NICKOLAS GILBERT
(director of photography)
nick@amplify.tv
www.amplify.tv

It may have been the fact that as a little boy he was “freaked out” by the fact that Mark Hamill had the same hair in real life as his on-screen doppelganger, or that the out-takes from “Cannonball Run” gave him the “profound realization that this was more fun that real work,” but director of photography Nick Gilbert was bitten early by the filmmaking bug.

Nick and director James Bonner worked on many commercial and industrial video sets together over the years, and conversation often returned to the subject of Jim’s long-gestating movie, TRAP. When it finally came time to shoot, Nick charged ahead into the “struggle to work beyond craft and into art. There is something great about the chaos that forces creativity in the heat of the moment.” That ability to improvise, as well as the practical experience of working on dozens of local productions, proved essential as Nick and Jim dreamed up increasingly devious, difficult shots.

Both were determined from the beginning to shoot on mini DV. Jim designed TRAP to be a low budget production using few locations, a small cast and a plot that relies “more on story than spectacle.” As such, the size of the camera, the cost of operating it and even the look of the footage factored greatly into the production plan. While most filmmakers are still side-stepping the digital format, Nick and Jim saw it as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel for their devices. “The limitation of digital media,” says Nick, “forces creative solutions to the visual problems that would most likely have been taken for granted or overlooked in a traditional film paradigm.”

Nick was drawn to TRAP because of the “universally accessible story,” but he was also glad that “the name of the game was no compromises” – which is to say, the creative team didn’t have to relinquish a single ounce of creative control in the making of their movie. It was, for all involved, “approached as a way to show the world what we could do, and what we could do under the conditions available,” says Nick.