DP Matheus Bastos on making budget indie films Gazer and Anima

Hey, I'm Matheus Bastos, and I'm on the Cinematography Podcast. INTRO OPENING QUOTE, MATHEUS BASTOS: He said, hey, I need you to come finish out this movie for me. I said, no problem. I'll be there. I didn't ask any questions. And I realized it was actually... ILLYA FRIEDMAN: You should have asked a question or two. MB: Yeah, we should ask more questions. And I realized I was like, oh, the movie star is Louis Guzman, Asante Black, Alex Hibbert. IF: And it's all underwater. MB: Yeah, yes. Well, my first three days on it were LED wall subway sets. IF: Oh, wow. MB: We had a pyrotechnic scene. Yeah. And then we had a stunt where someone fell off a three -story building. IF: Oh, man. There's a trifecta there. Yeah, amazing. MB: And I just remember, like, you know, I... felt this overwhelming amount of pressure. That was the film that got attention. IF INTRO: This is Cinepod, the cinematography podcast, a program about the art, craft and philosophy of the moving image presented by Hot Rod Cameras. I'm your host, Illya Friedman. Today on our show, I speak with cinematographer Matheus Bastos, one of American Cinematographer’s rising stars of cinematography for 2026. His credits include two 16mm feature films, Gazer and Anima. This episode is a candid look about how limitations, story, and trust shape a career, from a scrappy $80,000 feature to the call that changed everything. We dive into how Gazer's look was born from necessity. Shot on 16mm over two and a half years, the micro budget meant there were no dailies, the footage was sometimes processed, months after shooting. How the 16mm feature Anima got its cleaner look. Director Brian Ivie wanted a clean negative, so Matheus never went beyond 200 speed film and overexposed everything. How handheld and zooms became character psychology. Matheus' handheld technique follows the main character's unraveling mind in Gazer, while in Anima, operating style shifts between characters as their lives blur together. How focusing on his craft and professional relationships changes Matheus’s career. He stepped in for three days on the film Story Ave, and that job got agents calling. After the interview, stick around for our short ends, our pet obsessions of the week. But first, find out what's going on in the world of entertainment in our segment called Close Focus. IF: Hey Ben, it is time for our Close Focus. What's going on in the world of entertainment? BEN ROCK: This was going to be my short end, but I feel like it's a bigger conversation, so I wanted to bring it up. There's a company called Artcraft, and I don't know how many people are paying attention to this, but Artcraft has vibe-coded the entire Adobe suite, or I don't know if the entire suite, but they vibe-coded Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and Illustrator. You know, so basically... four pretty big motherships of the Adobe suite. Now, I'm an Adobe user, and that means that I'm paying in the neighborhood of $600 a year for the privilege. And if I stop paying for my Adobe subscription, I won't be able to open my edit projects, which is the difference between... paying a lot of money for an upgrade as we used to do with final cut pro versus a purely subscription model if you stop paying your subscription you can't use the tool anymore and all your uh it basically bricks everything you've done in the adobe suite so artcraft has all these things on github literally for free now again they were vibe coded this is not piracy they did not crack They did not pull Adobe code out. They used, I think, ChatGPT or Claude Code. IF: Can I interject real quick? There are people who are claiming it's decompiled. So decompiled would mean that they're using the same code. But if they decompile the feature set and they're reprogramming it in something called Rust, and if it is doing the same effect but structurally different, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if Adobe's claims to this will hold up because there's more than one way to get things done. And if it is an exact copy of the way that Adobe gets something done, then for sure there's going to be some legal wrangling. But it's not just Adobe. The same ArtCraft people have also now done like WordCraft. Microsoft Word and Excel have also been decompiled. BR: Which seems pointless because you can get that ostensibly for free in Google Docs right now. You don't need Microsoft Word. And I feel like unless you're like my father, rest in peace, would never get rid of his Microsoft Word subscription. I don't I don't know who would pay for Microsoft Word in this day and age. IF: This is, but that's not exactly my point. Just the fact that they've done this, but they're also doing it to video games. And there is people who have taken Call of Duty and have decompiled Call of Duty because there has been, this seems to have really risen out of the no physical media movement for video games after Sony announced that they were getting rid of all physical media and that when you purchased a game that it really didn't actually grant someone ownership over that game, that they could then pull it off of their cloud servers at any time. BR: Is this like world-class trolling? Is that what they're doing? Because that's the impression I got when it comes to, especially the Adobe stuff. I was like, these AI companies have been scraping all of human existence and paying nothing for it and saying like, Hey, you want, you want to make a Rembrandt picture of a, of a, of an iPhone. Sure. Here it goes. And it looks like Rembrandt, it's got his brushstrokes or whatever, which of course that would all be public domain. So who cares? But you want to do that to a living artist, like our mutual friend, Gabe Leonard. Now, now you're screwing with somebody's livelihood and the AI companies are all like, uh, move fast, break things. Let's just, uh, let's do what, what tech assholes do. And so like, let's, it's free reign. And when I saw the Adobe thing, what especially to me is like, of course, Adobe is going to have to sue them. They're making apps that I have watched videos of the apps on YouTube. They're indistinguishable from After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere. And those are three programs I live in. I know them really well. So it looks for all the world like it, but if it's actually not copying it, or I mean, you understand the tech of the decompiling stuff, which I do not, I was given to understand that it was mostly just vibe coded. But if it's like technically walking between the raindrops, but creating Adobe Premiere, now we have a tech bro versus a tech bro. I want to see who wins this. because Adobe is, they work for entertainment, but they're a tech company. That's what they are. And another tech company is like messing with them. And the other thing is they've released all of these things open source. So even if Adobe successfully sued them, this code is, it's out there. Now out there. You can't stop it. IF: It's going to be very interesting to see what happens. It seems to have spawned initially out of a direct attack on physical media that was really prompted by Sony's announcement of getting rid of physical media for their PlayStation systems. But since that time, it has very, very quickly moved into all. different types of software so there are people who are we don't know where this is going to go yet because there are people who are now requesting different softwares like oh this is expensive software i would like to see this decompiled and and open sourced and and released And there's some very expensive software out there this could happen to. There's huge corporations where their entire business is based on their software, of course. And then there's also this interesting sort of like mashup creative thing where like people are taking Call of Duty and Super Mario Smash Brothers and shoving them together now that they have this, you know, the genies out of the bottle. There's people who are doing really, really involved hacks and coming up with new versions of things. So if it is truly decompiling and they are stealing the code, which would have been an incredibly labor-intensive process without the use of AI. And I think really was not a form of copy protection most software developers really had to work. about but clearly in 2026 it is i i think this is also uh it's worth bringing up another not exactly uh identical but related headline that happened yesterday and i don't know if you caught it but Getty Images had to file for bankruptcy but only four years ago they were worth more than almost five billion dollars so it's a pretty huge change in the ai disruption of the stock footage market. BR: I can only imagine that that is is that just because people are generating footage instead of licensing stuff from Getty Images because like when i think of Getty Images it's like i need George Clooney at the Oceans 11 premiere and ai can't give me it can it could render a new version of that but it won't be the real thing. IF: Yeah it's it's hard it's hard to say but uh to have such a dramatic fall that coincides exactly with the sort of the rate the the rise of generative AI, I can only imagine that the two things are related. I have predicted a couple of things from the very beginning that were going to be horribly disrupted. And one of them was the stock footage market. And this is the, I have talked to people whose career is to shoot stock footage. Some of them are customers of mine who are not as much customers anymore because they would