If you’re a filmmaker a lot of your business likely comes from shooting corporate films, whether that be interviews with exciting brands, product commercials or tourism videos, all of which have a pretty set list of deliverables and are designed more likely than not to be utilised by a marketing team to turn a profit. This is all well and good and it’s the nature of the film business, one I actually really enjoy working in, but at times these somewhat restrictive guidelines can get in the way of our creativity.

This is where your first short film comes in. A blank canvas for you to tell whatever story you like.

At some point throughout your career as a filmmaker you’ve no doubt reached a point where you feel that you’re far too busy to even consider taking on more work, as every waking moment is being consumed by your current project. It’s an amazing feeling to have so much work on your plate that you don’t feel the need to source more, but eventually you’ll wrap up that project and be left wondering what happens next.

If you’re an underwater filmmaker or photographer, you will know just how hard getting perfect colours is underwater. Particularly from a videography perspective, where pulling accurate and life like colours from an underwater scene is post production is often very difficult, even impossible at times. But imagine a world where you can get perfect colours every single time? This world exists. It’s called R3D REDCODE RAW.

The reality of following your passion to become a filmmaker or cinematographer is not quite as glamorous as it seems online. We are constantly seeing success stories and scrolling through highlight moments from some of our favourite photographers and filmmakers, and while life is always greener somewhere else, we are often not seeing the whole truth. Following your passion to become a filmmaker is a viable career option if you have the motivation and dedication, but there are a number of hard truths that you will have to face.

If you’ve been following my work lately you have probably seen that I’ve recently invested quite a bit into a new camera system. This is Nauticam’s RED Raptor system, and while I probably should have used the money on a down payment for a house, I’d like to share why I decided to invest the money into a RED instead, and maybe, maybe, why you should as well… but probably not. That’s bad advice.

I hear this all the time from filmmakers starting out, with Mirrorless cameras like the Sony A7SIII and FX3 why would we ever need to bother learning manual focus?

And to that, I ask you have you ever finished shooting a project and jumped into the edit, only to notice that some of your favourite shots are ruined by a distracted or jumpy autofocus system or that in an essential moment of footage your autofocus was locked onto the wrong target. And given no other option, you’re either forced to use to the out of focus footage or delete the whole scene?

It's moments like this that originally drove me to learning manual focus many years ago, for situational moments where I knew my autofocus system wasn’t going to perform well, and today, this among a large range of other reasons is why I shoot almost all of my footage using manual focus.