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The Mind’s Eye Made Real

PostPosted: Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:51 pm
by Ben Chiu
The job of a Cinematographer is often misunderstood. Although I believe a Cinematographer should be involved in the project during pre-production, I'm sticking this article here in the Production forum because this is where the majority this craft is performed.

As with most aspects of movie making, your job is to make your work transparent (as if you did nothing). My belief is if your audience notices what you did when they're watching it and it takes them out of the movie, no matter how cool it might be, you did your compatriots a disservice.

Here is an article that talks about the contributions of a Cinematographer. While you may believe there's a fine line between enhancing/adding to project and going over the top, it seems to me that productions today tend to err on the side of impact so much that sensory overload has become the norm.

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...Film is highly collaborative undertaking, so it is difficult to attribute the highest importance to any one aspect. As a cinematographer, though, I appreciate how involved and how influential we can be in the creative part of making a film.

A cinematographer is often the one who most closely glimpses a film’s layers of meaning as envisioned in the mind’s eye of the director. It is our challenge to convey these many layers of meaning through the visual, affecting the way a film works emotionally. Each story is different, hence every film has its own created, unique vision, its own look...



Read the full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/02/28/the-envelopes-please/with-cinematography-the-minds-eye-is-made-real