buy gear, they would travel the world, they would create stock footage, and they would send them to Getty and Magnum and all these other stock footage companies. They have told me that the amount of work and business that they're able to get from that has been shrinking. But this is the first time I've heard of a major stock image company now having this sort of financial distress. BR: No, that's a big deal. And, you know, I hear Getty has some money. So that's even more surprising. IF: That is surprising. There are certain things. There's another thing I'll save for my short end, which is another disruption that AI is directly responsible for and I think is going to be more responsible coming up in the future. But I would say. that software and stock images are two things that directly touch into the entertainment industry and even the much broader media industry in general, because software, so many people are dependent on software for so many other types of things. BR: I mean, we're all dependent on software for, I mean, like, unless you're, you know, Amish or something, you're using software for something probably every single day. IF: Well, why don't we get to the interview now with Matthias Bastos? BR: Let's do it. IF: I'm joined now by Matheus Bastos. He is one of the ASC's rising stars of cinematography. Welcome to the Cinematography Podcast. MATHEUS BASTOS: Thank you so much for having me, Illya. Happy to be here. IF: You're in Los Angeles right now because you're shooting another movie. MB: Yes, exactly. IF: It's a feature film? MB: Feature film, yeah. We're in our last three days of production. This timed out perfectly. We had a little break, so we got to squeeze this in. It's called Your Heart is a Hummingbird, directed by S.M. Goldberger, and it's a very sweet, special little film that we hope will hit the festival circuits. very, very soon. IF: You are a busy fellow. I looked at your IMDB and saw that you had six projects. in production right now. That's not something I typically see for a lot of people. So do you just have things lined up one after another? Are some going on concurrently? Are you prepping multiple features all at the same time while shooting something else? MB: Yeah, a little bit of that. I think a lot of those projects that are the upcoming ones, actually a lot of them have already been shot and are finally making their way out. Some of them are movies that I shot late 2024 into 2025 that are finally going to hit their festival. release. One of them is a movie called Love, Love, starring Haley Joel Osment, Beck Bennett, Chris Elliott, directed by Thomas Leeson Schneider, that is finally going to premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival. on Tuesday, which is very exciting. And then I have another movie I shot for, I think, friend of the show, Eric Bronco, ASC. His directorial debut, Silent Partner, is about to come out. Both of those we shot a while ago. And then I have other things that I'm actively prepping for while I'm finishing up this movie. So I feel like I'm always trying to have the next thing going. But I think as goes with independent cinema, independent film, they take their time to find their way out. IF: Well, you know, this is the most complicated art form of all of them. There's so many elements and so many things that all go together. It's no wonder it takes a while. But I watched just yesterday, Mateus Bastos, double feature, back to back. I watched Gazer and Anima. And I enjoyed them both. And I want to talk about them both. And they're both fairly recent in your filmography. So let's talk about Gazer real quick. So Gazer is a 2024 film, shot 16 millimeter. And it's... neo-noir is how you described it. But for our audience, how would you give them the log line? How would you tell them what this movie is about? MB: So Gazer is a, we call it a neo-noir mystery thriller about a woman named Frankie who's suffering with a condition called dyschronometria, which is a real life degenerative brain condition where the person who is suffering from this condition has the difficulty perceiving time and connecting moments in time. And they're prone to these things. called zone out, which is you can stand here and if a visual or audio cue triggers this zone out, three hours could pass and it felt like a second. This character named Frankie has a really hard time keeping a job, struggling with her life, and she's trying to get enough money to win custody of her daughter. So she takes a job from a mysterious woman with a dark past and then other mysteries ensue. IF: The two things that I would say that Gazer and Anima have in common that I really know noticed, which maybe it's your style and maybe you can tell me, but film and handheld. MB: Yes, definitely. IF: So, do you try to do... film as much as possible and you try to do handheld as much as possible? Are those two things? MB: Yeah. So film, I love film. I try to be as quote unquote agnostic as possible when it comes to format, but I can't deny that shooting on film is inherently super special. I think it's a format that needs to be preserved and kept alive and passed down. But I think it's also, I really am a big fan of like the power of choice. I think the second that film goes away or somehow magically digital in a way, I think we all actually suffer for it. way, if any artist loses the ability to choose their paintbrush or how to make their project, I think we all lose. And so when it came to Anima and Gazer, I was approached by director of Gazer, Ryan J. Sloan. We went, we go back many, many years. We're longtime friends, grew up in the same town, went to the same school, et cetera. And then also my director for Anima, Brian Tetsuro Ivie. They're both just filmmakers that are committed to film and refuse to touch digital as long as they can. Brian is actually the co-founder of a company named Kebrado. which is a celluloid-only production company. And they produce, finance, make films exclusively shot on 16, 35, and 65 millimeter. And that's like their whole mission. And I just sort of found myself lucky enough to fall in their eyeline. And they saw... my, my work. And I, you know, Brian saw some of my work on Gazer. And Ryan from Gazer, I hadn't done film before Gazer. And he just said, I want to go on this journey with you. We're going to make this scrappy movie for no, no money. And we want to show him film. Are you in? And I just jumped right in. IF: Was this Ryan's first feature? MB: Yes. Yeah. Both, both films are. Gazer is Ryan's first feature and Anima is Brian's first narrative feature. Brian's a documentarian. So first time narrative filmmakers, both of them. IF: Nice. Gazer has, it has a very intentional look. It has a, I mean, it's 16 millimeter. It is grainy. And it is, and I'm curious. MB: Handheld, messy. Yeah. Yeah. IF: But I mean, but the grain in particular, I'm wondering. Did you go through a lot of effort to figure out what the amount of grain was that you would be able to withstand and then dial back from there? Or how did you settle on the level that... MB: Sure. You know, the honest truth with Gazer is that we were just figuring it out as we went. Gazer was a lot of our first movie. We shot Gazer over the course of two and a half years on a budget of $80,000. It was, you know, and what that comes with is like the inability to do proper tests or the inability to experiment and then come back later and try different lenses. Brian and I just committed to shooting the movie all on tungsten stock because, but one, I just love the look of 200T. I think it's the greatest stock ever made, but also we wanted to keep a consistency between our stocks. And we know that sometimes when you're switching between 250 or 500, there's a little bit of a fidelity change or et cetera. So we felt like 200T and 500T. the closest. We also love this like sort of classic old Hollywood, like, you know, tungsten stock uncorrected look. IF: Yes. I was going to, I was going to talk about this. We've got quite a bit of a day exterior, which looks like tungsten film. MB: Yeah. IF: And not even an 81 EF, not an 85. Yeah, and there is some blue. There's a lot of blue. MB: Yeah, the film is during the change of the seasons. That was really important to us. And so typically my philosophy, what I kind of learned from my just asking friends and a little bit of this film I shot in college and just research I'd done was, you know, always try to overexpose your film as much as you can. I typically aimed for... a half stopover or two-thirds stopover when we could. It's not always happened. And whatever that grain was is what the movie was. And there's a couple of scenes in Gazer, mostly these nightmare sequences that get a little Cronenberg, Lynch, Kubrickian kind of thing where we push the film stock. And that was both, we wanted a denser, oversaturated, grainy or hellish kind of look, but it was also by necessity because we were shooting all that. 20 pages to shoot over the course of two days or so so we're just kind of you know i was able to light a little more broadly with it but i would say the the the texture of gazer now knowing what i do now and things i brought to anima i sort of just shot gazer the way i thought i could shoot it and the film kind of presented itself to me and in a magical way i almost would would never have done it any different now. Sometimes I look at Gazer and I'm like, oh my God, I was so bold or so naive. I don't know. And I kind of love the look that I got from it just because we did it by, a lot of it was by necessity, I would say. IF: Sure. I