 Welcome to The Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today, we are looking at what difficulties photographers run into when they start making films based on my own experience. Over the last couple of years with the release of new cameras, but probably starting with the 5D Mark II from Canon that allowed you to record video on a, you know, professional stills camera. More and more photographers are getting into video, getting into film, getting into cinema. They have an understanding of the lights and they have the gear already. They obviously probably have clients that want video. So it seems very natural that as a photographer, you would branch off into giving your clients what they want. Video content to go with the stills you're taking or a whole bunch of different stills themselves. So I thought I would look today at the kind of differences between photography and cinema and motion and why and where some photographers struggle. Myself included. I should say, first and foremost, I started off as a filmmaker, got interested in photography later and then realized that, you know, as similar as the two are, there are some really important differences which can really trip people up. The first one that comes to mind is performance. If you take a lot of photos of somebody, you'll eventually just by the nature of the art find something, find a nice angle or a nice unguarded moment or a split second where the person is just looking the right way. Without actually having to give them much direction and you'll capture a remarkable photograph. This works great. I do this. If your model isn't that relaxed on camera, you can just keep shooting and shooting and shooting and eventually they'll either loosen up or they'll, you know, let their guard down or do something interesting or the light will play in a certain way and it'll just sort of pop. This is much harder to do in cinema because the illusion of the character of the moment has to be maintained over a longer period of time. You have to do a lot more work into creating something rather than just shooting and capturing something. If you're a photographer, imagine trying to shoot an entire sequence of hundreds of photos, all of which are good. None of which are a bad image. That's filmmaking, right? You have to, you have to, and it takes a different type of actor in front of the camera. I think photographers get really good at seeing the potential of a model, knowing that they can get something usable from them, even if they're not a professional. With actors, it's a lot more difficult. You can't just put a model in front of a camera and expect to get something good in the way that you usually can get away with in photography, or at least the way that I've been able to get away with things in photography. Another way that I think photography is different from filmmaking is that the image is the image in photography. It just needs to be beautiful or interesting. It just needs to draw the eye. Whereas in filmmaking, there's much more of a need to tell a story. And I think what a lot of photographers do wrong when they get into filmmaking is they try and bring that same sense of beauty to their films and their films end up looking like cosmetic commercials or perfume ads. They end up looking very on the surface beautiful, but with nothing underneath. You need to dive deeper with film. People expect more story. People expect more substance from a film than they do from photography. Photography is a lot more consumable. And talking in generalizations here, you know, people scroll through Instagram and like, Oh, that's cool. That's cool. But they'll judge a film on a much higher criteria. You know, does it suspend my disbelief? Do I feel for the characters? Do I understand the story? All these things are extra layers of complexity, which brings us to our next point. Filmmaking requires a team. It's too much to do alone, like a lot of photographers do. Yes, photographers have assistants and some have DITs and some have whole teams. But generally speaking, again, filmmaking requires much more of a collaboration with other artists, with your cinematographer, with your art director, with your script and writers, with your actors. You become less of an soul artist and more of a focus point, both to express what you're going for and then to filter everyone's ideas to that than you are someone who sort of has their hands in the artwork and gets to control every little piece. There's just too many moving parts in cinema. It's just too difficult. Even if you have a lot of time and a lot of resources, you need to delegate and you need to work with people who share your vision and who can understand what you're trying to do and let them and empower them to do what they do. Fixing things in post is a lot more difficult in filmmaking than it is in photography. In photography, you're used to photoshopping out the hairs or cleaning up the skin or basically replacing the background. You can still do these things in film. They can be far more expensive because not only do you have to do them 24 times a second for film, but it's very difficult to make that look consistent. In film, it's much more efficient to get it right in camera and improve it in post than it is to get the plate and create the image in post. You have to be a lot less tolerant of faults as a filmmaker because you can't go through every frame and erase that hair or that fly on the wall or brighten the skin every single time. Yes, you do a lot in post. You just don't have the same level of control without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Speaking of which, my backlight died somewhere in that last point, so I can't go back and fix it in post. We're just going to have to live with it. My final point is, while there are a lot of differences, there are a lot of similarities as well. If you've developed an eye and a vision and a sense of taste and a confidence with the camera as a photographer, there is a lot of that that you can bring over to filmmaking. You just need to understand that it's a different space that requires new skills, but the hardest part of both film and photography, I think, is finding your voice. Once you've found that in stills, it really is a very small adaptation to bring that into motion. Thanks for watching, guys. Leave your questions in the comments below. Were you a photographer that became a filmmaker or vice versa? I'd love to get your take on it, but really appreciate you watching. Subscribe if you want more videos like this, and I will see you next time.