Nick Morgan Cinematography - ID# 147

Crown Point

Division: A

Cinematography

Entry Description

Nick Morgan's two minute cinematography reel highlights his best shots from the 2017-18 year. It also shows his skills in areas such as shot composition, editing, color grading, and overall creativity.

Recent Teacher Comments

• 4/25 8:08 am - Pros - Good use of natural lighting, especially during magic hour. Your reel has a clear theme that works in your favor and helps define your style as a cinematographer; connecting people through emotion. The movement was strong for the most part, but hard to judge thoroughly because of the heavy time remapping. There is a huge variety of locations and types of shots, which helps to display an overall wide range of ability and showcase your strong composition skills. Capturing emotion and mastering the closeup is usually a cinematographer's greatest challenge and you clearly have a knack for that. Even when not using a human subject, your closeup work is very strong. Cons - the color correction is overdone in most shots, making them apear unnatural and even borderline out of broadcast safe in a couple of places. Color correction should be subtle and not draw attention to itself. As you continue to shoot (which you should because you are good and show promise), develop multiple reels for different situations (i.e. one for narrative work, one for documentary work and one for live event coverage). This will help your reel feel more cohesive and the give your prospective employer a sense of what you are capable of as it relates to that particular project (comercial vs. narrative short vs. news station videographer.
• 3/12 10:54 am - There's a lot going on and your pacing is too quick, it makes it very confusing. The music choice is a little unnerving. The shots are nice but it's hard to focus because the edits are so quick.
• 3/12 8:05 am - good use of color and creating a unique look. I would have slowed down the cuts in editing and focused more on the cinematography. Good use of DOP and varied focus
• 2/28 5:47 pm - I love your awareness of the depth of field. Color grading definitely helps you develop a "look." Your composition is fantastic as is the camera movement: smooth and deliberate. I would like to see you with with lights. It is such a large part of cinematography.

Judge 1

Positives: Loved the camera work and use of effects. Great editing. Good color grading.

Improvements: Not much room for improvement.

Judge 2

Positives: -Some really interesting color grades throughout. Clearly you do a lot of experimenting with color and I think a lot of these grades are really successful. -You've definitely had the most interesting sound design of the bunch. This is a cinematography competition, but I think having sound design like this and competent editing makes your images carry a lot more weight. We connect with them on another sensory level and perceive the images to be more powerful than they would've been just against some random song or silence.

Improvements: -You have pretty diverse content here, but I would've liked to see more interior scenes that showcase your ability to control light. -The shot of the "2" sign didn't make much sense to me. There wasn't really a perspective on that shot.

Judge 3

Positives: I loved the intro when you incorporated the title into the shot. Your shots were composed well and your color editing was very good. Your ending with the music being muffled worked well. I liked the speed ramping you used on the train shot almost 2 minutes into the video. The best part of the video is your editing.

Improvements: When you have the background music that you chose I did not think the rapping guy went well with your choice of music and style of editing.

Judge 4

Positives:

Improvements: