But time and time again I’ve realized that that’s not necessarily the case. So when you hire a DP. You must look at their work you must interview them, you must understand it if they understand the kind of budget level you’re at because you can get an Academy Award winning DP. But if they’re used to playing with very big toys and your budget is one hundred thousand dollars. It’s not a good fit. So that’s on a side note but I’m going to tell you the story of what happened to me when I first first got in the business. Shot my very first big big thing. I was shooting back in the early ninety’s. I was shooting on film thirty five millimeter film believe it or not. And I knew this company that happen to have film cameras lighting kits.

They had a whole business shooting a bunch of different things. They have a sound stage everything all in Miami. And these guys wanted some new cool stuff on there real. So I told him look you know if you guys jump on board. You know I’ll give you a copy of it for your real and you know blah blah blah and we all kind of work together. But on the outset it looked like these guys knew what they were doing. I mean they had a full business doing it. What I didn’t realize is the business that they were in. Was kind of like inferential kind of lighting and corporate video kind of stuff. They had no idea how to do a high end fashion Nike commercial which is what I was doing and I was doing, actually did three commercials with them and I was shooting thirty five and they had thirty five millimeter cameras and it cost me about fifty thousand dollars to do my demo real which was about three what ended up being five commercial spots.

When it was all said and done. So I packaged them all out to do him in like five days and you know it and try to do it is you know affordably as possible because there was no digital anything back then. It was like I was barely able to edit this on an avid back in the day. But anyway. So we went to start shooting and I didn’t get one DP. I got two DP’s and now my crew was top notch. I had a good producer who was working with me and she basically inherited these DP’s and all their gear she didn’t choose them she didn’t know she was a seasoned professional. After day one the crew. That day one. Excuse me. Hour one the crew walked off the set from them because I said we’re not working with these guys, these guys are idiots. They have no idea what they’re doing. So the producer had talk them back.

Blah blah blah. Because the crew was actually a professional film crew. But these guys were complete idiots and what happened is if you ever are on a set with two DP’s you need to run away. There’s no reason for two DP’s ever at all. There is a DP. There’s a grapher that’s standard but two actual Director Photographers with credits as Director Photographers both of them talking about how they’re going to light the scene. It is absolutely insanity. The crew members for years later after I worked with many other projects they kept referring to them as two monkey DP’s because they would just jump all over the set.

They used to use a light meter and they would light and they would check the light meter. Fifty times a minute to see how their lighting was and they would pull out four hundred lights from their massive group truck to light this scene and the crew was like what are these guys doing. So I was pushing the envelope. I was shooting very unique stock of film.

I actually gave them a booklet that I created on how to shoot the stock of film it was called Reversal Film Stock to get some very unique looks and I even felt that didn’t know they had never shot anything like this before so I did all the research to have them understand it and then I was on top of them a lot of times because I’m technical so I was like what’s your what’s your F-STOP and you know how is it and what are you doing in with all this kind of stuff so fast forward to the entire the endless thing.

One of the commercials came out so so horribly horribly bad. That I literally burned the negative. I didn’t give it to them. I actually went outside of my house opened up a big metal pan dump to the thirty five millimeter negative in there and burned it because I would never I never wanted to let anyone see this