Y Crazy Mind

A good movie doesn’t just tell a good story. It transports audiences out of their seats and into a different world, travelling through time, worlds, and dimensions and immersing viewers in a captivating and cathartic experience for a couple of hours. Doing so, however, is an all-encompassing task, taking the work of several visionaries to create something special. The visual aspect of a film is fifty percent of the experience, and a cinematographer need to be an artist as well as a technician. China’s Feixue Tang knows this better than most. Tang is an in-demand cinematographer in her home country of China and abroad, best known for her work on award-winning films like Here & Beyond, Who We Are, and The Elephant in the Room . She has an unparalleled passion for her craft, and a way of knowing just how to visually tell a story. Tang has a knack for the documentary genre, which audiences around the world can see in her film Lumpkin, GA . Documenting the stories of a fad...

Growing up in China, Zhihan Zhang was always enthralled by the arts. In his youth, he wanted to be a painter, loving the idea of creating beautiful images for the masses. However, as he grew and explored the arts, he found his interest in painting shift to photography. Once he began understanding the craft, he knew that he was destined to become a cinematographer, combining those innate artistic skills with filmmaking to achieve what he always wanted: creating beautiful images for the world. Being a cinematographer, for Zhang, is similar to being a painter, but instead of using watercolors and acrylics, he uses lights and shadows to create a stunning picture. His beautiful work can be seen in a variety of successful projects, from fashion films D-Express and The Lady In White for NOWNESS to the popular television series Behind the Spotlight , and many more. Zhang also is aware of the importance of using film to shed light on pressing issues and to educate his audience rat...

When Shuntian Jiang was a teenager, he found himself easily distracted from his studies. He felt he didn’t need school, and knew he was an artist at heart. However, he didn’t know what kind of artist or where to begin. Instead, he immersed himself in sports, until one day he broke his foot playing basketball. To pass the time during his injury, he would watch movies, and that is when the magic happened. He watched more than 1000 movies that year. He wasn’t just entertained; he fell in love with the art of cinema. He knew then and there he was destined to become a filmmaker and he has never looked back. Now, Jiang is a renowned cinematographer. Known for films like Path to Salvation , music videos such as Mona Haydar’s “Barbarian” and viral commercials including a recent spot for Japanese sporting apparel brand Descente starring Chinese icon and Hollywood star Daniel Wu, Jiang is at the top of his game. He loves what he does, and knows that those years he spent lost in his teen...

Growing up in Singapore, Justin Ivan Hong was an introverted child. Rather than speaking, he liked to observe leading to a sense of empathy and a desire to try and understand why people are the way they are. He explored this through the arts, whether drawing or taking photos, passing the time in his youth. However, as he grew, he began to have an increased interest in the idea of narrative motion pictures, and all these pieces of himself began to click together in cohesive harmony. “While I can’t say that I consciously wanted to be a cinematographer, the more I learned about it, the more evident it became that this was the creative outlet/voice that I had been searching for. It was inevitable,” said Hong. Now, Hong is an industry leading cinematographer in Singapore and abroad, known for his substantial contributions to the many films and television shows he has been a part of. He has worked alongside industry icons, like Star Wars ’ Mark Hamill and Howard Kazanjian ( Emp...

Despite having parents that both were filmmakers, Max McLachlan was not interested in the industry growing up. Instead, living on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia, he spent his time surfing. When he was a teenager, he and his brother began taking videos of each other surfing on a small handy-cam, and McLachlan discovered he had an innate talent looking through the lens of a camera. He began to make more movies in his spare time, making stop-motion animation with toys, meticulously moving each figurine frame-by-frame to achieve a linear story. By the time he was 18, he knew that this wasn’t a hobby anymore, but a passion he could not shake. Now, McLachlan is far from that boy filming his toys in his room and is an in-demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator in Australia and abroad. He has worked alongside some of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars from the celebrity coaches on The Voice Australia to Murray Cook, part of the iconic children’s phenomenon ...

An “edge of your seat” suspenseful drama doesn’t need to contain CGI or practical effects to focus your attention like a tractor beam. The requirements are a great script and a cinematographer like Mufeng Han who understands how to create the emotional space to transport a viewer into the environment that the director desires. Damaged is the type or nerve wracking tale that is one-hundred percent believable but it’s the manner in which Mufeng places you inside the emotional core of the film’s characters which produces such a strong reaction in audiences. Known for the same effect in award-winning films like Patrick (with wins from the New York Film Awards, the Los Angeles Film Awards, etc.) and Son of Wanderer (London Independent Film Awards, Los Angeles Film Awards, Mindfield Film Festival, International Independent Film Awards, Rome Independent Prisma Awards, etc.), Han has become acclaimed in the modern film industry for his vision and insight through the camera lens. In a medium...

While many of us experience daily anxiety about how to view the world, Nicola De Prato finds comfort in his perception of it. While cinematographer is the moniker most often used when referring to him, De Prato is a true artist who enjoys discovering the world around him and portraying these ideas through the camera’s eye. Myopic is a description he constantly disproves when it comes to the types of productions he works within. Award-winning films, documentaries, music videos, and the ever expanding world of web-based productions are all canvases for him to explore and with which to entertain a widely diverse audience. He’ll tackle issues ranging from internet stalkers to national holidays and much more. There’s never a shortage of intriguing ways for De Prato to create the visual presentation of a story; it’s this passionate trait that has caused so many in the production industry to enlist him and the benefits of his style. The horror/thriller genre has a long history of g...

It’s a scary thing to focus your life on a career, finish your studies, and then enter the professional world. When you’re involved in the creative arts it’s perhaps even more intimidating as there is no direct path to success and even at the highest levels of the field there is no security. Many artists make the joke that even after their greatest creations they are unemployed until their next success…which of course finds them immediately unemployed again. When cinematographer Jose Andres Solorzano finished his tutelage at the prestigious AFI in Los Angeles he found himself quickly on the set of famed singer Jaycob Duque’s latest music video “ Mal de Amores ” as DP for noted director Harold Ortiz. This video became a massive success online and was seen as reinvigorating to Duque’s career. Several factors contributed to the exceptional results of this shoot, not the least of which was the enthusiasm Solorzano contributed as a means of exhibiting his abilities and contributions on thi...