get it. Two and a half years though for a shooting schedule, is that like a weekend type of thing? MB: So it was like bringing the actors back, trying to keep continuity all the stuff. IF: Exactly. Did you have... dailies during this two and a half year period because I've talked to people who've made low budget feature films and then like they would drop some film off at the lab but then they couldn't afford to bail it out yet to see it it was was this similar for you guys too or did you get exact situation? MB: exactly no no dailies um if we were lucky we get weeklies but you know i remember because we would shoot Gazer in chunks uh nights and weekends sometimes if there was a holiday weekend or something or we went into a four or five day stretch where we could we would shoot a little bit more but we would you know budget just enough to shoot, and then sometimes not see any scans back until three or four months later. Because we typically shot in like April and November, trying to keep at least the turning of the season consistent. But, you know, sun is in a different place, time of year is different, but close in terms of look or feel. And, you know, thank goodness for Color Lab out in Maryland. They were our lab for this film. We would send them film, and then they would get an estimate back, and we were, you know, a couple hundred. thousand, et cetera, off. And we say, sorry, we don't have the money. And they say, don't worry, we already scanned it. When you're ready, we'll send it to you. And they took care of us. This movie was very unusual from what I'm mostly used to, which is, you know, I can't, I don't know what we have from yesterday, the day before. There's no reviewing. But also it kind of like I think kept us on our toes more and made us trust ourselves. And because we shot over the course of two and a half years, sometimes we would shoot one half of a scene facing one direction in Jersey City, New Jersey. And we come back in December and shoot the other side in Montclair, New Jersey. And because it was long enough, I actually had graded dailies from one side of the world. So you can match the other. We can try our best to match it at least. IF: Does Gazer exist in the world? Does it have a distribution now? Where can people see it? MB: Exactly. Gazer premiered at the Director's Fortnight Cannes Film Festival in 2024. And we got acquired by Metrograph Pictures, which is the distribution arm of the Metrograph Theater in New York City. It is now available on... Amazon, wherever you buy films. We're also exclusively streaming on Shudder right now. IF: Oh, right on. MB: Which is funny. I don't consider us a horror movie. IF: It's not totally a Shudder thing. MB: It's not. But Shudder really liked the genre elements. And I think the movie definitely dips into that vibe. But I think they just really appreciated the film. And so it's also available to stream on Shudder as well as the typical rental spots. IF: Nice. Yeah. And there are definitely a couple of sequences, like you said, that lean Lynchian, that lean into that. And it's fun because it's a little bit of a surprise too, because that's not the overall vibe of the whole thing. MB: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it kind of, it's, you know, one thing that Ryan, Ryan J. Sloan, the director, and our lead actress, Ariella Mastriani, who co-wrote the movie, they're both, you know, producers on it and self-financed the whole project. They, when they were writing the script, they always felt like, you know, the things that are happening to Frankie and that she's imagining, the things she's going through in her life is a nightmare. It's so terrifying and it's awful positioned for people to be in. And, you know, some people in the world might actually be in that similar position. And as they were writing that, they said, she's living a nightmare. They thought, like, why don't we go there and go in a more surreal nightmare world? And not everyone loved it. I think there's some people who those scenes popped out in a kind of a... them in a wrong way. But we also found that, especially in Europe, a lot of people really liked the change in its genre and tone. And they felt like, you know, I kind of liked when movies touch on a little bit of everything. I love those scenes. I know it's not for everyone, but I think they're very fun sequences. IF: Let's talk about Anima and let's also talk about handheld because I felt like Gazer has got to be like 90 plus percent handheld. I mean, there's definitely some moments that are not, but I mean, but really for the most part. Anima is probably 75%. MB: Sure, yeah, a little more half and half maybe. Or 50-50. IF: But also I felt like your movements, your handheld movements were also subtler. Can you talk about your, are you operating for this too? And so tell me about your philosophy of like... movement while the scene is going on because, you know, you need to be able to cut, you need to be able to see what's happening. How do you, how do you strike those balances? MB: Yeah. Handheld is a really intuitive, like built in part of cinematography for me. When it comes to handheld, I typically do operate the camera. It's hard for me to let go when it's time to operate. I think when it's ever like a two camera situation is a little easier. But I do mostly, I'd say 90% of my work has been single camera. And if there's a handheld scene, I'm usually operating it. Unless on the movie Silent Partner, I operated everything except for the handheld, which Eric Bronco operated. Okay. And I can say, you know, I'm willing to let go of the handheld when someone can do it better than me. And he did great. With Gazer, the film was just– IF: You're shining his star pretty well. MB: Totally. IF: Eric owes you like 20 bucks or something. MB: Eric's done so much for me. I'm still paying back the favor. Yeah, with Gazer, you know, The handheld was just purely reflective of the character's mental state and where we're at. And it's always following that movie. We were always just meant to be with Frankie and following Frankie's state of mind, her being in Gazer. The only time we don't do handheld, we have some steadicam sequences during a steadicam and locked off during the dream sequence because those are meant to be out of body not not not real but maybe real we're remembering something and her present day we're following her and that one you know i i almost say that that one has a little more emphasis in our steps it has a little more of a following quality that is uh shaky but also still always rooted with her. With Anima you know we we decided that Anima follows two different characters it follows Paul, this wealthy businessman who has a terminal illness and decided he's going to upload his consciousness into the cloud and try to live forever and follows Beck, this young woman who just got let go from her job, trying to see what the future looks like for her. And we always felt like Paul's life was sunsetting. He's on the way out. he had the weight of the life he's lived. So the camera is locked off. And Beck is a character who is searching and trying to figure out what her life is. And she's more sporadic and chaotic. And that camera was going to be following her and living handheld. And that's somewhere along the road trip. they start to blur and they start to bleed into each other's life a little. And then towards the tail end of the movie, we have locked off scenes with Beck and then handheld scenes with Paul. Handheld has just been, it's funny, I feel like a big chunk of why I get hired for my work is for my handheld. And I don't know why that is. It's just. It's so inherently within me to operate, but I think it comes from a place of character and story. And when something must be smoother or must be a little more elevated, you could say, I change the way I step, the way I move my shoulders. And then when it gets to something like Gazer, it's a little more shaky and hectic and chaotic and scary. I walk differently. My body curls differently to get different out of the operating. And that just feels like an extension of the way I even view lights or lenses. It's just sort of part of that look. And, you know, funny enough, I feel like I've kind of become like a handheld guy. Like people just think of me for that. And I'm thankful for it. I think it's one of my favorite ways to move a camera. IF: Yeah, actually, I'd like to ask you a little bit. about lenses for Anima, because you mentioned something before we started recording. You had actually taken some Master Primes and put them on a 16mm camera. MB: For Gazer, yeah. IF: Oh, you did it for Gazer. For Gazer. I can tell, though, you're doing a lot with the stock, though. Why the use of the 35mm lenses because of the focal length? They're trying to get it longer? MB: Yeah. So the honest answer is we were going with Ultra 16s for, I'd say, like 80% of Gazer. Well, because we shot over nights and weekends over the course of two years, we would go to our... friends at ARRI Rental and say, hey, can I get the 35, 25 in this Ultra 16? And they're like, we have all those except for the 25. We'll give you the 25 Master Prime or the 32 Ultra Prime. So that's where the result of mixing a lot of it came from. We just kind of threw whatever we had with us at the time. Because sometimes I would rent only three lenses for a bulk of shooting. And I realized, oh, I need something longer than 50 or longer than 25. And then I would just sort of grab what I had around me and we would just shoot that with the movie. So the movie is kind of a