Rich Williamson
"When I went to art school, I had every intention of becoming an animator, until I fell into a film program. I had always had an interest in film, but I never really knew what it took to get there. At H. B. Beal Secondary School in Ontario, I was suddenly introduced to Fellini and Wong Kar-wai; who just blew my mind. By the time I left secondary, it was a no-brainer for me - I was going to do film as my career."
"However, when coming to Ryerson University to study film, you soon realize that you are just one of many with the same dream to be a filmmaker. At the time, I was a little apprehensive to do directing, so I tended to gravitate to other people’s projects. And that’s pretty much how I fell into cinematography."
"I didn’t come to cinematography from a traditional photographic background. I had always loved composition and soon learnt that it is not limited to photography, and that cinematography is another way of expressing it. With cinematography, the beauty is it's a succession of images and not limited to just one still image. In reality, you’re trying to tell a story with a sequence of shots as apposed to just one picture."
"And then I graduated into the real world full of starvation and tears! Fourth year was a real wake up call for us all. Now I had to turn this passion of mine into a career that would do something for me. The next big thing was to invest in a camera, which ultimately came to me by a loan from my father."
"I owe much to him for helping me to buy my first camera. Although my father was a mechanic by trade, he always understood that you need to support young people if they have a dream and a passion to do something. In my case it was cinematography."
"My HVX200 camera basically allowed me to do freelance jobs and get me my bread and butter straight out of college! That camera kept me going for the first two years of my career. For those few years, I was mainly doing a heap of corporate work plus a couple of short films here and there."
"Looking back now, I have always been very fortunate the way strange opportunities seem to come my way. There was this one project, where I went down to the Gulf of Mexico with Greenpeace, right at the moment of the big oil spill. I was able to document the damage just after it had all happened! I felt very fortunate to be able to be there at such a devastating time for those communities, and to help record what they were experiencing as a consequence of the spill."
"Ecological sustainability is something that is very important to me, so this was a project where I felt I could do something to help in a good way. I was able to show how this sort of thing affects the entire community. In fact, I have done a few documentaries on things that impact local communities. Like my most recent films, 'The Sugar Bowl,' 'Power of One,' and 'Unsinkable;' which was a finalist in the 2012 International Docs Challenge."
"Most recently, I’ve been writing fiction screenplays for development. I love the subtleties of a screenplay as apposed to the directness of documentaries. The great thing about fiction is allegory and subtext. With screenplays it tends to be about the things you don’t see. With screenplays it tends to be about the things you don’t see. I have worked in documentary and I truly love it, however I am really interested in doing something with a larger crew these days. I am now at a stage in my career where I feel confident enough to create an original piece of content that speaks to the things that are dear to me."
"I am very disciplined with how much dialog I put into my scripts. Sometimes when I am putting dialog down, I am almost ashamed. You see, I am always thinking if there is a way to express a scene without having to have actors explain what is going on through dialog. Most of the things I write, do tend to be very sparse in terms of language because I am trained to tell the story through pictures. I tend to write my screenplays the way I see things as a cinematographer. In fact, I almost have to restrain myself from wanting to put camera moves into my scripts because it has become so second nature to the way I work as a DP!"
"I guess creativity has always been central to my life. My family home was full of paintings that covered every wall. You don’t think much of these things as a kid, until you see that they were all done by relatives. Without knowing it, I was growing up in a family full of creative people. You could say that writing and creativity has always been part of my family life, so it's no surprise that I now want to combine this love of writing with my cinematography."