PRODUCTION • Director of Photography Role

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The DOP works closely with the director to creative the overall look and identity of a production. They are the second most powerful creative person on set and the roles can incorporate technical and creative skills which I aim to develop along the process of this production in order to make it the best that it can be.

“As a director of photography, it is important to know your equipment”.

This is especially important as there are times when quick decisions and changes are made to a production and it’s essential be able to adapt to this and move along with the production. In order to prepare myself for these kinds of situations I want to make sure that I am fully comfortable with using the Panasonics which are our chosen camera and explore the settings in more depth so that if I am asked by the director to try something different or change a setting, this is an easy and quick process which will save us time during shoot days. It is also important for the fact that we are filming some scenes in multi-cam which will be much more challenging than a single camera shoot. This will take some testing days and be confident in my camera operators abilities in working with the cameras. For the crew, I want to make some shoot documents that has all the correct camera settings that I will decide on and make some blocking documents so that when I’m explaining to the crew what we’re doing they can visualise it and see exactly what I’m trying to say.

“The director of photography manages several production departments but primarily the camera crew”.

This means that on our shoot days, I will be responsible for coordinating our camera crew and the assistants that are helping with sound and lighting. I think that due to the fact we are planning on booking out quite a bit of equipment, it will be helpful to have some assistants to help in setting up/moving/operating some of the equipment and allow me to focus on no only what I’m doing but be assured that we are getting as much coverage of our scenes are we have the ability to film multi-cam.

“The DOP also manages the lighting department.”

This is something that on our project I will be working with our assistants to achieve as we do not have anyone specific doing the lighting on our shoot. The director and I will hopefully discuss the type of lighting that they want and then I will work on suggests of ways in which we can achieve what the director wants. From pre-production, I know that our aim is to use as much natural lighting as possible which will be tricky if the weather is bad. It is also important that I work out where the sun rises and sets and which scenes will need to be filmed when depending on the location and where the room is in the house.


Overall I think that I will enjoy my role and want to complete it to the best of my ability. I aim to do more research into specific sitcom DOPs and explore they ways they do their roles and their filming styles and techniques, plus some of the traditional ways of filming and lighting for sitcoms.

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