This book is not for everyone. If you don’t eat, breathe and live cinematography… maybe you should read something else. Seriously. This book may not be for you. (But if it is… you’d better not miss it.)
A review of this book on Amazon.com says:
“If you’re going into a career in the film industry, and will be working with cameras with the intention of working your way up to be a DP, this is the book for you. If you’re doing limited-budget work, and wearing multiple hats (writer/director/cameraman, etc), this book won’t serve you well. It’s intended to those with big bucks, and most of the tips/suggestions/advice in the book primarily apply to those working on films with a budget of a million bucks or more… That said, plenty of the tips do apply to anyone working the camera for a production of any size, but there are far better resources available if you’re doing what you do on a shoestring.”
With all due respect to the author of this review, this is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a long, long time.
I’m often laughed at by young filmmakers when I promote Hollywood methodologies for filmmaking. “We’re indie filmmakers,” they say. “We don’t go for that Hollywood crap. We’re going to do it our own way and be highly original and creative!”
I laugh right back at them. I know they’re doomed. They’re going to spend more time reinventing the wheel than actually using it to get anywhere. The production methodology invented in Hollywood over the last 100 years has made it one of the most efficient industries on the planet. It has to be: depending on the project you’ll have anywhere from 10 to 100 people who have to come together 20, 30 or 40 times a day to make one shot happen, and they have to do that for anywhere from one day to six months at a time. It’s controlled chaos, and it’s a miracle that films get made at all.
But the only reason they get made is because of this Hollywood methodology.
