Nico van den Berg
“For awhile there, I started to notice that my friends were progressing faster than I was. I still wanted to hangout with those friends, so I thought about continuing to photograph and film my friends in order to capture their progression. Looking back now, I can honestly say that what I was doing, was just terrible home movies of us all skateboarding. But it did ultimately lead me down the path of wanting to pursue photography and cinematography as a career.”
"My dad had been traveling to San Francisco, California for work and had taken me there on a few occasions. I had fallen in love with San Francisco, admiring all the legendary skateboard spots that I had watched in the movies as a child. I begun to think of how I could incorporate living in California into my dream of being a skateboarding filmmaker!”
“When I graduated from school, my dad suggested that I move to Amsterdam for a time to live with my relatives and get some experience living abroad. I was reluctant at first, but when I got there I just had a field day. While I was in Amsterdam working on the canals, I started shooting and photographing everything I saw. Without knowing it, I was creating a documentary about my three months in that beautiful city. There was something extremely liberating about capturing moments of my time in Amsterdam at that young age.”
“Those experiences were something really unique and unknown to me. Up until this point, my camera work had been entirely about skateboarding. Now it was all about composition, architecture, light and the city life in Amsterdam. I lived in Amsterdam for about three months, until I came back to the US to start my degree at The Art Institute of California studying digital filmmaking and video production.”
“My initial idea about college, was to take whatever I could learn from studying filmmaking at The Art Institute, and in turn take that knowledge to the skateboarding industry. As luck would have it, within the first week of orientation I happened to meet a real-life professional skateboard cinematographer who had already been working for years in the industry! This was my life’s dream - to do exactly what this guy had already achieved.”
“Our meeting was to be the great turning point in my life. The very first piece of advice he gave me was not to do it! Don’t go into the skateboarding industry, because in his experience, you won’t make a sustainable income and you will get taken advantage of for not much reward. So there I am, within only a week of arriving in California and my dreams were already crushed. I have to say, that week was a pretty rude awakening for me.”
“However, I am very thankful now, because I did find my true calling in narrative filmmaking and not skateboarding as it would happen. Meeting my friend that very first week at college was probably the best thing that could ever have happened for me. Without his advice throwing me onto an entirely different path, I may have never found what I love doing the most.”
“That first year at college was still pretty overwhelming, as I now had no idea of what direction to take with my filmmaking career. But since I was always that ‘guy with the camera,’ everyone kept coming to me wanting me to be the cinematographer on their projects. At that point, I didn’t actually know that I wanted to be a cinematographer, it's just that I always seemed to be filming something. After awhile, shooting just became very natural to me.”
“In fact, I didn’t really know what a DP was at that point. But because I was shooting everyone’s projects all of the time, I guess you could say that I just fell into it. Before I knew it, I soon became the go-to-cinematographer for all the students in my class.”
“While at college they didn’t allow you to just focus on one thing, so I pretty much got a taste of every department from pre-production, production and post-production. I knew that I wanted to stick close to the camera though, so I just took it upon myself to do as much cinematography work as I could. That approach really paid off in the end, because when it came time to graduate, I had a decent portfolio of work to market myself as a cinematographer.”
“I knew that when I completed my degree there wasn't going to be a big job or a director just waiting for me. So through my college years, I was doing internships and working as a camera operator. From there, I was able to build a rapport with some of the local production companies. By the time I did graduated, I was now ready to be working onset, and had gained the few contacts I needed to start working as a professional cinematographer.”
“Looking back at my commercial career as a DP, I guess you could say a lot of thanks is owed to the famous ‘Utubers’ - 'The Brothers Riedell'. Nick and Chris Riedell are two guys who have a very well known YouTube channel where they literally post a new films they directed every Wednesday. I had known Chris Ridell as an actor, working with him on set in the Bay Area. I was always a big fan of the brothers work and decided one day to get in touch and see if they wanted to collaborate on a project.”
“A month later, I am down in LA for a week long project shooting a short called 'Kin' with them. The format these guys use is to write direct and shoot a new film in under a week. So I really had no idea what we were going to do, until we started shooting and writing the script all at the same time!”
“Shooting ‘Kin’ with them in LA, was one of those totally insane experiences that make life worth living. The Brothers do this kind of thing every week and the passion they bring to each project is just staggering. The best part about working with these guys, is their amazing levels of energy and enthusiasm that you cant help but be addicted to.”
“Shortly after wrapping “Kin,” Nick and Chris pulled me into to do a commercial they had landed for Mobile One Oil with NASCAR. This was a huge opportunity for me as a DP and I definitely owe them both a great deal. This project opened the doors to other productions companies and agencies abroad.”
“Going forward, I really want to be able to maintain the pace in which I set to this date. I am now in the process of moving to L.A so that I can really sink my teeth into a new community and hopefully expand my work as a cinematographer into feature length films. For me it is about finding and building relationships with directors that compliment my style of cinematography.”