CAN | You work in multiple mediums: as a painter, cinematographer, and photographer. Which medium informs your artistic sensibilities the most?   

CT ── I think drawing and painting best inform my sensibilities. It’s the one discipline I feel is the least constrained by the world outside my mind, but the most revealing of that world. Through visual arts, I developed a strong understanding of composition, colour theory, form, and perspective that has helped uplift my techniques as a cinematographer and photographer. It is the one avenue that makes me feel the most connected to the artistic timeline of humanity. The historic path of drawing and painting stretches back much farther than that of cinema and photography, and will most likely outlive it. The skill of using cameras as an image-making tool developed much later in my life than my practice in visual arts. I use cameras to connect with the world around me and explore it with a restricted frame─one with which I can choose what not to see as much as what I choose to see. Drawing and painting allow me to point a ‘camera’ inwards into my mind, as well as outside it.

CAN | Cinematographers are, to some degree, the unsung heroes in film and television, contributing extensively to various aspects of production. How do you view your role on set and in telling a story? 

CT ── I appreciate the sentiment, but the work I do is hardly heroic. There are several roles on production teams I feel carry way more weight than they’re recognized for, and without as much creative license as I’m afforded. I see my role on set, in a nutshell, as a conduit and filter between a director and an image on screen. As a conduit, I’m essentially carrying a tempo and key from the director to my team and overseeing that we are all playing in sync. I try to see what a director is envisioning, either by looking at references or mining it from ideas and concepts, then translating it into a blueprint for me and my team to execute practically. This may be as simple as keeping some key notes in my mind when shooting solo in a documentary setting, to storyboards, lighting plans and ratios, blocking paths, and coordinating with production designers in narrative work. 

The part of my role I call a filter is essentially my voice, or eye, or whatever metaphor works best here. I need to understand and interpret whatever theme, motifs, mood, et cetera, a director is intending to explore before I capture it. I think it’s important to note that my role also has a caveat of staying out of the way of the story as much as possible. Everything I do is, hopefully, in service of uplifting and supporting the subtext of the story while allowing the text to play out with as little visual distraction as possible. A very poetic way of saying I show up and flick some switches and press some buttons on set.