James' Dance Journey

An enormous amount of planning went into the cinematography of the film; to help tell James’ story efficiently, the focal length, aspect ratio, video noise, contrast, color temperature, and shutter speed all vary throughout its runtime to help the audience get in the subject's headspace. To accomplish this level of cinematography, James’ interview needed to be split up into 40 different sections. In between sections lenses were swapped out, camera settings were adjusted, and lighting was changed. What was filmed was my fifth interview with James; the first four were to carefully plan out his story and interview so the cinematography could do the most it could. James is a synthetic documentary, through my many meetings and interviews with James I worked to craft an outline of his journey, and eventually a script of what I believed he would say. After completing the script, I planned out all the cinematography on a line by line basis. After that I had to create questions for each line of the script that would get him to say what the script called for. Countless meetings with James and others in the documentary were held to ensure that the story remained accurate and true to his life experiences.

It was important to me that James' headspace was represented through every aspect of the film. To further emphasize this, over 125 VFX shots were in the final cut, ranging from visually warping James' environment to demonstrate his worldview, putting him in places that he talked about but no longer existed at the time of filming, and much, much more. Though completing this many VFX shots was extremely difficult, in the end I believe they aid in telling a better story and help the audience better connect with James.