate of the castle is in the wall and there's flame digital flame in the uh 3D imagery

so we have sky panels above that um basically melted at the top of the wall mimicking the color and the flicker pattern of those digital flames.

Gotcha. Okay. They shouldn't influence into the set. Now you're playing the game of if you have a digital flame, of course it's going to be exposed to be red on camera

and hence not bright enough to throw very far. So you have to augment it right which is the same thing as normal on camera flame you know if you see the color then it's not doing a lot of lighting well and that kind of fits into what my other thought was was like the only once you had mentioned that the LEDs were bright enough my immediate thought was like well i guess you'd only really need to bring stuff in for effects or if you were trying to mimic the sun you know like a harder kind of directional type thing. We do light our characters. And once again, it's because, all right, we really want to give

them some shape here. And if I put a huge shape on the wall, it's 40 feet away. It's just going to mess, throw that light all over everything, which can be cool. So maybe I'll do a big shape for the world. And we will have directionality, but I'll also bring something physically in on the floor for the characters to give them more heroic lighting or give them more contrast. That said, with a hard light comment, it's sort of, I don't know of a successful example where they've done a hard sunlight world on the volume because you can't create a ubiquitous parallel sunlight that encompasses the whole volume. Right.

Good. Let's say, let's say that physics again. Let's think you lined up a bunch of big hard fixtures in an array to sort of give you that, but now you're milking out the volume like crazy. And are you really covering from one into the other this hard, so it's physically, yeah. Problematic. Yeah. Oh, so another tell-tale sign of shooting on the wall is like, oh, it's magic hour forever. Because of why not?

Because why not, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's great. But, you know, hard light is really hard to do. Sure. It's another term for hard light, difficult light. So all the Boba Fett desert stuff, I thought, oh, they'd probably do that in a volume. I was like, oh, no, that's like in the desert.

no they're hot oh dude I could not imagine wearing all that Mandalorian armor even the fucking alien costumes just having to be outside in Tunisia

wherever the hell they are yeah there's so much I guess they do have those NASCAR like cooling vests now you know they get it helps a lot yeah very dedicated role to be covered in stuff

all day for sure yeah a buddy of mine works at uh legacy effects and uh so he's done all the star warses all the marbles you know probably done a whole bunch actually he i know he's done a handful of star trek stuff because every once in a while i'll see something and i'll take a picture of it like you know and i'm like is this you he goes yeah motherfucker yeah we're talking about legacy all the time

yeah so that you probably have seen some of my friend carry stuff um but i remember he uh he started putting himself i don't know my joke is always that they're too rushed so he has to but i don't know what the you know the situation is down there but do you remember in obi did you watch obi one yeah so you meant you know the dinosaur that like chases obiwan like across the buildings like the dinosaur um what's what's he called bounty hunter uh-huh that's my friend carry like he made the suit and then because he was like tall enough for like he's kind of he's about my eyes a little shorter and uh i guess the head looked normal on him so he's like i guess it's

got to be me and so he got to do the thing this is fun hey that's a fun job to to be a dinosaur right i did want to ask um because i had seen it on your i and do be speaking of nerd shit i got i got to know what was up with that half life short oh that was um i worked with a director named Joe Miali and he was sort of big in the video game space he ended up doing a really cool feature about like Mecca robots

coming and taking over and stuff really cool and so we got in a cool rhythm we did a Assassin's Creed basically like fan short and this was in conjunction with machinima sure like RIP machin And so we did one for Assassin Creed. We did one for Half-Life. We did some other stuff, which were like YouTube series pilots and stuff like that. So the Half-Life short was just a fan film that I think he wrote or co-wrote. And just it was all his brainchild of like integrating some of the game features.

And iconic, you know, the crowbar, shit like that. Right. But we just didn't. I actually have a pro bar for that exact reason. We just did it for, you know, fun and for fans. Yeah, I should. I didn't even think to look it up. I was like, well, that's probably something.

