A miscellany of undifferentiated shots. Some of them would make a great first beat.

Scouting shots for The Sound of Water. Some of my favourites didn't end up serving the needs of the storyline, but are shown here in the hope that someone might enjoy them and that they could make themselves useful in some narrative way.

A collection of long exposures taken at night, some quite abstract. The effects you can achieve are fascinating, and the saturation delivered by long exposures on a digital camera can be breathtaking.

It'll be difficult to use this shooting style in a narrative way without blurring all of the human subjects, which is a problem I've been mulling over...

There is arguably no possible pattern of speciation that has not already been discovered by the branches of a tree in the wild, or planted in some park, or along some city street. I'm interested in recording some of these patterns, not necessarily as the start of any visual narrative, but as a self-contained metaphor for branching narrative, for the split and sweep of multiple possible futures. By examining a single tree, I can contemplate a dozen possible approaches in as many minutes.

A proof of concept. My first experiment in something I've long contemplated: the photographic quad, with 16 photographs representing 16 narrative beats. It's the visual analogue of the scripts that I have been writing here. I first considered producing photoquads simply to combine my obsession with the nuts and bolts of narrative with my interest in photography. And it's an idea I've resurrected now because, with every narrative beat requiring only a single flick of a shutter, it represents the cheapest possible visual exploration (in terms of production time) toward the goals of the Experiment.

Paths that will not open to the mind alone have been laid bare by the steady beat of trial and error. History is the travelogue of a million-odd solutions as they wander each in search of an accommodating problem. And humanity is itself a blunderous tide that mostly fails upon physical and intellectual barriers until one by one, they're worn away and gone.

I say these things because I begin to understand that no intelligence will achieve the goals I've set in this Experiment I've made of my life.

They say that your life is what happens to you while you're expecting it to arrive. And you can observe this principle in action without necessarily "living it out". You'll find it anywhere you look, because it's mirrored microscopically in every contact.

The final figure of a telephone number, for example, is not a number but a person. And when you dial it you had better count off 3-2-1-HUMAN in your head, because that's exactly what you're going to get. A person is a labyrinth of talent and desire, a root system that feeds a tree of skills diverged and intertwined to meet a unique series of opportunities. Wander it if you will. But don't expect to come out facing the same way you came in.

This is something that I've learned from Wendi Smallwood.

I'm not ashamed to admit that "illuminating failure" has been a recurrent theme in my life. I find that if you aim yourself directly at the thing that you desire, then you will make the right mistakes. And the difference between a "right" mistake and a "wrong" one, is that the right mistake is never of omission. The right mistake represents the results of a test of everything you believe. The right mistake provides you with enough observational material that you can decide whether to modify your approach to the next five minutes or your approach to your entire life.

I have modified my approach to my entire life in response to a particularly illuminating mistake I made called An Untitled Interaction.

As the demo clips previously posted further down this page reveal, I was originally trained to shoot on film. But most anything I do these days is on Digital Video. What technical enhancements do I use to disguise or compensate for this? (There are a lot out there that claim to do just that.) Is unadorned DV really worthy of capturing quality work?

I've heard independent filmmakers obsess at length about video vs. film, a debate that typically metastasises to encompass frame rates, progressive vs. interlaced, anamorphic lenses vs. HD modes, real steadicams vs. stabilisers vs. handheld. And then when the same filmmaker is on the set, and the actors, relatively neglected in the exercise of judgement, don't deliver the best they possibly could, the director gives vague instructions; does 12 takes, either all basically identical or each increasingly stiff with frustration; knows something is missing; becomes ever more aware of all the technical people waiting around on the set; and finally, at a loss for how to correct for anything but a 3:2 pulldown, convinces himself he's got enough, and moves on.

But he doesn't have enough. He doesn't have anything, and he will discover it as his heart sinks take-by-take in the editing room and his original vision evapourates, leaving a pixel-perfect string-puppet shadow version in its ruin.

I most recently worked in 16mm colour as the Director of Photography for a 30-minute film that played in the Toronto Short Film Festival, called The Devil & Ms. Jones, and excerpted here...

Clip One

Clip Two

Clip Three

Shooting on film is a great experience, and I do miss it, but not really because of its visual properties (and I'll explain why not in an upcoming post, above). Mostly I miss the challenge of it. Working on film is like flying without a net. Film cameras don't normally come with LCD screens attached, and even when they do, no video monitor can show you how the light will fall on that emulsion. You have to know it in advance, because you've tested on your film stock and you understand the language of light with a fluency that you can get away without on video.

Now there's no doubt that being well-versed in film photography is a big advantage when lighting for DV (much more so than vice versa), but strictly-speaking, it isn't completely necessary to get the job done. So there's a whole range of skills that only gets a vital workout on film. And when you haven't done it in a while ... yeah. You miss it.

Other projects I have shot on 16mm colour include the following two student films from my time at Ryerson in the film certificate program: Filmmaking in Two Easy Steps (as the writer, director, cinematographer, and editor); and The Payoff (as the cinematographer).

F.I.T.E.S.

The Payoff

Incidentally, the script for Filmmaking in Two Easy Steps is a 16-beat quad, the first one I ever wrote for the screen. And coming full circle in a way I never would have predicted ten years ago, I've been writing a lot more of them lately.