testament of like how things come together and things that shouldn't work somehow magically do. But even on Anima, we use the ARRI Rental customized Cooke S4Xs, which are their adjusted iris blades. So round iris on the Cooke S4s and expanded T-stop. So some of the lenses would hit like a T1.6 or so. I like to use 35 millimeter lenses on 16. I think purely just have more options. You know, we're limited on the 16 lenses. And the Cooke S4s just felt like the right look. We wanted a classic kind of 90s, like a movie you can pick off the shelf at your local blockbuster kind of thing. And I just looked at what was being shot in the 90s and early 2000s, and it was Master Primes or Cookes. And we wanted something warmer and more vintage. So Anima, we went for the Cookes on that one. So it's a cleaner look overall, Anima. IF: It's not nearly as frenetic. It's not nearly as noisy and as grainy. It definitely feels more controlled. Can you talk a little bit about the way that you achieved this with 16mm? Because 16mm, yes, it's good to overexpose usually a little, but I mean, you're keeping the grain way more in a manageable space. Did it come from shooting slower speed stocks? Where does that come from? MB: Yeah, essentially that. Brian Ivie, the director of Anima, his favorite stock is 50D. He just loves a clean negative. And so we just dedicated to shoot it on it as much as possible. And luckily for us, a lot of the film is that... the day and a lot of daytime exteriors or daytime stuff in a car rather on the road trip and we're able to really get away with 50d and i think you know the more and more i started shooting on film because i started with digital and then film kind of came a little later in my career i i was really scared about like oh man like i really need 500t because i'm so used to 800 1280 1600 sometimes on digital and i actually find that um once you start adapting yourself to slower speed stock you realize how much light there really is in the world. And whereas on digital, I might've been so used to cranking the camera to 1600 to get more highlight detail. pumping it with ND. And on film, I was shooting 200T with not much ND. And so I think on Anima, the way we achieved that, Brian really wanted a clean negative. For us, that meant a lot of 50D, a lot of 200T for our interiors, just nature of the beast. You'll lose some light as you go into your interiors and very minimal 500. We actually stopped at some point halfway through the movie, stopped shooting 500 for a bulk of our night scenes and started pushing 200T. It felt like it was even cleaner. But the cleanliness was really achieved by overexposing the whole movie by a stop. The 50D, I did two thirds because it's really such a clean. I didn't feel like I need more. But our 200 speed film, we shot it at 100 or rated at 100. And then whenever we did touch 500T, overexposed by a stop as well. Once we realized that 200 pushed looked cleaner than 500, we started shooting 200 rated at 200, but in development pushed at a stop. What we lost was like, or not even lost, what changed was it's a little more punchy and contrasty, so you adjust in the grade. But I found the scene inside the car when they're outside the motel parking lot when they're chatting. or in that fluorescent parking garage outside the concert, that was all 200T push one. And I compare that to the inside of the concert where we shot 500T over a stop, and I always felt like the 200 looked cleaner. So that became our new go-to night stock whenever it made sense. IF: Got it. Was the conversation of 35 ever in the mix for this movie? I'm curious though why the choice of 16 just because for a lot of people it ends up being cost. Some people like to lean into the format. You do a lot inside of a car and 35 is so much larger, just bulkier equipment. I'm curious why this choice? MB: Yeah, it's definitely all of that. I would say cost was definitely a big factor. We just knew that it's a road trip movie. It wasn't a big script in terms of page count, but we just knew that we wanted to give actors the space to try things and go again and let's roll it back and let's keep the scene going, which lends itself towards 16. Like you said, road trip film. We're moving. We're in a different location almost every day. The handheld aspect of it in a car. But also 16 is Brian Ivie's favorite format. I think it's probably one of my favorite formats too. We love 35. It just didn't feel like this one necessarily wanted to be 35, but we wanted a cleaner 16. And so we found our ways to do that. But the next one that we’re planning, that we're in early talks on for both me and Brian's film and me and Ryan's film, both of them will be 35. IF: Okay. So one other aspect I noticed between both of these movies is that you're not afraid of zooms. And you definitely cheat in, sneak in, and sometimes very deliberately are zooming mid shot. It is not something that you shy away from. it has a little bit of like a more retro throwback feel because it's not also like a powered zoom. This looks like it's a hand twist. So tell me a little bit about that choice because that these days to me feels very stylistic. The industry as a whole has moved so far away from zooms, especially from the hand zooming. So tell me, are you trying to give it more of them that throwback to a 90s and 80s, a 70s? Or is it something else? Because you did it in both movies. I'd say more in Gazer than in Anima, but very clearly at the end of during the scanning sequence there. There's a Zoom again. MB: Absolutely. You know, it's funny you picked that up. I never thought about how they both use Zooms in slightly different ways, but similar ways. And they're both kind of... retro throwback films you know with with Gazer i think we were really just sort of you know looking at the masters of new Hollywood and a big tonal reference for us was like move like The Conversation and this idea of like surveillance and the paranoia thriller and so that's where zooms really came in for us and this idea of you know having Frankie zone out and you know while she's zoning out she's obviously losing track of time but there's like a honing in on a specific thing and sometimes it's the thing that triggers you or There's something triggering like a sound or a noise or whatever, or overstimulation or lack of that. But there's still like a honing in of like, did I just see what I thought I saw? So with Gazer, the Zoom was really the storytelling to introduce this feeling of the paranoia to induce a feeling of dread. You know, there's a little, there's a slight little dolly zoom that we do in one of the scenes of Gazer. And it's, you know, we just wanted to harken back. Ryan is just a cinephile and a student of the craft. We wanted to harken back to... a time where that was much more common. And, you know, in all honesty, I'm not a big zoom guy personally. Like I don't, you maybe have one in every lens package, but the movie I'm doing now, Your Heart is a Hummingbird, there was no zoom. And the director SM was like, no zooms. And I said, great, I agree. Not for this one. But on Gazer and Anima, it made sense. On Anima, it's a little bit of the same. Like I think we're hearkening back to something, but Anima has this sort of... lightheartedness, this quality that feels, I think the word we had talked about was like handmade and handcrafted. I remember there's a zoom that happens in a scene while the two characters are driving in Anima that I was shooting on a zoom more so for flexibility of our timing of the day. And Brian was like, on my on the wireless comms like maddie zoom in and i was like you want me to just zoom in with my hands i did it and he loved it and there's something that felt fun about it but also in heart spontaneous harkens back to something it just gave the scene a jolt that it kind of needed the the tonal comps that Brian and i joke about is the Anima feels like as if Alexander Payne made a Kogonada movie and we're like how do we bring this fun 90s like you know sideways day trippers element but also this like pensive slow homage to asian cinema, Drive My Car, Kogonada movies, et cetera. After.Life is a big reference for us. And that's where some of the more slow deliberate zooms in sort of our sci-fi segments or the beginning introducing someone. And then when we did go handheld with it, I'm just doing it by hand. It was to bring sort of, I think Beck's chaos into Paul's world a little bit. IF: I think it's a bold and very interesting and delightful choice to not make Anima feel like it's set in the future. It feels present day in basically almost every regard. It's like this is contemporary. And when you think about, you hear about Silicon Valley tycoons investing in this idea of downloading people into or uploading into the cloud or whatever it is to create a virtual chat bot or some sort of- MB: AI generated versions of your lost family members. And it's things that are happening now. IF: Exactly. Happening right now. It feels like it is an analog, real world example of this future that is just around the corner but it's just bleeding into to today when you guys were discussing this movie was there discussion about leaning into or leaning away from what is this crazy future or this interesting new future. MB: I think, you know, a big term we talked about was retrofuturism, this idea of like the past is somehow also the future and the future is inspired by the past. And the movie has a lot to do with like used CDs, but as much as it does with AI upload consciousness surviving and death capitalism and all these kinds of