Many of you know and a bunch of you don’t know that Photography and Filmmaking are actually all about light when it comes to the image. Light is the key to making an image look great. Not enough light and the image is noisy and the colors will look strange, the sharpness of the photograph will be terrible making the image look grainy. In film/video it’s even more of a problem. The sensors our camera use today is light years beyond what was available just ten years ago but even still, they aren’t even close to the old celluloid film and much less, the human eye with its big grey central computer with the far superior AI built into every model.

I wasn’t schooled in the way of shooting or writing things those days. I just did it by the seat of my pants. My actors would sometimes ask me “what am I doing this for?” I would answer with “just trust me, it will work”. It did work for the most part. I only have one film I shot that no one has seen.

When Bad Boys premiered, the Miami lifestyle still had some “Miami Vice” reverberations and people were ready to see that vibe portrayed again. With audiences flocking to the other hits of the year like “12 Monkeys”, “Nixon” and the still-relevant “Seven”, we were all in the mood for a light-hearted action flick reminiscent of “Lethal Weapon.” Transferring the theme song from the hit TV reality show “COPS” didn’t hurt either. This movie didn’t let the theater-going audiences down as it delivered a healthy dose of camp, action, jokes, and star-power. I enjoyed the movie so much at the time that I bought it (there was no streaming then) and the soundtrack too. Although I found it “meth-lab” trailer park to play the theme song so I stuck to the other tracks when there was a possibility of someone eavesdropping on my musical choices. Bad Boys II might be considered a better film, and it made just as many people happy as the first, myself included

The movie is shot exceptionally well. I enjoyed ninety-five percent of the shots and set up. I especially love the one-shot, one-take way they did most of the film. It is very compelling and demands respect as it’s the most technically challenging thing to film. I thought they had to be using a boom or crane on a vehicle to get the shots of the two men going down into craters that must have been twelve to fifteen feet deep without having any camera shake, and they did exactly that. Pretty cool if you ask me.

I love making films. If you didn’t know that already, well, now you do. Sometimes we have a fleshed-out script, and sometimes we don’t. The real fun of making films sometimes comes from not knowing what I am going to film and figuring it out as we go. I know that sounds dumb, but it always seems to work out.

This last weekend, we did exactly that. We had outlined a few scenes and practiced some stunts with the actors. It worked out alright; it was one of those times when working on a wing and a prayer just felt right.

As you know, I love filmmaking. The one thing that always brings a smile to my face is when a project is finished, and the world gets to see.

It was going to be the first time I got to use my Sony a7III in a real studio environment. And It didn’t let me down. My a77, the camera that I have been using for the past eight years did though. I honestly didn’t have any idea just how behind the times it was.