Shooting Indie
- maxchristopher6
- Nov 20, 2025
- 5 min read
By Nate Drew
Shooting Indie. What does that even mean? In school, we are taught to plan everything, create shot lists, storyboards, style sheets, mood boards, etc. While these tools are essential and can be incredibly helpful, what they don’t teach you is how to improvise, improvise well, and how to respond to all of the crazy things that can go wrong while still maintaining the quality of your cinematography.
The average feature film has over 1,000 shots in the final cut (usually double that number gets captured on set), and when you are in the depths of pre-production, coming out the other side with a coherent style, or even a cohesive story, can be incredibly difficult. Making mistakes and breaking your own rules across weeks or even months of shooting is always going to happen. Yes, it’s not just a possibility; crazy mistakes and problems will happen, but over the course of my experiences shooting the feature film Wire, I learned a few hard-earned lessons that I have found extremely helpful in my work. I’d like to share them with you:
Shot lists and storyboards are necessary in pre-production, but should only be a helping hand on set. Write your shot list once, take a few days off, and then rewrite it again. The first shot list you create will never be the last. Even the last shot list you create won’t reflect the final product. Creating a storyboard or shot list serves as the first draft of an essay. It exists to help frame your thinking about how to shoot a scene; it does not show you how to shoot it. As you work through your shot list drafts, you can see which shots will work and which ones won’t. You can pull the best out of previous drafts and enhance them with new ideas. Eventually, you won’t just have one way you could shoot a scene; you’ll have six ways to do so, and when you finally step on set, you’ll have a blueprint in your head for every possible contingency and every directorial, blocking, and lighting change. In my experience, filmmakers who stick to their storyboards like glue are largely unable to see anything other than what they wrote down. As a DP, you have to remain flexible when other people can’t.
Good shot ideas can and will come to you from anyone on set. Never be quick to dismiss them because they often will elevate your filmmaking even more. You are not a bad DP for failing to come up with the idea; you are a bad DP for not considering it. When designing thousands of shots for a film, you have to accept that not all of your ideas will be winners. Shooting a film, especially a feature, is about knowing how to make the hard call, cutting a shot you love, or even cutting a scene, while still being able to land on your feet. Making the hard call sucks, but someone has to do it.
Being a cinematographer is all about having, using, and training your imagination. Use it every day, train it every day. When you are bored at work or in class, transport yourself somewhere, construct a scene in your head, and then talk your way through everything that is happening. Move through the scene as if your camera is on a gimbal, capturing each aspect of the environment and then moving to the next. For example, I’m looking into a dark, skinny alleyway. Buildings line the sides of the alley, extending three stories above my head, and the red brick turns a dark gray in the midnight light. There are grates on the asphalt ground, steam rises out of them, and fogs up the dark corners of the buildings. A fire escape extends upwards, rust builds around the railings, and a ladder hangs half off its hinges, dangling above a green dumpster… etc., etc. You get the point. When you step into a location, really look at every aspect of it. Look at the leaking trash bags leaning against the wall. How is the light reflecting off the black plastic? The dumpster is casting a super long shadow. Can I use this to hide a character in darkness? Or should a character step out of the steam rising from the vents? What if I captured the scene from the fire escape above? I can build depth by having the hanging ladder sit in front of the camera. What if I frame it and shoot through the ladder so the characters appear between the rungs? Can I even get onto the fire escape? Who knows!
As a Director of Photography, your job is to see the scene in ways no one else does. When you arrive, take a second, get yourself a fancy Dasani water bottle, stand there, analyze your environment, and hydrate while you can. Think about every angle you could possibly get, and ask yourself what would make that specific angle interesting? Move the camera in your head and create your best guess about what it would look like if you strapped an FX30 with a 50mm lens to the head of a seagull and flew it through the set. Obviously, I’m kidding, but practicing imagining things like that will allow you to consider angles you never could have imagined in pre-production.
If I learned anything from shooting Wire, it was that 90% of your job as a cinematographer is picking the locations. NEVER let anyone go location scouting without you. A good location, with good natural lighting, will make or break your set and how the footage looks. Finding a location that allows you to manipulate existing lighting instead of constructing your own will save you and your (probably unpaid) team hours. If all your gaffer has to do is set up a panel light to fill out your shot, they will thank you. When shooting Wire, about 75% of the scenes we shot outdoors around Pittsburgh were lit by the location's lighting. The parking garages had existing lighting fixtures that provided the hue and brightness I wanted; The Point had existing depth and floor lights that managed to provide enough exposure for the camera as well. Even picking the time of day played into how we were able to light our locations, including using well-timed wildfire smoke to add haze to some of our city overlook scenes. I think planning our shoots in this way helped to give the film a very grimy and grounded look, which I tend to value over the low-key, super soft diffused style that many modern films are choosing. The extra time taken in pre-production significantly smoothed over stylistic debates, transportation time, and helped limit our equipment budget so we could focus our money elsewhere.
Lastly, for every location and every shot, construct a bird's-eye view of the scene in your head. Imagine camera icons where you want your shots to be and draw lines between them to see if you are breaking the 180-degree rule. Think of every possibility – the good, the bad, and the shitty. Edison found 1,000 ways not to make a lightbulb, but he only needed one way for it to work.
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