Acknowledgments

This book stands on the shoulders of the people who built the craft of moving images and then, generously, taught it.

It owes an obvious debt to the editors, cinematographers, sound recordists, and directors whose published wisdom shaped how production is taught — among them Walter Murch, whose In the Blink of an Eye remains the clearest thinking on why a cut works; Steven Ascher and Edward Pincus, whose Filmmaker's Handbook has oriented generations of new shooters; and the many working professionals who have spent their careers explaining, on stages and in books and across an enormous body of free online tutorials, how a shot is lit and a sequence is built. Where this book names a technique or a principle, it is almost always because someone else discovered it first and cared enough to pass it on.

It owes a quieter debt to the open-source and open-education movements. DaVinci Resolve's free tier put a professional finishing suite in the hands of anyone with a laptop and changed who gets to learn this craft. Free and low-cost tools — Kdenlive, Shotcut, OBS, Audacity, and the communities around them — did the same. This book is released under a Creative Commons license in that same spirit: knowledge about how to make video should not be locked behind a paywall or a film-school tuition bill.

Thanks, finally, to the readers who will do the exercises instead of only reading them, who will shoot the ugly first draft and then the better second one, and who will pass what they learn along to the next person holding a camera for the first time. That is how a craft stays alive.

The moving image is one of the most powerful ways humans have ever found to tell each other the truth — and to move each other to act on it. Use it well.

This is an open textbook. Corrections, improvements, and adaptations are welcome under the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.