Mike Gioulakis
"I ended up at an arts and musical boarding school for my senior high school year, focusing on my chosen instrument as well as minoring in photography. Then, at the last minute, instead of heading off to toward a career in music, I decided to change gears from music to filmmaking."
"Lists like CML had just started back then, so I was really starting to geek out on all of this stuff, trying to make sense of it all. I would read through the forums and any American Cinemtographer Magazine I could get my hands on. This coupled with a strong love for photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Charlie White and Erwin Olaf, helped to inspire this new path of mine."
"I ended up at Florida State University majoring in Fine Art. Most of my friends were there at the film school and I actually met most of the directors from Strike Anywhere while there. I sort of made my own path between the Fine Art department and working on. I would be gaffing a students project one day, then in a painting critique another, and studying Art History the next. It was a well rounded education that I believe proved to be formative in how I like to approach most of the work I do even today."
"When I left FSU, there were a few of us that worked together on a feature outside of Philadelphia. It was made with a lot of sweat, as no budget films are and the team included a lot of the guys I went to college with, including Justin from Strike Anywhere."
"From there, it was sort of a natural move up to New York, where I continued to shoot shorts, small music videos and gaff on non-union features and commercials. I did this for a couple years, before heading over to the west coast, which was somewhere I always knew I would end up."
"I got to LA just before the writer’s strike and there was a fair amount of features shooting in town and was swept up into the lighting crew, got lucky and was in the union within a few months. For the next few years I worked in lighting on a number of TV shows, and so for a while there, I stopped pursuing DP work and put in some time on the crew side, learning from lots of excellent gaffers and cinematographers. For me, crewing in TV and working for a bunch of guys who have been gaffing for decades really helped to hone my craft. With shooting, there are twenty different ways you can approach the same problem and so many different tools to try and resolve that problem. So for me, working in a crew showed me a whole range of ways of doing things I wouldn’t have done by myself. I remember working with this one gaffer who would use these old 8k soft lights and 4K soft lights - these big tungsten style lights. And then on the next set, another gaffer would be solving the same problem with a bunch of Kino Flos, and on the next one, massive bounces with Blondes and Maxi-Brutes. I loved seeing all these different approaches and would make a mental catalogue of the tricks of the trades I would come across for use later in my own work."
"Then, sometime around early 2010, I was contacted through a mutual friend and tapped to shoot Don Coscarelli’s (Bubba Ho-tep, Phantasm) new movie, "John Dies at the End". It was an incredible experience working with Don and the film eventually made its way to the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2012."
"Around this time, the guys at Strike Anywhere started up their company and I got to do more and more work for them as well as lensing some indie features such as "Bad Fever" for Dustin Guy Defa, "Pearblossom Hwy" for Mike Ott and just recently on "It Follows" for David Mitchell."
"I am super critical about my work, and I like to sit down and pull it apart in terms of technique. There are so many decisions that you end up making when you are shooting, that I think it’s important that you always think about your choices after every shoot. It’s hard to do this sometimes, but I believe in order to push your craft, you need to look for ways to improve all the time. Regardless of whether everyone else thinks you have arrived, I think it’s important to always keep pushing yourself to do better and better work."