Frame & Reference is a conversation between Cinematographers hosted by Kenny McMillan. Each episode dives into the respective DP’s current and past work, as well as what influences and inspires them. These discussions are an entertaining and informative look into the world of making films through the lens of the people who shoot them.
In this episode, we’re joined by my friend Michael Cioni to talk about his new company Strada (YouTube).
Michael is a serial entrepreneur whose career includes numerous awards for his creative work and technical achievements. He is an accomplished director, cinematographer, musician, four-time Emmy winner, member of the Motion Picture Academy, and Associate Member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
A U.S. patent holder of digital cinema technology, Michael was the founder and CEO of the post house Light Iron where he pioneered tools and techniques that emerged as global workflow industry standards. After Light Iron was acquired by Panavision, Michael served as product director for Panavision’s Millennium DXL 8K camera ecosystem.
He then joined the cloud startup company Frame.io where he served as Senior Vice President of Global Innovation. After Frame.io was acquired by Adobe, Michael led numerous workflow innovations including the breakthrough Camera to Cloud technology program as Senior Director of Global Innovation.
He continues to be motivated by the desire to democratize professional workflows and focuses his efforts on inventing new ways for filmmakers to create through his technology. Michael is a well-known and gifted speaker, advocate for the community, and serves as a mentor and educator throughout the global media industry.
Mark Laurila, retired teacher of English and Film at California State University August 21, 2023 (Updated in June 2025) Marechal1937 (YouTube)
“My aesthetic has always been tied to the Gordon Willises of the world, the Jordan Cronenweths, the Conrad Halls, the James Wong Howes… the people who took risks.”
David Fincher ‘Seven‘ Criterion Laserdisc commentary, 1996
“With all our modern technology, there is no one who can match James Wong Howe’s ability to control light in the service of story.”
James Wong Howe ASC was a legendary Hollywood cameraman who remains too little known today, despite having been nominated ten times for Academy Awards (and winning twice). A master of black and white, he brought his characteristic, nuanced control of darkness, and light to cinematography.
He loved to tell the story of how he put on roller skates and picked up a handheld camera in order to capture the excitement of the climactic boxing match in the classic Film Noir Body and Soul (1947), starring John Garfield. The footage Wong Howe captured inside the ring became a major inspiration for Martin Scorsese when he made Raging Bull (1980). How exactly was Wong Howe’s approach so different from what had come before? This video shows examples of earlier boxing movies, such as Golden Boy (1939) and They Made Me a Criminal (1939), and compares them to Wong Howe’s achievement in Body and Soul.
The resulting analysis is surprising and will likely change perceptions of the film and of Chinese-born/American-raised James Wong Howe. Regarding the film, the innovative camerawork combines the smoothness of the Mitchell BNC with the instability of the handheld Eyemo. Regarding Wong Howe, racism was a constant presence in his life, as he experienced racist movie crews, was denied citizenship because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and was barred from marrying the writer Sanora Babb because she was white. Additional Wong Howe movies referenced here include Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Transatlantic (1931), Air Force (1943), He Ran All the Way (1951), Hud (1963), Peter Pan (1924), and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968).
Best of James Wong Howe: The Thin Man (1934)
This video presents the highlights of Wong Howe’s cinematography in the 1934 Comedic Mystery The Thin Man, an adaptation of the novel by Dashiell Hammett. William Powell and Myrna Loy play Nick and Nora Charles, a famous detective and his heiress wife who team up (with the help of their dog Asta) to solve the mystery behind a murder and a missing suspect.
The video demonstrates Wong Howe’s brilliance in several modes: Revealing the Main Characters (in which the characters are first seen from behind, with a moving camera allowing their surprising actions to help define them), Shadowy Characters (in which Wong Howe employs the kind of light and dark that he would use in future Films Noir), Pioneering Whip Pans (in which he uses the ultra-fast panning that would become best known decades later in the films of the French New Wave), The Artful Close-up (which shows the painstaking, glamorous lighting techniques that made him so in demand among the era’s leading ladies…and men) and Character Motivates Camera Movement (which shows how Wong Howe preferred to move his camera only if it had the purpose of better showing characters’ actions).
The success of The Thin Man resulted in the production of five (less-effective) sequels between 1936 and 1947.