Of course I could. Is it online somewhere? Is it on YouTube? Yeah, I think it's there. I should have just tried to, for whatever reason I saw it. And I went, I got to ask about that and didn't. think to watch it like try to go find it there there were parts where we had the like crowbar pov because it kind of follows the crowbar like go into scenes but then like the crowbar

goes different places and we follow it and we get to like see the whole half life world and so you like we bring to go pro to the crowbar and had it like bouncing around and do it's pretty fun yeah the uh did did you play that game at all or even like assassin's greed or anything or is that kind of not much that brought to you yeah but it was i did my research well i know the worlds sure the uh the other nerd thing i wanted to ask which had nothing to do with the research was i see you got the 3d printer back there uh and i was wondering what because i certainly i had a printer for seven years and i do a lot of like i'll print my own focus gears for like cameras that or lenses that don't you know stills lenses or whatever or just like

even accessories for my car. So question is, what do you use that for, just for fun or for profit? Well, that belongs to my wife, Connie, who is a visual artist. Oh, hell yeah. She went through a design degree at Art Center. And so she was laser cutting and doing all the stuff, model making, the whole thing. And now she's been using 3D printing for like multimedia visual art. So she's like using AI generated imagery with animations to like poetry.

And then she has these 3D printed sculptures, she's like extruded from AI images. And she recently exhibited these in Paris and things like that. So she's like a multi-faceted, interesting person who uses every tool available to her. so she's mainly the 3D printer and I at one point I was really into gear I had like red camera I still have like my own slider and like all the tools that I could get because I wanted to have them but more and more so especially on like the uh they did bigger shows I really just have to rely on the crew for their ingenuity and I'm like I said stuck sort of like scratch scratching my head about how, what am I going to do with four million LEDs and how it

bring this episode to life, which is a new genre. You know, some of these have like never been done before in Star Trek. You'll see, especially later in this series, this season, there's genres that have not been done in any Star Trek show. So a lot of creative focus on that. And I've put my like screwdrivers away for the time being. actually recently I'm like always like cleaning out my garage or something

and I have my like AC pouch with all the tools and I even have orange sticks and like film actual film tool right I can't put orange sticks no one's guessing maybe I'm gonna change a mag you know and I still have my changing tent and so I have this stuff and it's just like

I'm just I'm not using it a lot one of my main tools I do still use is a laser pointer yeah I feel like every time I don't bring in shit I need to like point at something and now we're just that one. No, no, no, no, the other one. Do you mean the other one? So there's always like the tools you need,

but I haven't been like constructing and printing and designing as much as diving into scripts and, you know, trying to interpret them. Well, that's kind of the journey of professional, right? It's like it's always like gear and nitty gritty up until the point. where you someone else can do that. I was just, I was talking to another, it was like an interview like two days ago where we were saying like that's the whole thing

is you, you, when you're on the indie side, you're like trying so hard to know everyone's job and like, you know, do everything to the best of your ability. And then when you finally, it's like being rich, like you finally have money and now everyone wants to give everything to you for free.

It's like you know everyone's jobs. You finally get there and now everyone else can do it for you. You just got a point. There's a lot of authority to that or, you know, the agents only call you when you don't need them anymore or something. You know, it's like, right. That's definitely not the case for me. I found a great agent who reached out to me after she saw Bone Tomahawk and thought it was

really great and he wanted to help me. And she's been instrumental, actually helped me connect with Strange New Worlds and things like that. So Tara Kromer is excellent. But that said, with the whole, you know, let your crew support you, I did. again, with my wife, who's extremely talented, we co-wrote and co-directed a feature on our own, and we live up in Lake Arrowhead, and we walk these trails, you know, like every week or multiple times a week, and the scenery is so beautiful, wanted a story that we could capture our experience of living there in these really scenic places, all natural. So we developed

a story about a man who's lost someone and needs to go into nature to like a legendary sort of mystical place where they could possibly reunite. So there's like the feeling of loss, and it's very internal, but it's also extroverted into nature as this sort of like healing, challenging place that we have to return to to really like make sense of what our feelings are. So we shot this thing with almost no dialogue and a 10-person crew was basically all our friends. Right.

All the exteriors, we did do some interiors, but all the exterior. We did do some interiors, but all the exteriors, it was zero artificial lighting, no belt sport, just time of day and angles, you know? Like if we want... No nag? No. All right. Contrast.

And it just kind of naturally worked, whereas, like, we want some shape. It's like, rotate 25 degrees. Now the back, like, we're here, the fills over here, and this naturally falling off. And it's like, why are we even attracted to this? because it just exists. So it was really an exercise in returning to the basic cosmic reason we like single sources and this kind of contrast and the way the sun dips over the atmosphere. We would wake up at 4 in the morning and go shoot Magic Hour and then take a nap

and then shoot Magic Hour in the evening, not every day because that's like very long days, but we'd take advantage of it when we could. and it was basically like magic hour of the movie except you know we wanted this sort of like a thriller plot we were really inspired by tree of life and these sort of moody things but we were like we want a very singular story yeah when I did that all on our own and that was wearing all the hats again and I was like

