Q&A with Cinematographer Dan Parsons

Director Pete Schwartz (left), DP Dan Parsons (center), and first AC Michael Morlan (right) shooting The Undeniable Untimely Death of Leland Sturgis.

Cinematographer Dan Parsons recently shot five shorts for the Global Short Film Network (GSFN): If God Had Wanted Us to Fly He Would Have Given Us Wings, The Undeniable Untimely Death of Leland Sturgis, Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator, Not Evelyn Cho, and The Haircut at locations including Austin, Texas, and Culver Studios in Culver City, Calif. For more on Parsons, visit his Reel-Exhange profile.

Does shooting for the GSFN — and its mission of top-notch storytelling and films that act as conversational springboards — provide any unique challenges to you as an artist?

In general terms, narrative film audiences are accustomed to a three-act story structure. However, GSFN is producing films with stories written in a two-act structure and depart from the traditional approach to narrative filmmaking. One might say that where three-act films end with a period, these films end with a question mark. Conceptually, this was easy for me to understand, but knowing how to creatively execute a two-act structure was a new challenge. For instance, in the three-act narrative structure, I might choose to take one visual element such as lighting or color and modulate it over the course of the story to reflect or contrast the arc of a particular character. If one were then to take a still from each act of that story, it might be possible to quantify the changes in visual design that are happening across the narrative. This modulation of visual design is still possible with the two-act structure, but the sense of resolution and completion to the character arc are just not the same.

Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator was the film that called for a radically different shooting approach than I had previously encountered on a film. … From the beginning, I knew that the camera work had to allow for an unrefined quality.

Read the rest of Parsons' Q&A.

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