Best of James Wong Howe: Body and Soul (1947)
This video presents the highlights of Wong Howe’s cinematography in the 1947 John Garfield Film Noir boxing drama Body and Soul. The movie shows how money, along with sex, can lead to corruption, a theme often found in Garfield’s movies.
The video demonstrates Wong Howe’s brilliance in several modes: Emotion and the Moving Camera (in which emotions are enhanced through the choice to move the camera through space), Romance Night and Day (showing how the mood could be created differently, depending on the time), Picturing Lust (in which he used a composition to suggest objectification), Noir Style, Deep Focus, and Pioneering Hand-held Camera.
Body and Soul was created through Garfield’s own independent production company and resulted in a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for Garfield. It won for Best Editing by Robert Parrish. The film co-stars Lili Palmer, Hazel Brooks, William Conrad, Canada Lee, and Lloyd Gough (billed here as Lloyd Goff).
The film’s director Robert Rossen, its screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, and Garfield were all eventually targeted by HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, during the Hollywood Blacklists in the 1950s. Because of his blacklisting, Garfield’s career was destroyed, and he soon died of a heart attack at the age of 39.
Best of James Wong Howe: He Ran All the Way (1951)
This video presents the highlights of Wong Howe’s cinematography in the 1951 crime melodrama Film Noir He Ran All the Way, which contains the final on-screen performance by John Garfield.
The video demonstrates Wong Howe’s brilliance in several modes: Introducing a Character (which involves a fast pan, a startling push-in, and reframing to emphasize a gun), Darkness and Light (showcasing Wong Howe’s mastery of Film Noir style), Camera Placement in Pool (in which Wong Howe put on swim trunks and lowered his camera into Long Beach’s Plunge to get the play of light off the water and onto the actors’ faces), All in a Single Shot (virtuosic, and always helpful on a low budget movie), High-Angle Vulnerability (nearly a God’s Eye View looking down on human weakness), Trapped Inside Frames (fitting for a hostage story), and John Garfield’s Final Scene on Film (a collaboration with an actor that Wong Howe had loved and worked with since the 1930s).
The script was mostly written by Dalton Trumbo, but because of his blacklisting and impending prison sentence, his name was removed from the credits. The film’s director, John Berry, was also blacklisted, and he left the U.S. in order to continue working in Europe.
Best of James Wong Howe: Picnic (1955)
This video presents the highlights of Wong Howe’s cinematography in the 1955 Cinemascope and Technicolor classic Picnic, directed by Joshua Logan and based on the play by William Inge.
By the time this film was made, nearly half of all Hollywood feature films were still being shot in black and white. Wong Howe’s reputation still largely rests on his black and white work, but by the 1950s, studios increasingly chose to make films in color, pushing Wong Howe outside his comfort zone. The Technicolor company required DPs to be “assisted” by a supposed Technicolor expert who would try to dictate color use and lighting. But Wong Howe resisted, making enemies at Technicolor. He continually aimed to use less high key and more low key light than the Technicolor engineers pushed for, and he was always ready to desaturate the colors to give a more earthbound look, rather than a gaudy Hollywood one.
Picnic was the movie that made Kim Novak a star, and William Holden became a major sex symbol for his many shirtless scenes and for the sexual chemistry between him and Novak. Although most of the interiors were shot on Columbia Pictures sound stages in Hollywood, the many exteriors were shot on location in several small Kansas towns. Wong Howe loved the challenge of location shooting. And in this case, he also loved that the director, Joshua Logan, was mostly a New York stage director. As Todd Rainsberger writes, “Haskell Wexler, a Howe assistant at the time, says that Logan was not cinematically inclined and relied heavily upon Howe to visualize the story.” As Logan himself wrote in a letter to Jimmie, “If I have been a successful director in this picture, it is enormously due to the encouragement, ideas and editing that you gave to me so generously…” Wong Howe, known in the industry as a “frustrated director,” loved the opportunity to put his imprint on the movie’s look.
Best of James Wong Howe: Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
This video presents the highlights of Wong Howe’s cinematography in the 1957 Film Noir masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success. Burt Lancaster plays powerful and ruthless New York newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker who manipulates Press Agent-on-the-make Sidney Falco, played by Tony Curtis, into doing his bidding, breaking up his younger sister’s romantic relationship.