I'm grabbing the easy rig and I'm doing the thing I'm you know like digging and like creating a path to track somebody handheld down the woods and stuff so you know it was like grab the shovel and here we go is that uh when's that going to come out i mean when it's done no yeah i mean fair enough yeah no one's no one's got the whip on you we purposely were like okay the pressure is low in order to you know delivery that we don't have um anybody breathing down our our next except ourselves and everybody collaborated we want to get this out there but it's been a great process because

we get to grow along the way we grew as we shoot it and we're growing in the post-prudish cream post-production process dabbling and editing similar selves with like working with talented people so it's helped me become a much better cinematographer having gone through a future film

directing and everything process instead of like generating the footage which is still a very personal thing but like handing it off and saying we'll see you at the premiere really taking it all the way and realizing how difficult it is to pull something off but also like

being sensitive to every aspect of it so that it makes you a better collaborator. And, you know, we did that a few years ago. And I think Star Trek, Star Trek was probably my first, like, major project having been through all those aspects. And I think I noticed my ability to collaborate better. Yeah. I mean, I've always said that being an editor makes you a better DP. And over the pandemic, I started offering my services of colors because I was coloring all my own shit anyway.

And I got like a handful of like documentaries and shorts and a couple features. And I wouldn't say that coloring makes you a better DP, but it certainly lets you takes the pressure off when you're like, oh, fuck, I don't know, you know, I don't need to get a flag up here. I know I can take that down, you know, with a window versus going, eh, they can do that right, you know, that kind of thing. But I assume, yeah, writing and directing and especially all that would make you a better all-arounder, a better, as you're saying, collaborator. I had this really weird experience in undergrad. I did my own film as a thesis, and I did every aspect of it. I wanted to collaborate with people along the way, but it was a story about, so I'm a classical cellist. Oh, wow.

That was my introduction to like a creative headspace. and lifestyle. My mother's a pianist and grandmother was a pianist. And I've just sort of been around it. That's how me and my wife met. She's a wonderful pianist. That's amazing. The transition from classical music to cinematography was very direct for me because I went to film school and they handed me a bolex and we're like, all right, here's a light meter, go figure this stuff out. I didn't know photography at all. And I had done illustration and ironically, my grandfather was like a commercial illustrator. So that aspect of my life was also sort of there, but I hadn't practiced with a camera. So I learned, like, what an F-stop was

shooting motion pictures. So I had handing or holding this, um, Llex, and I was like, okay, this is my instrument. And now I got to learn the technicals, like the exposure and the angles and the framing and this sort of stuff. And lo and behold, you can create some meaning out of it and the audience gets an emotional response. I was like, I know how to do that. Right. With a musical instrument. So cinematography to me has always been visual music. It has to be rhythmic. It has to have phrasing. It has to

build up and have harmony or dissonance and things like that. So it's like light on dark, dark on light is sort of like building a chord to me. What was I talking about? Oh, well, I'll say I'm nodding emphatically because I grew up in

music. I'm a drummer, but I learned how to play guitar. But one question I always ask DPs when I hear that they come from a musical background is how do you, because I can't articulate it, but you've just done it for me, which is why I was snapping my own neck, is like, how does music and cinematography or even filmmaking match? Because I always end up trying to like, I'll show someone a song and I'll be like, this is like filmmaking. And they're like, that's, what do you mean? it's like that's not a score and I'm like no no no like the the feeling you know the the way that it doesn't return to its own chorus I don't know that's film make you know there yeah I would edit my reel for you know I don't know a couple weeks or something and I'd spend six months

trying to find the right song oh it's the worst parts but I was saying that because I had this weird experience in undergrad where I made this film it was very personal to me I wanted somebody to help me write it, but they couldn't understand this because it was just so internal. And I wanted somebody to direct it. I didn't even want to direct it. I just really wanted to put it together and shoot. It was about a violinist who was struggling with music and

realize that music was so much more than what they were playing and being taught. So they were sort of coming of age creatively, which was, you know, mimicking my own life in doing the film itself. Very meta. Right? Which now. So I ended up doing all these roles. I definitely didn't want to edit it. Ending up

ended up editing it myself worked for the composer to do the score and all this stuff and it in the undergrad i went to temple university in this sort of like final film festival it won best script best directing best score best editing no cinematat artist and i'm like you're telling me to do everything else you know it was it was a strange experience but i think that when I do my own project, I'm really just invested in the storytelling. I don't know that the cinematography suffered, but I guess it just like wasn't inherently as like gravitating to that specific audience. So similarly, when we did this feature film, I definitely made a point of like having the

