DP Reel and Artist Statement

Evan Terry DP Reel Spring 2016 from Evan Terry on Vimeo.

When I started college, I was an aerospace engineering major. Although I had discovered my love of film and photography in high school, I had always planned on working as an engineer. However, after working as a teaching assistant for a documentary production class for a year and a half, I realized that I needed to go in a different direction with my education and my career.

While I thoroughly enjoy the creative freedom and opportunity for expression of shooting a narrative piece, I like to work mostly on documentaries. There’s a certain excitement about shooting in the field, in an uncontrolled environment where you can never anticipate everything that will happen. It forces to me to work quickly and under the pressure of only having one chance to get the shot. To me, this style can feel very free because I don’t have to wait on a full crew or cast to be ready. This carries over into the way I shoot most of my still photography, as well. Always run-and-gun, capturing whatever catches my eye using almost exclusively natural light. Working with natural light presents interesting challenges and forces me to be creative with framing and composition to work with what is available to me.

I enjoy how I can tell a story in a documentary in a way not possible in any other medium. The freedom in shooting is mirrored in the editing process, and I prefer to both shoot and edit my work myself. Unlike following a script, with a documentary the editor can build the story up from nothing using just the pieces that are available, yet the same pieces can be crafted into an infinite number of possible films that each tells a slightly different story in a different way.