Three Lessons for a Future in Cinematography
From Daryn Okada and Caleb Deschanel
This summer, the Academy Gold program introduced a production track, offering technical workshops and on-set experience for students with career interests in cinematography, production design, post-production and film editing.
Cinematography Branch governor Daryn Okada (“Mean Girls,” “American Reunion”) and Academy member Caleb Deschanel (“The Natural,” “The Patriot”) spoke to the interns about their own experiences and things they should know about the field. Here are three of them.
Be curious.
As Deschanel, a five-time Oscar nominee, puts it, “If you don’t have curiosity in this business and it doesn’t live with you all the time, I don’t think you’ll be able to survive.”
“The technology is changing so fast that if you don’t have the curiosity to stay up with it, it’s going to be really difficult to take advantage.”
Deschanel emphasizes going out there and getting to work. Shoot as much as you can, take photographs, be inventive. Your work will benefit from the creativity you bring to it.
Get experience — and use it.
Okada’s parents were plantation workers from Hawai’i and came to Los Angeles to find better jobs. They raised Okada in East LA and South San Gabriel, where, “from the earliest age, I watched TV and I’d see movies.”
“That literally was the escape mechanism. But it also was my view on the world.”
Images affected Okada since elementary school. After high school, he learned about projection and got a job screening student films. This is where he realized that he was most engaged by the images. Okada met students and offered to help in any way. From there, he worked his way up.
To this day, he relies on his decades of experience to do his job well.
As cinematographers on set, Okada says, “we don’t get to see everything right away.” You have to use your experience to trust what will work and what won’t.
Even then, each experience is unique. As Deschanel says, “You need to pre-visualize it and you need to have a storyboard. You need to know what you’re going to run up against. But then you need to let it breathe a little bit.”
“That’s how great movies are made.”
Take lessons that apply to you.
“Rules are meant to be broken, but you have to know the rules first.”
Okada emphasizes taking everything in, and then using only what’s relevant to you. He believes it is an active learning process.
“You have to be a participant in your own career,” he adds.
Learn more about Academy Gold, and how you can get involved, here.
