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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

This Article Features Photo Zoom

As a cinematographer, Brett Pawlak is a product of digital. His first camera was a VHS camcorder, then he graduated to Hi8s with which he'd persistently re-create his favorite films shot for shot using his sister, mom or dad to try to make his work look like the work on the screen.

"I would always wonder why it didn't look like the films I would be watching," Pawlak says. "I'd cut it together and try to make it look like a film, but at the time, didn't realize that it was because I wasn't using 35mm."

DP Brett Pawlak shot I Am Not a Hipster with borrowed RED ONEs.

Now, Pawlak, like the rest of his generation, is in the best time he could hope to be in as a baby of the digital revolution. Digital technologies advance every day in the land of cinema—the ARRI ALEXA has the latitude range comparable to most film stocks, in five years, the RED has come out with three cameras all besting the next, DSLRs have changed the very landscape and structure of independent filmmaking, and all the big manufacturers are constantly one-upping each other to have the most advanced of digital sensors.

But before all of that, there was Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Pawlak's first visit to the cinema and a seminal point in his life and what would become his career.

"I just thought that I have to be a part of that," recalls Pawlak. "Who wouldn't want to be a part of that? That was way before CGI; all those sets were practical. That whole experience made me aware that there were people behind that movie who made that miniature world."

Soon after that, and seeing the original Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, Pawlak began making movies with friends. One friend was the writer and director, and the rest of the group acted in them. By his early high-school years, he and the others slowly began to take on different roles, and he just happened to be interested in making it all look like a movie.

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