Director of Photography

I have locked down a Director of Photography for Freshmen; Daniel Dredger. I’ve actually wanted Dan to DP the shoot for a while now but I wanted him to come to me. We had classes together before but never really formally met. The AFA (student film club) showed one of his movies at the LOTD premiere (my last big project) and so when we had class together with Miguel we got to talking. He came and helped out on Tyler and I’s midterm and showed great dedication and interest in the filmmaking process. The more I talked with Dan in class the more I liked him. He showed a strong dedication to filmmaking as well as specializing in cinematography. I thought “hmmm, I don’t have a DP for Freshmen yet…” So I kind of had him in mind. I started to talk to him about the project and he put me in my place, which I respected. See, as president of the student film club here I see a lot of students that have never hit record on a camera tell me they’re going to shoot the next El Mariachi or Blair Witch. They have no idea what they’re in for. So I was talking with Dan once about it and I kept talking about all these people doing features and how I tell everyone to do a short instead because if they try and do a feature they’re going to kill them selves and that it’s a bad idea, etc, etc. When I started talking to Dan about my feature he was like “Wow, Mr. “students should never do features” is now doing a feature?” While in my defense; Yes, I’m an amateur, but I don’t consider myself to be that much of amateur relative to student film. But I like that Dan called me on my apparent hypocrisy. It shows maturity, honesty, and good communication skills. So I slyly slipped him a copy of my reel in hopes that if sees some of the other stuff I’ve done he might be interested in working on Freshmen. He gave me a copy of his short he did for his midterm and it only re-enforced that I wanted him to shoot the movie. He emailed me after he watched my reel and said he liked it. I then sent him a link to this blog in hopes it would be more bait for him to work on the production. It worked. He sent me an email telling me he’d like to work on the movie. I emailed him back and asked him what he wanted to do. I didn’t want to out right ask him to DP. I wanted him to tell me he was interested. I wanted to be sure that he wanted to work on the project, not just doing me a favor. Needless to say he emailed me back saying he wanted to DP. I spoke with him in class and told him it was going to be hard and a pain in the ass and that it was going to suck. He sounded up to it. I also talked to him about doing tests next semester and he thought it was a good idea. I’m excited to work with Dan. I think things are going to work out very well. I’m also going to offer his partner in crime, Ben Folsom, a part in the movie.