David Licata | April 26, 2012
We all need some kind of reassurance from time to time. One of the things I need it for is my skill as a cinematographer. So on my corkboard is a print out of an email from Andy Bowley, a very fine cinematographer who shot much of A Life’s Work. Thank you, Andy. Your email [...]
David Licata | December 10, 2011
I am always awed by how cinematographers see so much more than I do. We can be looking at exactly the same thing, the same angle, the same frame, and they’ll register all sorts of details, big and small, on an initial viewing that I won’t see until I’ve viewed the footage they shot several [...]
David Licata | December 6, 2011
Here’s about five and half minutes of raw footage from A Life’s Work. I shared this footage in an earlier post (Process: What I’m Thinking When I’m Shooting). I want to share it again for a different reason. I really enjoyed filming the climbers. They were smart, athletic, down to earth, and funny. They seemed [...]
David Licata | October 19, 2011
Here’s an excerpt from the Redwoods section of the sample of A Life’s Work. Notice the first two shots and the last two shots. Here’s about five and half minutes of raw footage from the Redwoods shoot. The first two and last two shots from the first clip come from this raw footage. This was [...]
David Licata | October 14, 2011
The other night I went to see Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon at the Brooklyn Public Library. I’ve seen this film quite a few times, and a few years ago, while preparing for the Redwoods shoot, I watched the Woodsman’s trek sequence over and over. You can see it here, 7:20 into the clip. It lasts almost [...]
David Licata | September 2, 2011
The “vacation” continues, so here are some … what did Saturday Night Live call reruns, Encore Presentation? Well, here are some Encore Presentations of some earlier posts. Hope you enjoy them. From Concept to First Day of Shooting Why Do I Love These Shots? A Clip “How Do You Find These People?” The Cinematographers (I’m [...]
David Licata | March 25, 2011
Someone else shoots and someone else edits. So what exactly do I do on A Life’s Work besides sit opposite these amazing people and ask them a bunch of questions? I make a lot of decisions. Who, what, where, when? I decide those. I come to a location with a shot list, knowing that in [...]
David Licata | December 31, 2010
What were the most viewed posts on the A Life’s Work blog? Glad you asked. The list is a little misleading, because some posts have been up for a lot longer than others, and so naturally will have more views. Still, a few posts are telling, like 2 and 13, which lit up the stats [...]
David Licata | November 11, 2010
Cinematographers travel with a lot of equipment, and it all looks scary when viewed through an airport x-ray machine. That’s why every time they fly somewhere and unpack the gear bag that’s been checked, they’ll pull out one of these: I don’t consider myself a cinematographer, though I’ve done a fair amount of shooting for [...]
David Licata | November 4, 2010
Here are the first few images shot for A Life’s Work (fall 2006). It’s a distillation of the first twenty minutes of footage. It’s only after twenty minutes of tape that the fifth shot, the one of Arcosanti, appears, which is to say cinematographer Wolfgang Held shot the landscape around Arcosanti before we attempted to [...]