things. And I think when Brian and I had chatted early on when I was signing onto the film, we agreed that like the sci-fi of the movie is in the background. And there's scenes where it comes to the foreground and we see things with our eyes, but always a bit of a distance or in a version where you're like, I don't really know what this fully looks like. There is a scene or a part of a scene that didn't make it into the film at the end when she speaks to someone on the other side that we actually decided to remove to pull back a little, to not see what that's all about because we wanted to let the audience lean in and have this idea that the future is around the corner, but it's also kind of happening when we least expect it. That was really like a big creative choice for us. But also we just wanted the film to feel grounded and human. You know, a funny term we had heard is it might have come from like the Duplass Brothers or something. It's a Psy Feelings. It's a Psy Feelings movie. Sci-fi, but emotional and dramatic. IF: Yeah, it's not a plot-driven movie. It's a character-driven movie. I think that sci-fi is at its best when it's character-driven. I mean, because sci-fi has a tendency to... have these giant epic story driven movies, but this is the opposite. It's personal, it's small and it's intentionally so. And I appreciate the restraint. I'm sure that budget plays into this too, to not just go over techno on everything. It literally feels like you could go into a pet store today and have, and have it feel like. MB: Yes. And I think that was a goal with both movies. Now that I'm thinking about it is they both want to have a sort of, they're both modern. but Anima feel like it's shaking its hand with the future, and Gazer feels like it's shaking its hand with the past a little bit. But the hope is that they both feel kind of timeless in a way, where Gazer is a very deliberate plot device of why Frankie doesn't have a cell phone, because the digital screens and everything triggers her brain condition. And then with Anima, we were like, okay, well, it's a sci-fi thing, but it's not really the point. We're living in the now. And even this kind of, in real life, this analog renaissance happening, right? Like CD sales are up vinyl’s up and film cameras again and and so they both are these modern movies that touch on our times, but I think have conversations with, like I said, Gazer with the past and Anima with the future. But it never loses its perspective of where our characters are living, which is in that very moment. IF: Anima premiered at South by Southwest this year. So it's very, very recent. Any word on where people will be able to see it yet? Do you know? MB: Hopefully, hopefully some someplace soon. We just announced our international premiere at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain. They're a big genre-focused festival. I believe we also announced... Newport Beach. It will be happening, which is in October. And there's some other ones we can't announce just yet, but very, very soon. And just in talks for seeing where it can go wide and hopefully people can see it on a big screen, which is really important for us. IF: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I got to ask you, being named one of these ASC cinematographers to watch, has it made your phone ring? What's happened because of this? MB: Yeah, things have been, it's funny because magically I was in town prepping for this movie while the ASC Rising Star events happened. And I can say that conversations now with whoever they might be, you know, powers that be industry people have been different than they were before. IF: You got some validation from a hundred year old organization. MB: Totally. And it's really, it's really special. You know, every year that list had come out and I was always so happy to see friends on it and friends back in New York, friends in LA, friends overseas. And I was always just admiring it and just excited to see, I think the, the rising stars list started in 2017. friends that I've you know know that were on that very first list who are now ASC members now it was always just really inspiring to see sort of who was getting their flowers and who's being seen and I always thought you know maybe one day I'll get there and then it was a real treat to get the call this year and say Congrats. Someone decided you're worthy of this list. And it's been really special. I think things have been, you know, I won't say suddenly overnight I'm getting calls to go shoot the next Batman movie, but it's the conversations have changed and it's been really exciting to see what the next chapter will bring. IF: How did you get started in this crazy business? How did you get the bug? Where do you hail from? Give me your life story, go. MB: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I was born and raised in New Jersey, just outside of Manhattan to two immigrant parents. My mother's from Brazil, father's from Portugal. And they both came and sort of, you know, like had this American dream and just started off to the races. My father works in construction. My mother's a cook. IF: So when you told them you wanted to go shoot movies. MB: Yeah. Yeah. IF: They were like, what? They were like, go be an accountant. MB: Exactly. And I was the one who was like, I want to play in a rock band and go make movies. But, you know, I would say pre getting into film, my way in was. As a child, I always loved things like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, these big epic fantasy tales that just opens up this childlike imagination that for many people has lingered on through their whole lives. And I was always into those, always loved storytelling in some form. I think growing up... I was very bad at, I wasn't great at school. I was not a great student. But when it was the creative classes, I always excelled. During recess, I would direct my friends in impromptu plays or whatever you might call them. I was always in our school plays. I acted in them. After school, you know, you always wait outside to get picked up by your parents. And I would just improvise. I would lie to my friends and say, I saw a scary movie last night. And I would improvise a scary movie to see if I could scare them. And when it worked, I got the biggest thrill. realized like storytelling is somewhere within me, but I didn't, I didn't know that movies were made by human beings. I thought they were, you know, given to us by the gods. And so I thought, okay, like, I don't know what exactly I'll do. Maybe I'll find my way into theater or et cetera. And then I discovered music and then I had a whole 10 year detour into. um 10 plus year detour into music i was a drummer in multiple bands touring playing music writing recording music signed to small record labels and it was when i was in bands that we um realized like well if we're in a band we need a music video and we just had uh no money we were young broke kids you know couldn't uh afford to hire anyone so i picked up our family vacation camera which was a canon t2i and slapped the kit lens 1855 and we just shoot music videos on it We did the first video, which is not great. I grew up and had a photography and video audio mentor at this church we went to growing up. And he gave me his 7D with Tamron zoom lens. And he just sort of gave me this runway to try stuff. And I shoot music videos for my own band. And then other bands were like, oh, you do music videos. And then I started shooting their videos. And the bands got bigger and budgets got bigger. They signed to record labels. Suddenly a $500 budget video became $5,000, became $20,000, became so on and so forth. And I just found myself being listed as cinematographer on these videos. And I thought, okay, I guess I'm a cinematographer now. And I went to film school and went to Emerson College for grad school and just started shooting more seriously from there. IF: When did you get out of film school? MB: I technically never finished. I was supposed to finish 2020 grad school, COVID hit. I was teaching at Emerson then, and I decided I didn't want to finish school. And that's in 2021, I started shooting Gazer. So, you know, even though I never finished and school was always a tricky thing for me, that time in my life has been really special. IF: That's fantastic. Okay. So now that you've got a bunch of movies under your belt, you've got an agent, you've got a name to this ASC list. MB: Yeah. IF: What are you looking to tackle next? What's the goal? MB: I remember a couple years ago, I got to ask. Alexis Zabé, cinematographer of the Florida Project. I said like, do you have any advice for us? Do you have like, what do you recommend, et cetera? And he was just like, I think we're talking about like scaling up and how do we get, you know, do bigger things and how do you get ready for that? And he just said, he's like, the thing you're doing now is what you're going to do for the rest of your life. It just gets bigger and better and more difficulty, more, more problems, more money, more, et cetera. But he's like, what you're doing now is what you're going to keep doing. And so my answer, people ask me, like, you know, what do you want to do next? I kind of want to just keep doing this. But at scales that, you know, at scopes that can scale up and bigger budgets, whether it's, you know, small studio movies or different challenges, whether it be genre or format or creative ventures, I think for me, just being able to. IF: Is there a genre or format that you're looking to tackle? MB: You know I love, I love