Cinematography : Starting my career by Brandon Marks

If you are doing commercials, stick with it. That's great $ and a great learning environment. There has never been a more difficult time to build a cinematography career. The field is saturated. Frankly how people got started even 10 years ago is irrelevant; things move too fast now and people keep entering the field with no real growth in employment. 2 things that have yet to change: 1) who you know and 2) patience. Better to be a reliable low-level team player on big union shows than yet another indie DP/ filmmaker trying to DIY and network your way upward. Time + the right connections = success. ( You need luck too, but that's just cosmic)

Great advice from Royce. Most of us older guys, got their start doing commercials, like myself, and I suggest just sticking with it. Why? Because you have more opportunity to be more creative. Doing features and docs is almost boring. You have absolutely NO say in creativity, and your day is spent squinting with one eye for 12 hours, maintaining your frame lines and following the money. But the money is good. I highly suggest going to a camera rental house, and let them let you practice on a geared camera head. Great place to network and meet other camera techs. Also, the other good point that Royce made was about the over saturation of cinematographers. The reason being that 90% of them out there have less than 5 years of experience, and half of them have the audacity to call themselves a DP! VERY discouraging!!!

Thanks guys! This is the second time I'm hearing about the camera rental house and I'm going to start pursuing that as it does seem like a good way to make some connections. The most discouraging thing for me about the commercial world (as I have experienced it thus far) is that many people aren't interested in creative shots, they just want boring, static frames for the majority of their commercial. Often times my girlfriend (who edits a lot of my work) gets told to cut out anything remotely creative... I take it this is abnormal?

Most clients really have no idea what they want in a shot. If you are doing lots of statics, just put the camera on a slider or a dolly. It's still a static shot, but subtle camera moves without being obvious will give that "national look". Worse, of course, is when the client insists on get his ugly mug in front of the camera! What I am trying to say Brandon, your clients idea of "creative" is generally too over-the-top in THEIR mind---with flaming monkees jumping out of airplanes landing in Jello. Most clients are just very straight-laced accountant types, anyway. But, at the end of the day, all that matter is if they are happy----and if the check is good---or not.

Maybe I misunderstood the initial post Brandon.. are you shooting smaller commercials as a DP, or working on agency spots as a lower level crew member ( national or global accounts ) ? I would say that when a DP gets involved in a commercial ( agency -produced ) they have the least creative input of any realm ( certainly less than feature narrative- that's where you get the most opportunity to create, and also the worst pay for that very reason ).. you are shooting of storyboards and at the mercy of stylists and a gaggle of suits in video village. You are shooting the parts that were pre decided. If you are doing smaller commercials, that's a different thing- director / DPs often do those, and so influence the thing from the start. I think I was suggesting better to work as any sort of BTL crew (camera or lighting) on big shows than to shoot and cut small stuff... because small leads to more small, usually.

Yeah, sorry I was very unclear in the original post. What I'm doing hardly qualifies for a DP credit. Basically most of the time I am working on very small, usually one man shoots in which I get to the location wherever it may be and meet with an executive or someone else involved with the company I am shooting the spot for and they say "I want a wide shot followed by a close up of this persons face and that's it". Either that or I basically work from shot lists gathered through emails. What's worse is a lot of the time I wind up getting to shoots and the person has no idea what they or their company wants, so then I have to design shots on the spot with very meager equipment (the production office I work for is indeed a very small startup company) and then run every shot by them. Then, when the edited piece gets sent through for approval, they often wind up saying "I don't like this slider shot, can we just go with the simple wide and the closeup"? It is great to technically be working in my field right out of school, but I definitely want to move on to larger productions that will be seen outside of PA. I just don't know how to get to that point. I guess that is the basic idea of my original post.