I have constantly been a diligent student even during my freshman year in high school. I have always been a fan of movies – just every genre and my parents have even scolded me for sneaking R-rated movies into our DVD player at home which are too violent and which offer sex scenes. But even when I was in puberty then, I was never aroused at any of the sex scenes. When I view a movie, I am forever detached from the story. I always look at all the clinical aspects of the movie. I can still laughingly recall at the time when it was me and my cousin Mike only at our crib. It was one dark evening and the rain was pouring in torrents. I was watching The Hole, a British horror movie which featured the lovely Kiera Knightley and I intentionally switched the lights off in our room so I could watch the movie vividly. Since it was a horror movie, my cousin walked out of the room and left me alone. I just laughed at him and enjoyed at how cinematographer Denis Crossan angled his camera to make the terror in the movie believable to the audience.

And I was mesmerized. The Hole was actually the stepping stone of my goal. I want to be a cinematographer someday. And so I am diligently studying during my high school days. I am always at the top of my class. I really enjoy the literature classes but I make sure that I also excel in physics and trigonometry all for that one goal – to study filmmaking at any of the most prestigious film schools in the United States. In fact, I want to excel in high school so I can grab scholarships. As we all know, not even middle class families can afford to send their children to the best universities in the country. Some of them just land at community colleges. And I don’t belong to that class. I am an African-American and we are just living on mortgage in a middle-class neighborhood here in some rural county in Kentucky.

Then during weekends, I rent movies voraciously. I don’t just watch movies at random and with bias. Even though I’m an African-American, I don’t dig into Denzel Washington, Spike Lee or Antoine Fuqua movies just because they are African-American too. I want to view movies because I simply like the cinematography. I eventually loved the grindhouse and the graphic genre of Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard, Robert Rodriguez and the Wachowski Brothers. But I also like the styles of the Coen Brothers and Danny Boyle. See, I don’t have any bias when it comes to watching movies. One of the cinematographers who is my idol is Janusz Kaminski. From his vertigo-inducing work in Munich to his heartbreaking camera angles in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Janusz can really communicate the lesson of the movie to the audience.