Allegedly, I am going to be graduating from high school in one month and three days.

With that, I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection. It’s weird that I won’t be living at home in four months. I was really excited about it ever since I got my acceptance letter. Now, I feel something different, but I can’t really put my tongue on what exactly it is. It isn’t fear, but it’s something like it.

This year, I set out to watch a movie a day.

Something I’ve always taken for granted is the importance of learning through example. I used to pore over theory articles and spent the better part of the day with my camera. I worked hard and long on my abilities and tried my best to develop my eye, but I found that I was simply not growing at the rate I wanted. Last summer, I was given a very important piece of advice from someone I look up to very much – one cannot explore new facets of cinematography without first learning about and understanding thoroughly the foundation left by our predecessors; only in this way can one really learn the rules of the craft and find ample space upon which to build. It’s a very simple concept, and when it really struck me, it was like waking up from a long sleep. Finally, I had found the missing piece and was ready to begin.

I noticed a change in the quality of my work almost immediately. Seeing the masters at work humbled me and made me think about everything in a new way – I would spend hours watching their creations, and nearly the same watching their interviews. Suddenly, I was much less afraid to work in front of others. How could I be scared with my good friends Chabrol and Hodge looking over my shoulder, making sure all of my moves were sound? With my mentors, my heroes with me always, my Libatique and my Deschanel, I felt more confident in my work than ever. Every fall from grace was a chance to learn. I took something from every mistake I made, and I never made that particular mistake again.

One other epiphany that came was the realization that cinematography is not so much a way to show how I see the world, but rather a way to show others how the characters within the narrative experience it. Something about me is that I’ve never seen a movie that I didn’t enjoy or learn from in some way (aside Water For Elephants; terrible movie). I’ve taken in many hours of film, but the one that’s stuck with me the most so far is Requiem for a Dream. Suggested to me by one of my good friends, the movie chronicles the lives of four urbanites as they warp and twist with their respective addictions – television, heroin, cocaine, food, pills. One of the most obvious devices used to tell the story is the use of smash cuts to explicate the transition between sobriety and intoxication. In the beginning, there is a certain juxtaposition between the tranquil world of the protagonist’s elderly mother and the underworld that he inhabits. As their addictions progress, the aesthetics do as well – shots become tighter, scenes become shorter and more manic as their lives deteriorate; the two worlds converge to a singularity of drug-induced despair. That was when it struck me. If this story were told through an objective third party observer, the style would be static throughout the entire movie, and if a movie isn’t dynamic, there isn’t any reason to watch it all the way through.

This completely changed the way I read movies. As I began to get a better grip on the language of cinematography, I was much more able to understand the dynamics of the characters – who’s important, who’s not, who lives, who dies, who betrays the good guy, who prevails and saves the day. This, as a whole, has made watching movies much easier and has made every experience much more satisfying. It has affected the way that I look through the lens, through layers of plastic and metal, through tiny, tiny screens. It has impacted my writing, my characters, the problems they cause, and the way they overcome them. I dream in narrative. I see in Technicolor.

If I had to do it all over again, I would spend less time eating and more time in my basement giving benediction to my own personal hierarchy of gods, the men that tell stories, the men behind the glass, the only men that make me feel anything at all.