cinematography shine, but it's just realistically telling a story. And I do think that makes you better at one particular craft. when you've had your hand and all of them. Yeah, well, and I imagine the reason you, I don't think every DP wants to be a director, but I think good DPs understand

directing, you know, you're a visual storyteller, as everyone always likes to say. So I imagine if you're focused on directing, especially as a student, you're getting the shots that work, not necessarily the shots that'll win you an award. You know, you're not thinking pretty,

pretty you're thinking functional. You know, in credit to the ASC, I did the cinematography program at AFI. And when I was shooting my thesis film there, I specifically was like, all I want to do was tell a great story. You know, that's why I went to this program. They're teaching you great technicals and there's a lot of like super talented cinematographers coming into that program. Actually, a lot of my peers from that year. A lot of people on this podcast. Yeah, Autumn Dural and Todd Bann Hazel and Matt Lloyd and all these guys. They're just really shooting some of the world's top projects. And we all were in the trenches together. But on my thesis, I was specifically just trying to tell us. Or like, let's go moody. I don't know. I don't want to

win an award. I just want to tell this story. And it ended up like I ended up winning this ASC. you know graduate award um and michael goy was a president of the ac at the time and he called me and i was sort of shocked um and he said you know when we uh watched everybody's things it always comes down to a very close match you know sometimes we even have to rewatch and rewrite people's uh projects fresh competing against each other and they said we ended up deciding yours was the winner because it really supported the story. And so that's always been my approach, that it's narrative over, I don't know, pretty images.

Of course, you want to think your images are pretty, and I think that when you're telling the story, they become that, you know. But that's been my personal approach and the multifaceted background and things like that, think are always coming into play the visual music and all that so um you know that's my 3d printer story well to your point about like uh you know visual music and stuff and that i think the shot becomes pretty i because like i think a standard pretty shot is boring like we all think

of the same pretty shot but if it's the right shot I'm going to articulate this better. I've said a million times on this podcast that, like, technically correct sucks and feeling is always going to win. Like, even if, even if the shot is technically incorrect, if it feels correct for the moment, it'll always win out. And that's, you know, same, same. I didn't sleep last night because I watched your shit and then I watched three more movies. So my brain's half slow. Oh, I love it.

That sounds like you're in a creative flow. a bit that's what I was going to say when you were mentioning the when at the very beginning of this conversation when we were talking about time taking in and time releasing is have you heard of um Stephen Coulter wrote a whole book on flow states or and I guess he's standing on the shoulders of giants but there's a whole series of books on flow states and that's like that's like how I live oh okay perfect yeah it's like you're following your inspiration from one thing to another and like trying to ride the crest if you will of your inspiration along the way and it makes doing your taxes even harder yeah dude because you're just

like oh my gosh this is so far below my inspiration at this moment yeah it always yeah april always seems to be peak i don't want to be here from time well now we got to October which i certainly took advantage of i was like no fucking way i'm going to nab i really can't remember what that what that meal was that you're trying to write off luckily i am self-employed and i got quickbook self-employed and i'm i'm good at on the app going like where i was what i did i write a little note otherwise you're a hundred percent right yeah yeah yeah flow state is definitely um become my lifestyle as much as I can keep it there

and I think that's you feel the creativity flowing from you instead of feeling like you're chasing it and that's definitely I was in periods of my creative career earlier where I felt like I was chasing like if I need to do the stuff I need to do first and then I convene a headspace. Right. Oh, that's the worst.

Let the inspired headspacer to take you where you need to go and everything will get there. And hopefully the IRS doesn't come and rest here. Yeah, that whole, if, there's so many versions of that that people go through. Can't remember what, I think it's, what is it, the War of Art, the Stephen Pressfield book. Maybe I got, yeah, it's too many Stevens. Anyway, you know, I was talking about resistance and stuff, but the worst version of resistance is when people go like, oh, all I need to do is first I'll go to this retreat and then I'll be a good whatever. You know, first I'll, once I can get into USC, then I'll be a good filmmaker. And it's like, nope, you just got to just do it now when that, when that crest comes and that flow state hits you.

flow state's like the second level of being present and meditative right like once you're present you're not thinking too hard about everything else you're open to the idea of the flow state hitting you and you can catch that proverbial wave totally talking about you know that if if then you know something i saw a lot um you know continuing to shoot because dPs you know the the it's as hard as anything when you're getting started it's like how do you show people that you know they should work with you or you know how do you get to work with the people you want to right but um it is at least um starting out i think highly technical and um you get to shoot more than a director you know and um something that i would see is like directors wanting to be directors

and not producing content, like, not producing shorts. It's like, if you want to practice the art of directing, it's like, go grab that DSLR and cut something together. You don't have to show it, you know, but you can do it. So it's similar in cinematography, I feel, where, oh, once I learn this, so I've had experience on this, then I can shoot. It's like, well, I think it's always starting from the bottom, matter what. Yeah.

