Rowan student and Cinema Workshop club member of the week Brandon Martin has been avidly interested in cinematography since he was a child. He watched movies casually until high school when everything changed for him. The switch flipped inside his head from just watching a film to enjoying it and the process of creating movies. That interest influenced his decision on what college to attend.

During the college search, Martin narrowed his choices down to two schools, Rowan University, and the New York Film Academy. He chose to attend Rowan because their media department had a good reputation and it was a more affordable alternative.

Martin’s first college experience in Rowan’s film program was when he was a co-director for a short film called Rearview Mirror as a freshman. Martin had no experience coming into that project but was given the opportunity because of how enthusiastic and eager he was to work on something early into his college career. The film was never finished because the four editors whose role was to chop up the film in post-production left the club. Martin used that situation as a learning experience of what it could be like in the real world.

“It did impress me with the importance of preparation, which is massive for anything team-oriented. You can’t just be a control freak. You have to have other people working on the same schedule as you, trying to achieve the same goal as you, and learning the value that goes into your time,” Martin said.

Martin recently finished working as an assistant director for one of his friend’s films for class, and he claims he used that experience to gain important lessons involving the film industry as someone in charge of the whole production. 

“It was a very important experience for me to go through, because, as I reflect on it, working as a first assistant director for the first time, someone who necessarily doesn’t have hands-on creative aspects or conceptual aspects, just purely technical,” Martin said. “I didn’t get a lot of what I wanted out of the experience, but I got a lot of what I needed. I learned more industry lingo and more do’s and don’ts. No matter how humiliating the process might be or embarrassing to make of yourself, I would always rather have learned it here during my time in school than out there in the real industry or working in a real union.”

Handling constructive criticism positively is a skill that Martin focuses on. He works to take feedback and critiques from his colleagues and believes that anyone could give good feedback to his work, regardless if they are familiar with the occupation or material. He believes eliciting a reaction from his peers influences him to take note of how his audience reacts. 

“It’s not about how people react. It’s about something at some point along the way in this story that we crafted on this screen, it elicited an emotion out of the audience that while they might not be articulate enough to explain to you what surprised them or what made them exclaim, it still got in effect, which is what I’m looking for like above all else, that’s what I’m looking for at the end of the day,” said Martin.

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