drama. I love, I've done some work in like the drama comedy space. I think, um, you know, one thing I'd love to, it's funny in my ASC writeup, I mentioned how I would just as equally be super excited to shoot a like slow cinema, black and white, esoteric, Apichatpong Weerasethakul style, like, you know, film that's bleak and esoteric and dark as I would be shooting like, you know, the next Dune. Like I'm, they both really, I have a place in my heart and I love them both. And I think for me, I just want to be able to have range and be excited. Someone I look up to tremendously is like a Robbie Ryan who will make movies with Ken Loach and then make movies with Noah Baumbach and then movies with Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold. And they're all so uniquely different and they feel loose and they feel overplanned and they feel huge and they feel really small. But at the core of it is just like fantastic storytelling, fantastic writing, performances, and a dedication to the craft. And I think as long as I can stretch my wings in different formats, genres, stories, scopes but still tell stories I'm excited about and that I'm interested in and passionate about with people that I love being around. I can do that and make a living and keep it going and grow that. I'll be super happy. IF: You mentioned Robbie Ryan. You mentioned several people, but are there cinematographers that inspire you in particular? People who are like a North Star, you really like their work. Is there a particular... person or style of work or a particular reference of movie that is inspiration to you? MB: There's the people I can always say, like, you know, very inspired by Roger Deakins, Emmanuel Lubezki, Bradford Young, very inspired by all of them. I think one of my people who I just like emotionally and philosophically and just so inspired and always looking at is someone like a Harris Savides or Robbie Mueller in ways that I wish I was more like is they're bold and they're thoughtful. They don't feel the need. They never felt the need to, like, be a certain thing because of any outside pressure of, like, what the industry says or whatever. And they push the envelope, you know. And I think people like that now are Jaron Blaschke and Robert Eggers. I think they push the envelope. I think Greg Frazier pushes the envelope. But I'm also inspired by, you know, I feel very lucky that a lot of people I actually look up to are dear friends. You know, Eric Bronco, Lowell Meyer, Natalie Kingston, Christina Dunlap, Oren Soffer, people I feel, you know, before I became friends, I was fans. I was a fan of them. And then they made space for me. They let me in. And I feel very excited by just being able to be surrounded by people I look up to. Norm Lee is another one of them. And then Ed Lachman. I love Ed Lachman. Ed Lachman is just someone that the work he does, whether it's El Conde or Carol or... you know he's new or old his documentary works he's someone that i i think it's funny because he's very quiet and doesn't make very loud movies but i find them very electrifying so Ed Lachman, Harris Savides, Robin Mueller and everyone else i mentioned always inspired by them. IF: i want to shift gears a little bit because you know you're yeah it's always the overnight success story 20 years in the making but it's like but you're a young guy in this industry and uh you've been but you've been doing it for a while and you got some some miles under your belt For the people who are not quite at your level, for the people who are out there thinking like, I need to get an agent. I need to level up. What advice do you have to give that next generation is coming behind you? How important is an agent for them? How should they be trying to position themselves so they can get into that? Is commercials a better avenue to start than narrative? What's your advice for the people who are like just getting out of film school or doing YouTube University? MB: Yeah, it's hard because it's so, especially in this day and age, it's so easy to look at other people's journey and other people's, even even their journey, but they're like, they're, they're where they're currently at. They're, I won't call it a destination, but their current position and to just like compare and to feel like, God, if only I had that, then I would have this, or if I did this, then I would be there. And I think at the end of the day, you know, one, one piece of advice that i heard that i i remind myself of as much as i can is wherever you are be there and i think that both means like you know like right now in a conversation like be here be present but i think it means like wherever you are in your career wherever you are age or your understanding of the world, like to really be there and soak it in because it's always when you're past it and you look back and you're like, oh man, like if only I appreciated that more or something. And so I think for me, you know, a long time ago, a couple, I'd say almost five years ago now when I, when I didn't have an agent, I remember I was, I was watching friends of mine getting signed to different agencies and we're all on the same age. And I just felt like, man, I feel like I don't belong. I feel like my work's not good enough. Or what do I need to do to find this? Uh, if, if I, if I did this kind of film, then maybe I can get an agent. If I get an agent, then I would get a big studio movie and all these kinds of things. And my, um, and my roommate, Daniel Sestito, my, my near and dear friend, uh, just got fed up and just said, shut up, just stop, stop talking about it. Stop thinking about it. He's like, he's like, you're doing great. You're very talented. You just keep doing what you're doing and it's going to be fine. Like, just stop talking about it. I can tell I was talking his ear off and you know, it kind of like, he never really reacted that way. And I just said, okay, I think he's right. I think I just need to like, just chill out. And then later that year, me and some friends, we had gotten together and we just wrote down like our goals for the new year, things we'd hope we'd reach. And I just said, I want to, number one, I said was like, I want to focus on the work. And number two was I want to focus on the people. I want to do this. I want to work with, you know, four new directors this year, blah, blah, blah. And then way at the bottom of the list, I said, I want to have an in-person meeting with an agent. Just like maybe I get to the point where they're interested enough to, you know, entertain me in person. But I just said, I'm going to focus on the work. And what followed that year was just exactly that, continuing to focus on the work, continuing my feature career, and working on Gazer and other movies I had done. And a couple months later, I want to say eight months later, I got signed to my first agent. And it just sort of naturally happened. I worked on Eric Bronco, our friend yet again. He was working on a movie called Story Ave. And he had to leave a couple of days early and he said, hey, I need you to come finish out this movie for me. I said, no problem. I'll be there. I didn't ask any questions. And I realized it was actually- IF: You probably should have asked a question or two. MB: Yeah, I probably should have asked more questions. And I realized I was like, oh, the movie star is Louis Guzman, Asante Black, Alex Hibbert. IF: And it's all underwater. MB: Yeah, yeah. Well, my first three days on it were LED wall subway sets. IF: Oh, wow. MB: We had a pyrotechnic scene. Yeah. And then we had a scene or a stunt where someone fell off a three-story building. IF: Oh, man. There's a trifecta there. MB: Yeah, it's amazing. And I just remember I suddenly felt this overwhelming amount of pressure. And I was like, oh, my God. So I watched all the dailies. I read the script back and forth and frontwards. I reverse engineered a cinematography Bible. I sent it to Eric. I said, am I even close? He's like, yeah, you got it. And in his very Eric way, he's like, yeah, that's exactly it. And then I just showed up on day one. And my first day on set was Louis Guzman's last day. I said, oh, boy, first time working with any actor of that caliber. And I just did what I could. And luckily, it went great. And everything, you know, I hope, you know, fingers crossed that it's been a couple years now. Everything matched great. And they brought me back for some extra pickups and reshoots. And that was the film that got attention. And people came to, you know, agents called me up for that project. And it was just an amazing example of like, oh man, I always thought my, like, again, I had this idea. If I played God, if I did this, then that would happen. This would happen. And none of it played out the way it did. So my biggest advice for people is just, you know, focus on the work, focus on the people you make work with. I think be smart, do your research, see who's out there, who DPs or production designers, editors that you like, who represents them. See just like what's out there. You don't want to be the person that's reaching out. for representation or trying to get out there when the time's not right You want them to come to you and be like, we'd like to talk to you. And I think that comes from just like putting in the work. And I think as you naturally do that and you build community and you build friendships and people recommend you to each other, naturally, you know, a cinematography colleague or a friend will call up their rep and be like, you should check out this person. Like they're really doing