Cinematography

Hey cinametogs! I want to know whether I’m being cleverly minimalist or just plain cheap and delusional.

I’m after a slow move from a dark, gloomy passage between buildings out into an open street with a proper shift in light. I do not want the camera helpfully “fixing” the exposure for me like some over-eager youTuber with a content-creator complex. I want the passage to stay underexposed and murky, and the street properly exposed when I come out into it.

So: can a pocket cam or action cam actually pull that off if you lock things down and don’t shoot like a caffeinated baboon, or do I quit pretending and drag out the full cine rig?

I’m looking at a GoPro 13 Black with the anamorphic mod, but I’m really wondering is if anyone with an action or pocket cam has pulled this off? Has anyone got this sort of shot to work without the camera doing something “helpful” and bollocking it, or am I trying to make a Swiss Army knife perform brain surgury?

I’m watching the Netflix Nordic series DETECTIVE HOLE starring Joel Kinnaman and I have to say the cinematography on this show is unreal.

It was fun being interviewed by the Palm Springs Screenplay Awards for being a finalist. There's a little in there about being a DP.

Read on...

https://www.palmspringsscreenplayawards.com/mike-fitzer-interview.html#/

A few things worth knowing about this month:

The April issue of American Cinematographer is out, covering Project Hail Mary, The Bride!, Wuthering Heights, and Amrum. Linus Sandgren breaks down his approach to Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights adaptation, and the issue includes a report on a performance-capture demo that James Cameron recently led for ASC delegates. New ASC members this month include Jarin Blaschke, Jomo Fray, and Zoe White.

NAB 2026 opens April 19-22 in Las Vegas. CineCentral sessions include a talk by Roberto Schaefer, ASC, on cinematography alongside panels on exposure, vertical production, and immersive production. Worth keeping an eye on if you follow gear and technology announcements.

On the virtual production side, VSS has partnered with ARRI to build one of Europe's largest VP facilities at ARRI Stage London -- over 700 square meters of creative space. The footprint of serious VP infrastructure outside of North America continues to grow.

The Cameron performance-capture demo for ASC members is worth a conversation of its own. His use of that technology across the Avatar films has pushed what is possible on set, and the implications for how cinematographers work within those environments are still being worked out.

Anything here you want to dig into further? Drop your thoughts below.

Cinematographer Greig Fraser ACS, ASC breaks down the visual and lighting approach behind Dune: Part Two, from the film’s colour journey (Caladan to Giedi Prime to Arrakis) to the practical challenge of creating realistic “sun” on set.

Fraser talks about building sharp, clean shafts of light, the problem of matching (or augmenting) the sun, and how the team used Creamsource Vortex fixtures, culminating in a custom build of 64 Vortex8 units (the “Vortex 512”) to create an intense, controllable sun source for Arrakis.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKZEwJD9wRo)

https://nofilmschool.com/day-for-night-filmmaking-technique-best-movies

https://youtu.be/gNmjwvtRl1Y

Fraser discussed one of his biggest challenges: How was he going to light the tunnel? “In the past, what people have done to move light is they put a light on a frame and moved it over a window or through something, but we had to have the entire tunnel being hit by the sun.”

“The tunnel had a bit of scariness to it at the beginning. It had to feel a little bit like he was going into a well,” he says. Fraser says he took a lot of inspiration from deep-sea submersible footage where they’re in pitch black, and they’re diving into the darkness, lit purely by the lights from the ship or from a headlamp.

Fraser and his team ended up building lighting rigs using old tungsten lights — a lot of them. “We physically couldn’t get enough LEDs to do that. They’re all old school tungsten lights, and we pixel-mapped them, so it meant that the sun can rotate around in any sort of configuration that we want.”

(https://variety.com/2026/artisans/features/project-hail-mary-cinematogra...)

As a DP, I'm always looking for ways to enhance the story, and more often than not, the best way to bring that extra emotion, clarity, or focus to a frame is by executing the simplest of moves.

For instance, I love a good push-in. Not a zoom, mind you, and not an optical enlarging of the frame, but an honest-to-goodness, tell your AC to get ready, dramatic dolly toward the subject.

You see this move all the time in films like A Few Good Men, American Beauty, Jaws, and countless other great pieces of cinema. No 12-minute oners, no complicated camera hand-offs mid-flight... Just a simple push-in to tell the audience that "THIS" is important.

What are some of your favorite, yet simple, camera techniques to amplify the story? Tell me in the comments.

In addition to running a film production company, I've been teaching an intro to film production course for two semesters at a local college. One of my favorite parts of the class is where we dig into lighting and how it informs a scene, character or mood.

I bring out films like Goodfellas, Another Earth, and one of my all-time favorites... Sid and Nancy, shot by renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins.

What are some of your favorite films (from a lighting perspective), and why should I include them in my course? Let me know in the comments below.

Dragged a gimballed camera with an anamorphic lens down a narrow passage and the result is... educational.

The walls bow and smear in all the fun anamorphic ways, but the camera is also doing a very honest impression of my skeleton reacting to gravity one footstep at a time. So instead of sleek menace, I’ve got “ominous corridor shot brought to you by the vertical bounce of the human meat suit.”

Clip attached.

Question for the cinematography hive mind: if you want this kind of moving shot without laying dolly track, what’s the trick to killing that footstep bob? Is it operator technique, body mechanics, rigging, lens choice, speed, some dark art I haven’t yet been initiated into, or simply the price of trying to be clever in a narrow space?

BTS: The Return does something quietly radical with its cinematography — director Bao Nguyen handed each of the seven members their own camcorders and just... let them shoot. No instructions, no shot lists. The result is a visual diary that feels genuinely personal rather than polished-for-consumption.

The deliberate choice to use camcorders over phones is worth paying attention to. Phone footage has a look everyone recognizes — it reads as "content." Nguyen wanted something closer to a family vacation tape: tactile, unguarded, a little imperfect in the best way. Some members filmed everything. Others barely touched the camera. That variation itself tells you something.

On the production side, Nguyen kept his own crew footprint intentionally small — tripods planted in corners, minimal handheld work so the crew wouldn't become part of the story. Tight recording spaces that might've felt like a limitation actually pushed the intimacy further. Sometimes constraints are the whole creative strategy.

The footage haul? Over 40 terabytes. From seven guys with camcorders and one disciplined documentary crew.

What came out of it has drawn real praise — compositions that make these global superstars look small against the world around them, which turns out to be exactly the point the film is trying to make. The visual language is doing thematic heavy lifting.

Director Bao Nguyen gave the subjects their own camcorders and credited them as cinematographers — with no shooting directives. As a cinematographer, how do you feel about this approach?