If you want to shoot, shoot. Because, hey, phones look great now. Well, that's the thing I was going to, because we've mentioned a few times on this podcast, like various deepies. You know, I have echoed the telling students or people just getting into it like, oh, if you need to start and you're strapped for cash, use your phone. And I will always, especially online, see a lot of resistance. to that people saying oh you just don't get it um no one's going to take it seriously uh you know that's you're you're being naive and i'm always like no you're being uh not naive whatever uneducated on the issue the issue is you need to fail a lot first the the the price to entry is

failing a lot first and you might as well not spend 15 grand on a camera package to just fail first and then we'll talk about the camera absolutely yeah there was a there was a period where I was really close to buying an Airy 3, Airy 35, 3. Because I was like, oh, I want to shoot high speed and I want to shoot 35. I was like, yeah, well, if I spend, I don't know what it was. It was a pretty good deal. I was like 15 grand or something for that and the lens. And like, oh, maybe I should do this.

I was like, well, then what am I going to put in front of the camera? Right. You know, so I think instead I did a short and shot it either on like on a DVX or something that I could. get my hands on um and that's the truth especially acting you know i think that sometimes not always but sometimes i get you know my motto is good cinematography is great acting on screen yeah if you've got to the point where the acting is stellar you probably an equality product their project and you know how to like them and it's like how do you support what they're doing and of course if it looks technically better and achieves the story goals it's going to it's

going to be a better result than if it's technically worse it's not to say the technicals are nothing but there's still like the primary skill is the the emotional interpretation and the support of that but to really honor what the actors are doing and make the technical process worked for them i think is a huge part of doing even on star trek which is a very technical show yeah being attuned to what the actors are doing we i think that fans love the show because of that aspect because they love the writing and they love the acting and um shooting it um is going to happen one way or another but shooting in a way that elevates the project is the emotional flow steak. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the, you know, I think I, uh, like many people, I'm a big

fan of David Fincher and I've been lucky enough to interview like four DPs now that have worked with him. And I finally after, you know, doing my dumb nerd research and talking to those people, realized that the entire process of his, it's a little neurotic, but the entire process This is literally just centered on actors. Like everything else goes to the, everything else is optimized to acting. And people like to talk about his cinematography and stuff. I'm like, yeah, it looks great.

But really, it's quite simple. It's very simple. It's like, it's the same four shots over and over again. It's the same lighting setups over and over again. It's literally, one guy was saying that for house of cards, they need it. The entire camera package had to fit in the, sprinter van and they needed to be up and ready within 15 minutes of arrival like acting time now um which goes exactly what you're saying sure lots bring out the neg fill let's go yeah gotta go yeah neg fill in one one keynote tube i've know that was the other thing i've noticed is a lot of meg and one keynote tube that would give them the pop in the eye you know no behind scratch oh yeah yeah it invisible uh the trick was an

invisible scratch like it wouldn't be too punchy but yeah well i have kept you uh far longer than i intended but uh this conversation's been great and i'd love to have you uh back on i don't know maybe at the end of the season where you can have back on talk about whatever sure oh maybe maybe you won't have had shot something by then because strike but well let's keep in touch um yeah want to pick my brain about this egg I'm going to hole in front of your face but not show you what's inside of this mystery episode that's never been done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's going to do something people talk about. So just back on that. And then, yeah, I mean, I would love to shoot something at some point this year. Yeah, so hopefully we'll get to that. I flew to Toronto,

prepped the season, That was going to start in May, didn't shoot it, and now I'm sitting here talking about shooting. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Hopefully by the time this episode comes out, that will have been resolved. I hope so. Yeah. Well, thanks for the extra time, man.

It was really awesome to chatting with you. And like I said, the show's fucking great. You guys are running on all cylinders. Thank you, man. Appreciate the support. Frame and Reference is an Albot production. It's produced and edited by me, Kenner. McMillan and distributed by Pro Video Coalition. As this is an independently funded podcast,

we rely on support from listeners like you. So if you'd like to help, you can go to buymea coffee.com slash frame and ref pod. We really appreciate your support. And as always, thanks for listening.