The Most Important Thing To Improve as a Cinematographer

Hi, could I please get a medium pumpkin spice latte, a hot one? Okay. Ever since pumpkin spice came out at Starbucks, let's just say I come here just a little bit more. But what's wrong with that, huh? Awesome, thank you so much. You too. Yeah, baby! Listen, I know my fate. I listened to Olivia Rodrigo. I drank pumpkin spice lattes in the fall. And if you want to judge me, please don't. I'm fragile. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I think a lot of us have been thinking about this as well, is that collaboration is so important. And it could be because we just got back from Sony Condo, and that's pretty much all of us artists together hanging out, just collaborating and throwing ideas back and forth off of each other. But I met Johnny Romes out there, who actually lives right down the road from me in Utah, but Johnny's a super talented filmmaker. And he hit me and was like, hey man, I'm going up into the mountains right now, going up one of these trails if you want to come. Like last minute. He hit me like an hour ago, and it's about to rain too. So I don't know how this is gonna go. But I was like, at first I was like, oh, I probably have stuff to do, whatever. But then I was like, you know what? Screw it. I think this could be good to just go hang out and kind of keep that spark burning. Hey, it's freaking raining now. Say hi to my friends on YouTube. Oh, hi. It's manual focus, whatever. It's probably not in focus, but that's Johnny. Dude, September 2nd, you already got the blonde stones on, dude. First run of the season. So we're airing down because you can feel every single rock that we're going over by making them softer and less air. They become softer. So you can see, I just fake I know what I'm doing. And then Johnny comes through and actually does it. What are you getting? So I'm going to fly out that way. Oh, you're going to fly out? Oh, yeah. I'm going to fly in as we're driving across the street here. Oh, and just get that hole? I'm going to get full mounted in, yeah. Oh, hell yeah. And then we can just keep going and then it opens up. For the sunset. Heck yeah. You know, I'm a firm believer that when you just play around and have no objective and just have fun, that really is when you make the best art. Your love to me is like honey on my tongue. It's on me. You shoot my woes when the day is done. There's rain and streaks and rainbows. Johnny, is everywhere you go look like this? I'm out of my element, guys. This is definitely his element that I'm learning. That's one of the benefits of collaborating because you're kind of forced to expand your bandwidths and your circle of what you know and what your skill set is. I do my thing. You guys know my thing. But then Johnny does his thing. I'm being very much so put out of my wheelhouse or out of my strengths essentially. But when you collaborate with other people, you're forced to pick up and like see what they're doing. You almost expand your like bandwidth or your circle of your knowledge and your skill set that you've got. Look at this little... Look how you got that leg stuck out there. That's so cute. This looks so cool. I used to do this all the time. And I think that I started working like on film sets and stuff like that. And I forgot that I just love like getting out in the mountains and doing shit and doing this. Because I mean, how can you not? Look at it. What are these lenses? But also something I like to do when hanging with friends is listen to music. And that might be a cheesy way to talk about our sponsor for today, which is audio. Now, if you're not familiar with audio, long story short, they are a music licensing platform that has an abundance of tools that help your post-production workflow. For example, all of the songs in this video were sourced from audio. But what made it even better is the access to stems. Now, if you don't know what stems are, essentially it's the individual components of a song. The guitar, the drums, the voice. They give you the option to get each and every factor of it. So if you just don't want the voice while I'm talking, you can chop that out. Or they've got something called Link Match AI, which is where I say I'm listening to Spotify as I do with my friends, and I like a song and it's the vibe of the video. I can just copy that link, bring it on over to audio, drop it in there, and it'll give you an abundance of songs using AI that match the vibe of that song. They've also got sound effects as well, a library to use for your projects. I'm going to leave a link down below for you to read more, but you can get 70% off your first year using this code. I'm going to leave everything down below, but let's get back to hanging in the mountains. Especially if you're moving to a new area or new to the community or just a beginner in the industry, having friends that you can collaborate with is a great way to build your network, build your audience and your connections. Mine, I looked over, like at some points it was facing the door. At some points there was almost only the wheel in it. I was like, I got to take it off. Dude, this was solid because there's... I saw your arm at the window too. I was just holding onto this just in case because I'll stretch it. Yeah. But there's no... It cannot move up or down. It was like locked in. It was totally locked in. I guess when he brings me to the top of a mountain, it's going to look good. I think I like blue hour, the time past sunset so much better, dude. The light hangs on. Oh my God. Especially up here. Yeah. Oh, this is so exciting. It's gotten dark pretty quickly, but even the trees, just like focusing, just still on the trees. Just on the trees. Oh, that shot right there with the freaking color in that. I need to do like a... I'm going to do a little pan down reveal here. I didn't realize that when Johnny messaged me an hour ago, that he'd be having me run through the mountains into the darkness. And it's crazy because we didn't talk until condo and we live like four minutes from each other. That's funny because I had followed you and then you saw me on the app and messaged me and I was like, yeah, how does he know who I am? And then I saw you were from Salt Lake so then everything just clicked. Cam, if you're watching this, if this makes it in, move to freaking... Where are we? Utah. It just encourages you to have fun doing things because among everything, we're just screwing around. Yeah. Well, the thing is as well, you know, I do this so often but you coming out here with a fresh perspective just gave me new ideas. Yeah. Because if we've got our rhythm and our workflow, we've got our honed in ways and our routine that works. But when you bring in a whole new perspective to it all... Yeah, it's so fresh. It's so fresh. And then you're like, oh shit, I didn't even look at it like that or normally I just don't stop here or whatever it is. Exactly. And that's the other glory. I mean, that's why I love collaborating with people because really it's just my cheat code is stealing their work. Man, it goes both ways, dude. It's like steal like an artist. No, I'm just going to steal the shit from the artist. Johnny Robbs, everyone. I don't know why I said that like a stage. Like I'm on a band. Thank you. What are we doing?