some cool stuff. Or I heard about this film that's playing at this festival. If you're going to go there, you should check it out. And then I find that all the best things in life. that sort of come with this career. I don't want to say come by chance. I think you work hard for it. But I think it's when you put what really matters at the front of it, then things start to appear that you thought you had to calculate it, but it actually happens because you prioritize what was important. IF: Well, it sounds like filling in for Eric for those three days was really consequential too. You said it's what started to get attention and everything else. MB: Totally. Yeah. And just to have my name attached to a project like that. And again, for him to give me the platform to step up. And I remember texting him and afterwards he'd be like, thank you so much for even thinking of me for doing that. And he was... The first thing he said was like, I'm getting you ready for the big leagues. And I thought like, how sweet to have someone look out for you like that. IF: It was great having you on the show. You know, thanks so much for coming out. MB: Of course. It means a lot. Thank you for having me. IF: All right. So that was Mateus Bastos. Hey, thank you so much for being on the show. Great chatting with you about your movies. I can't wait to see what you're doing next. All right. Hey, Ben, it's time for our short ends. What is your pet obsession of the week? BR: So my pet obsession for the last week has been Scream Fest, the international horror film festival out of Hollywood. There's a couple of genre festivals. Probably the two best ones known in L.A. are Beyond Fest and Scream Fest. And my short film, which I've talked about on here since we started trying to raise money on Kickstarter for it until the end, got into Scream Fest. And we premiered last night at Hollywood and Highland at Man's Chinese Theater, which is... Pretty iconic and amazing to play there. But this festival is just really well run. And if someone listening to me right now is working on a horror feature or a horror short, definitely... put Scream Fest at the top of your list of festivals to submit to. And if you can get yourself out here to LA, please, please, please do. It's just a really well-run festival. The programming is excellent. They actually did like a cool mix-up of classic stuff. They had Evil Dead 2 and Peter Deming, who we had on the show just a few months ago, they gave him an award for Evil Dead 2 on the 40th anniversary of the filming of Evil Dead 2. Yeah, it's just a great festival. And we had our screening last night. we had a really good showing they use a company called simple dcp to create their dcps and our dcp looked amazing. I am consistently blown away. My short was shot on the Sony FX3 by Will Barrett and Will's an amazing DP and that's obviously the number one thing you need to have. And also colored by George Foyt did the grade for us. I hadn't seen the DCP and seeing it on the big screen looked just amazing. And they programmed us with a Spanish language feature that I'll give a quick shout out to that will be premiering on Amazon Prime in just a couple of weeks now. It's called Apocalypse Z New World for anyone in the genre space. And, you know, you could be making like weird animation or anything that would appeal to horror fans. Check out Scream Fest. They're excellent. And our friend Liam Finn is the producer on the closing night film. IF: Oh, wow. BR: Which is tomorrow night. So by the time you're listening to this, it's too late for you. You missed the boat if you weren't already at Scream Fest. I'm very excited. to have gotten to go there. It's a great festival. IF: What's the closing night film? Give it a shout out. BR: So the closing night film is produced by our good friend, Liam Finn. It's called Christmas at the Kringles. And he's a producer on it. And Mark Stolaroff, who's also been on the show. IF: Nice. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. BR: Liam has made a couple of movies over the years with Christmas themes. And he also produced a film that a friend of mine, Tom Keish, made called Kill Her that premiered also at Screamfest, I think three years ago. IF: Oh, wow. All right. BR: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Illya, what is your obsession this week? IF: You know, I don't know if it's fair to call it an obsession, but I have been thinking an awful lot about animation. And just this week, actually, I think just in the last day or so, Hollywood Reporter has published their sort of their first time ever, their power list of animation. So it's really interesting. They say it's their first pass. It's not a ranking. It's like, you know, they basically came up with 60 people who are sort of defining animation right now around the world. And it's a really, really excellent list. I particularly enjoyed it because there are some people who... to be there and some people who you might not expect. Like, for example, Eric Bauza. He is the voice actor for Coyote vs. Acme. He also did Teen Titans Go. But he's one of the successors to Mel Blanc, who did, of course, the voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian, just to name a few. So it goes into people who I didn't think would be there, like Mike Judge, who, of course, had a real heyday with shows like Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill. But then it also... uh you know Pete Doctor and it's got you know the president of Paramount animation Jennifer Dodge it's got tons and tons of people including you know people you'd totally expect to be there like Matt Groening so of course creator of the Simpsons and Futurama and if you haven't been watching Futurama there's like i haven't watched it in years it turns out there's like three three new seasons of Futurama for me to catch up on so BR: oh i've been showing them all to my son he loves it IF: yeah anyway i think that Animation is a very interesting segment of the industry. It hits four quadrants. It hits, you know, people young and old, male and female, like almost nothing else. It also faces serious disruption from AI, even though what's on this list right here doesn't show that. I know for a fact that in-betweening is becoming a real standard practice using AI, which used to just be called computer animation. Computer animation, the in-betweening of a lot of things were handled by a computer. AI is another methodology now of in-betweening. BR: I don't mean to be like this, but I sort of feel like... That's an obvious use of AI where it's not really making a creative choice or doing anything. Because in-betweening is like my arm's moving from here to here. So some person had to do each frame. And for the longest time, yeah, it's been done by a person operating a computer. And now it would be done by a person operating an AI. in a computer like it i i'm sure it makes it faster but i don't know that it really changes it that IF: Well i'm gonna say that it's not just the in-betweening anymore that really the human the human art sort of exists at one level and now all of the animation process and visual effects that go along with it are becoming ai and becoming more automated and Any animation studio that is not that is not a throwback to like, you know, stop frame animation or something like that. It's very purposely like a a human process like that. You know, the people over at Laika, they've got a very, you know, established workflow. But anyone else who's not taking advantage of the time savings that AI. helps for animation is probably a dinosaur compared to some of the other companies. Now, these other companies are coming in and going, we can create this and it serves our purpose. And it's animation is going to is going to get continuously disrupted for a while, I believe. And there is a wonderful human aspect to it. But a lot of the drudgery, a lot of the slow, slow work of animation, computers have already taken over some of that. It's going to just accelerate now with AI. BR: Yeah. I also think that we're going to start, you know, sort of like in a way, sometimes in the film industry, we fetishize stuff that's shot on 35 millimeter film or whatever. I think we're going to start. IF: What? No one's ever done that. We didn't just have a show last week all about IMAX. BR: No, but like, you know, I just think we're going to start seeing more fetishization of like human made. But I will say this and I'm not going to name the film, but I recently saw a film that had, well, it was at Screamfest. And there were obvious AI shots in it. If it was AI of, you know, a bunch of bug eggs hatching out of somebody's skull and climbing out of their eyeballs or something, you'd go like, oh, OK, well, that would be really hard to do. But this is all like landscape photography that looked nothing like the rest of the film. And I'm like, why would you do that when the rest of the film looks very analog? IF: That's a really bad choice. And I think that there's something very important about the human judgment and idea of matching everything through i think there's a lot of i mean like we all we've all seen the ai slop there's a lot of people who are calling themselves filmmaker who they're just going to release a entirely ai slot movie or insert slop elements they're not going to be using it appropriately and i think it's going to pull people out right out of the story immediately. BR: And sometimes i don't know if have you have you experienced this where you're watching a commercial or something and you're trying to figure out if it's