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I was having a conversation with a director of photography that I was working with at the time. The course of the conversation we were having eventually brought up the topic of American Cinematographer magazine. We agreed that it was a fantastic magazine to read and he went a set further and proclaimed it to be the single best trade magazine of any trade in the film industry and perhaps out of all trade magazines. This is a bold statement but flipping through a few issues of the magazine should make it clear to anyone, even non-cinematographers, that if it is not the best, than that there is something special about it. For those of you that do not know, American Cinematographer is a monthly trade magazine published by The American Society of Cinematographers. The reason he elaborated on as to what makes American Cinematographer is such a great trade magazine is its flow of information. In any trade magazine, the flow of information is essentially what makes or breaks the magazine.
This flow starts at the wellspring, the work force and knowledge base. American Cinematographer pulls from the resources of the American Society of Cinematographers an organization chartered in 1919 and is, to quote from their website, "committed to educating aspiring filmmakers and others about the art and craft of cinematography". This mission statement says something very powerful about the A.S.C. which I will return to later. With the A.S.C. you have an organization that has for all intents and purposes been around since the origins of the film industry. With over 300 members from over 20 different countries, the A.S.C. encompasses a significantly large cross section of professional directors of photography working in the industry today.
More important than simply the knowledge base of a trade magazine are the kinds of people that are in that knowledge base. For example directors, of both film and theater, are notorious for their secrecy. Without generalizing the field too much, directing is an art and when a director finds a successful method of getting a performance out of an actor, they are well known for being very secretive about those methods. To some extent, this is true in a lot of fields. Businesses protect their business secrets. No one wants to give their competitors their secrets. This attitude is surprisingly not a popular one amongst cinematographers.
My friend Ahmet explains this for me. When you're shooting something, he explained, you are in a specific location, at a specific time of day, with a specific lighting set up to work for a specific mood for the specific part of the script. You are shooting on a specific camera with a specific lens. All of these things build into the uniqueness of the shot. The probability that anyone else, yourself included, will ever be called upon to create the same atmosphere for an identical shot, in an identical location is almost astronomically low. To that way of thinking, why not release your craft secrets.
It is this attitude of willingness to share and teach that makes the flow of information from cinematographers to American Cinematographer so great. With no fear that their trade secrets will be stolen and used by their competitors, there is no reason not to document the exact position of every lighting instrument they used. If you open any issue of American Cinematographer there is a good chance that there will be diagrams of lighting and camera placement. One of the first magazines I really sat down and read cover to cover was the issue that came out in July of 2010. Inside it had a great article talking about the film Inception. As part of this discussion the article included a blueprint of, not one but at least two of their set pieces with detailed notations for where their lighting instruments were (and what models and color they were using) and their camera placement. Reading an article with that much detail in their diagrams, you really get a complete understanding of how that scene was shot.
Now as a filmmaker myself I'll probably never have to shoot on a rotating stage set in a dream world with the exact look that Inception had, but I may be able to use some of the techniques they developed in order to make that work technically. An even better example is in the February 2011 issue. The article on the Green Hornet talks about how they polarized the windows of the Black Beauty and used a polarized lens. They could then rotate the lens 90 degrees and create an in camera effect of the car's windows blacking out. This is a technique, which could easily be taken out of the context of the Green Hornet and used in another film for a completely different shot.
If you are an aspiring filmmaker or even someone who works in the industry, you will benefit from reading American Cinematographer. I'm saying this not as someone who works for their marketing staff but as a student of film and lighting. I don't always read every article in an issue. I don't always understand everything that I read. Every single time I sit down to read an issue of American Cinematographer, I come away with at least one new piece of information. I realize that my ability to do that comes directly from the attitudes of other professionals working in the field and their willingness to share their knowledge. That makes me feel really good about the career that I've chosen and the people that I'll be working with in the future.