The video demonstrates Wong Howe’s brilliance in several modes: Sidney Falco and the Restless Camera (in which the constantly moving camera emphasizes the press agent’s non-stop hustling), Faces in Darkness (often suggesting hidden intentions and toxic influence), and EXT. NEW YORK CITY – NIGHT (in which Wong Howe’s mastery of location and night shooting astonishes).
Sweet Smell of Success began as a short story by Ernest Lehman, best known for writing Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest. Lehman wrote the first script, but after the director Alexander Mackendrick was hired, playwright Clifford Odets rewrote much of it, and the film’s famous acidic dialogue seems overtly Odetsian.
“Sweet Smell of Success is a crazy movie. You know, directors look at films in a pretty special way. We all have a kind of lexicon. For us, shots are common nouns and verbs that, together, form sentences or paragraphs, a language. And this language is constantly evolving. Sweet Smell of Success is part of my lexicon. It is there even when I don’t consciously refer to it. I love it because it stays true to its concept all the time. It never stops to take you by the hand, it pulls you in, period.”
This video presents the highlights of Wong Howe’s cinematography for Hud, the 1963 adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel that showcased one of Paul Newman’s most iconic performances and that won Patricia Neal her Academy Award for Best Actress. Wong Howe won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
This video demonstrates Wong Howe’s brilliance in several modes: Ultra Widescreen Panavision for Dynamism, Making a Cadillac Emblematic of a Reckless Man (which shows how the pictorial qualities involving Hud’s pink Cadillac were used to reveal personality and, simultaneously, excite audiences), Tracking Two-Shots that Emphasize Connection…And Ultimate Disconnection (which shows how Wong Howe developed a motif over the course of the film), Filters Remove Clouds for a Stark, White-Hot Sky (which shows the use of light-blue filters to create an effect that Wong Howe bragged about in almost every interview he gave after this), Location Night Shooting Enhances Emotion and Realism (which actually benefits from the local bugs attracted to the photo floods), Wide Angle Lens (25mm) and Slow Pan Underlines the Isolation of a Barren Landscape (which shows one unbroken, high angled shot that made the surrounding farms look much farther away than they actually were), Matching a Location’s Bare-Bulbed Lighting for Small Town Authenticity (an instance in which Wong Howe proclaimed he resisted any use of his “special touch” with light), Mid-Gray, Rather than High Contrast to Create a Hot and Drab Environment (which shows how “Low Key Howe” stifled his favored mode for the sake of what was most appropriate for the story), Unglamorous Lighting to Suggest a Hard Life (which shows several scenes with Patricia Neal’s character, Alma), and One Virtuosic, Continuous Shot to Give Finality to a Character’s Arc (giving the kind of big send-off that couldn’t have hurt Neal’s chances on Oscar night).
Hollywood Stunt Coordinator & VFX Artist Dave Macomber discusses pre-visualizing the fight sequence for David Fincher’s The Killer and his new Unreal Engineproject.
Dave Macomber is an award-winning stunt/fight coordinator and second-unit director in the film industry. With a passion for Visual Effects (VFX), Dave seamlessly incorporates VFX elements into his stunt visualizations, providing a comprehensive template for directors and the rest of the crew.
Having worked on iconic blockbusters like Transformers, HBO‘s Watchmen, and numerous Marvel Cinematic Universe films, Dave’s expertise shines through. Just a glance at his IMDB page showcases his impressive portfolio.
In his latest project for David Fincher‘s The Killer, Dave coordinated a gripping 6-minute fight sequence shot mostly in darkness. Join him as he shares insights into working with David Fincher, revealing that Fincher is an extremely collaborative director, and how his background as a VFX artist dictates his approach to photographing sequences in his movies.
‘Killer vs Brute’ exemplifies Dave’s mastery in delivering high-impact action sequences. Even though the scene turned out to be a success, Dave states that it was “the most intimidating thing I’ve ever done in my career.”
Venturing into Unreal Engine filmmaking during his spare time, Dave’s creativity knows no bounds. Last year, he unveiled The Ronin, his first Unreal Engine short film, showcasing a fight scene performed entirely by himself, using Rokoko Motion Capture technology. Now, with The Widow: Assassins Highway, Dave enlists a team of Marvel stunt performers to help him capture the stunts and elevate the action.