ai and it's either ai or it isn't but like commercials are so art directed and stage managed in every way that they kind of sometimes can feel a little weird and robotic even if they have people in them and i'm like oh wow this is like making me question like i'm sure some of the ones that i watch are like oh that's real people or oh yeah that's totally ai and it's it's like blurring that line of what's real and what's ai and i think i haven't okay eye for it i'm sure there's stuff that i that that goes by me but to me it's like it's going to invade our thinking you know there's certain things you look at and you go like oh yeah like ai can totally make them those generic woodenly acted commercials of like mom and dad sitting on a couch talking to their kid it can totally do that now. IF: I will tell you that there hasn't been anything I've seen, anything that I've seen that had an emotional connection with the. I don't have an emotional connection with those commercials. I think that's the point. That is the point. But I would say what I think is perhaps worse is when you're seeing advertisements that are coming to you online, particularly on your phone, maybe through social media, where they are presenting themselves as not being AI, but they're very clearly AI. And recently I saw a whole bunch of people commenting all about this person who was supposedly a veterinarian and was talking about being a cat doctor. And here's all these things you should feed your cat. And immediately it struck me as AI. Immediately it struck me as AI. BR: Oh, yeah. I've seen a lot of those, like especially on YouTube. They're everywhere. IF: And I know that when you're looking at a smaller screen and when you're maybe a more casual viewer, you're not paying too close attention to it. But the comments of people talking about the doctor, which, of course, could have been bot farmed. It could have also not. real but the comments of people saying like oh i'm so glad this this vet is here telling us what we can feed our cat and i immediately was like god all of this is like you can't trust you can't trust anything none of this information is real and i don't know BR: yeah it's but yeah you know i mean well let me here i mean this is way off topic of your short end but i think that this is something that impacts our industry a lot with the AI-ification of advertising you know we're i mean like we're seeing a lot of traditional advertising still and actually a friend of mine who works in commercial so that it's a huge boom of commercials being shot right now so yeah good on them but i'm seeing a lot of ai commercials even on television and i'm curious because uh ad agencies would make a big chunk of their change if like let's say you're doing a big commercial campaign for Nike, and let's say you're making a million-dollar commercial campaign, and those do exist, they would sometimes take 35% of that budget. So there was always an incentive for the commercial production companies to drive up the cost because that meant that they made a higher profit. But if you're doing a Nike ad that you're hiring two or three people to generate in Kling or whatever AI they're using, your labor costs are... if you're paying them top dollar, which why would you? You could probably get an intern to do it. But let's say you're paying them one-tenth of that, one-hundredth of that. You know, that means that these agencies are going to suddenly be less profitable because they're not going to be able to charge these giant production company fees that they used to be able to charge. That was why commercials... paid so well is because the people who were hiring you out were incentivized to charge the client more money. And if you can go to the client and say like, yeah, I can get, you know, my, my nephew to generate, you know, something roughly equivalent to any other commercial you've ever seen, you know, for almost nothing. Does that not then put out the commercial production companies in the ad agency? IF: I'm going to say no, because actually I have a tremendous aversion to these. AI generated commercials, especially because of the how scammy low end ones that there are. If the large brands start. emulating that, I'm going to feel like they are also low end and scammy, just like these other ones. It's as if, you know, it's as if Coke decided that the best way to start marketing their product was like 1985 infomercials that would be more equivalent to like ShamWow or the Magic Dicer. It's like Coca-Cola doesn't market itself that way because Coca-Cola doesn't want to be associated with that type of advertising. BR: It's funny that you would use them as the first example because they were the first people to make a national commercial using generative AI. IF: And I would say the temperature. of people by and large when they did that. was quite different than today when they when they did it at that time it was edgy and interesting and they were you know being a trendsetter and they had to do a bunch of stuff now that it's commonplace it's like they say in the Incredibles, is like once everybody is super no one will be. It's like once everyone can do this then that sort of commercial does not stand out that sort of commercial looks weird and dated that sort of commercial makes me have a less positive association with a brand. BR: well they probably got a lot of coverage because they did that at the time. And if they did it now, yeah, you're probably right. But I mean, like, you know, at the Super Bowl, you were seeing AI generated ads. I mean, it's just, it's not even. IF: Yeah. And I would say all of those brands doing that at their own risk, because I'm not alone in this. As I talk to people just randomly through life and things, the people who are aware of ads being AI have, immediate negative association with it. BR: I just wonder, though, if there would be a tipping point because, you know, like Eli Roth's The Ice Cream Man or the new movie from Danny Boyle is already catching heat because he used generative AI for, he said, under 30 seconds of the movie. And Eli Roth used it apparently a lot. I wasn't going to see The Ice Cream Man anyway because it just didn't sound like my thing. I wonder if at a point it's going to be not a point that anyone cares about. IF: I will tell you that the way that it becomes something that nobody cares about is probably through an inroad in at least in entertainment, one of two ways, probably through visual effects and probably through animation. Those are the two areas I think most are most susceptible to disruption from from AI. When you're talking about animation, you already have an impediment to you having a connection with a human being. You've got a representation of what it is. So the closer that animation can be something that people can relate to while still not trying to be a human, the more successful it is. Visual effects, quite often, it is supposed to be something that is realistically happening. So you've got an idea of what that is supposed to be. And if you can make your visual effects more realistic because you... incorporated AI then you might have a better shot at connecting with an audience or the opposite extreme where it's something so fantastical that no one knows what it looks like anyway it's something original yeah as you try to stand more in that sort of reality space that you know the uncanny valley the uncanny valley is anything that someone knows what it's supposed to look like anyone who has an understanding of how a human would react anyone who understands like what a place or a setting or a scene is sort of generally supposed to be the more you try to replace that sort of thing the harder you're it's going to be for your audience to actually connect. BR: Nope makes sense. IF: Anyway, Ben, that does it for this episode. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? BR: You can find me at benrock.com. Check it out. See all my stuff. How about yourself, Illya? Where can people find you? IF: You can find me at illyafriedman.com. Hello at illyafriedman.com. If you want to send me an email or there's a little contact page now that's working, you can send me a message to the contact page. BR: I'm going to do that right now. IF: Oh, great. Not because we're talking and you could just ask me whatever it is. You're going to go send me a message. All right. Thanks. Hey, Ben, who do we have to thank? Who made this show possible? BR: As always, our amazing producer, Alana Kode, our preditor, she's producing and she's editing. She's probably editing this right now while she's listening to me say this. And also she's doing a lot of interviews. Alana does it all. She doesn't need us. Why are we even here? Let's go. And then we also have to thank Kays Alatrakchi who created all the music for the podcast. Check out Kays’s website, musicbykays.com or Kays Labs. Let's say you have a synthesizer and let's say one of the, I'm going to go with transistors. I don't know what's in a synthesizer. Fried, broke, whatever. Reach out to Kays. Kays fixes synthesizers for money. IF: Awesome. All right. So that does it for this episode. Ben, do you want to take us out? BR: Thanks for tuning in. This has been CinePod, the cinematography podcast presented by Hot Rod Cameras. Find your next camera, lens, or accessory at hotrodcameras.com. Watch and subscribe to our show on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow and interact with us on Instagram, threads, Facebook, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn. But not X. Don't do that. Thanks for tuning in.