This episode offers a captivating glimpse into the VFX pipeline, the Hollywood stunt process, and Unreal Engine filmmaking.
Listen to the extended version of the conversation as a podcast:
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates—found unlikely creative fulfillment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making.
Every weekday,Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”
Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five kids, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a company called With Teeth, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.
Fincher will be on-hand to introduce his thriller, which stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as two detectives on the hunt for a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as inspiration for his crimes.
Having been in development since 2007, David Fincher’s adaptation of the French comic series The Killer arrives as a slick, stylish, and darkly funny film about a professional assassin desperately trying to project an image of cold, exacting competence, all the while struggling to keep his head above water in the aftermath of a job gone wrong.
With its solo protagonist who goes for long stretches of the film without saying aloud a single word, The Killer often resembles a silent film as much as anything else. Camera Operator had the opportunity to talk with A camera operator Brian Osmond, SOC, about working with Michael Fassbender in this unique role, the camera as “straight man” for the film’s sly comedy, and the professional relationship he’s developed with director David Fincher over the past seven years.
With no name and no background to go on, we meet “The Killer” in Paris, France, in the midst of his preparations to assassinate a similarly unnamed target. After days of meticulous planning, the moment finally comes with the target in sight, ready to take the shot, and he misses! Our mysterious assassin is left trying to pick up the pieces of this botched assassination all the while the situation continues to spiral out of control. The Killer is directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and stars Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton.
Camera Operator: Let’s talk about the first 20 minutes of the movie. That’s the part that really stuck in my head after the movie. That long, slow burn setup to what’s kind of the movie’s main punch line: him missing the shot after all that meticulous buildup and preparation. Can you talk a little bit about what went into shooting that sequence?
Brian Osmond: Yeah, it is a slow burn, isn’t it? It’s a bit painstaking, but ultimately I really like the sequence. His meticulous nature is obviously on display, and when it finally comes to the moment to pay it all off, he misses! And that sets up the rest of the movie. Shooting it was a lot of work, as you can imagine. The entire sequence, structurally, was made from three pieces: there was the Paris work, there was the stage work with Michael, and there was the stage work for everything across the street, and those are seamlessly combined with compositing and editing.
Spending too much time looking backwards feels dangerous to me, but this day on the calendar caught my attention. Has it really been that long, old friend?
I just spent an hour listening to this time capsule of what 28 year old me had to say, and it still excites me and breaks my heart.
Cate Adams, Costume Designer Edited by Leonard Zelig Behind the Scenes photos by Miles Crist March 5, 2024
Illustrations by Richard Merritt (Click to view in full resolution)
During my first talks with David Fincher to discuss the script, one of the first notes he gave me was that maybe “The Expert” should be in an Ann Taylor suit. Ann Taylor is a small US chain of clothing stores for fashion-forward career women. Put together, but not flashy. Very understated despite her wealth. That was my first impression.
When we got closer to shooting the scenes with Tilda Swinton in Chicago, there was correspondence between her and David about shaping the character, what she would wear, what her house looks like, that he shared with me and Gigi Williams, Head of Makeup.
She lives in a beautiful, mid-century modern home, and she has money from her occupation, but she is very under the radar. She indulges herself with smaller luxuries like fine-dining restaurants, where she keeps her own bottle of whisky, and Swiss ultra-luxury vintage watches like an Audemars Piguet. A masseuse could be seen leaving her home with a table.
David suggested a simple but beautiful dress with a flow, with a sway. It had to be warm because it was going to be really cold since we were shooting at night in Chicago in February. So, maybe wool. And nice shoes, but not so tall as to risk hurting anyone when she topples. He wanted something that was in a lighter tone, similar to “The Killer” in Paris. It’s funny how there are these hidden Easter eggs, everything connected. And all the light tones couldn’t have a touch of pink in them. If you look at some khakis on the color wheel they will lead to pink. And he doesn’t like pink. I also had to avoid greens. And patterns. So, it had to be muted tones like off-white, ecru, eggshell, cement… She shouldn’t be menacing when you first see her. You want a bit of compassion or empathy for her.
I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of time with Tilda. So, we just started doing a lot of research. After scouring the internet for dresses and looking for reference photos of her films and press appearances, we started to think that we should make our own dress.
The Fincher Analyst 