"The Big Bends" Tod Campbell

"Brite Eyes" John Snedden

John Snedden, an operator currently based in San Diego, Calif., was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and raised in a small town in Illinois. In 1984, Snedden enlisted in the U.S. Navy where he served for 20 years as a cameraman, documenting Navy and Marine Corps personnel missions in both 16 mm film and video formats. Snedden began his civilian career in 2005 as a film loader for Stu Segall Productions in San Diego. He joined the Guild and quickly moved up through the ranks, becoming an operator on the 2009 MGM feature Hit and Run.

Andrew Eckblad introduced himself to Snedden by email. He had just been awarded a new filmmaker grant by Panavision and was looking for a cinematographer to shoot the 10-minute film Brite Eyes that he wrote and planned to direct.

"Brite Eyes takes places in a black-and-white world where a group of people in a village come across a girl with color in her eyes," Snedden describes. "They want to be like her. Andrew insisted on producing his story on film, because there is something magical about the look."

San Diego's Felicita Park was used to capture exterior locations. Scenes that included smoke and rain effects were shot with as many as four 16 mm cameras, including a Photo-Sonics Actionmaster that records up to 500 fps. Kodak Vision2 500T 7218 film was Snedden's primary stock. "We filmed scenes from six to 300 frames per second to emphasize transitional moments," Snedden states. "When a woman tries to comfort the crying girl, a teardrop falls onto her hand in color. We used a bit of slow motion to punctuate that shot which conveys the character's feelings without words. The colors were converted to black and white during offline postproduction with the exception of the girl's eyes and the teardrop."

"The Fantastic Magnifico" Stephanie Dufford

San Francisco-native Stephanie Dufford began her academic training at the famed Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), studying painting and drawing. During her sophomore year, Dufford says she began to question whether she wanted to spend her professional life alone in a studio. "I had always enjoyed still photography - my favorite part of painting was using colors, highlights and shadows as parts of illustrations," the 2nd AC explains. "So, I bought a Bolex and experimented with telling stories on film."

Dufford switched her major to filmmaking when she transferred to Chicago's Columbia College. While finishing her degree, she worked as a prep technician for the rental house Schumacher Camera, and interned with Roberto Schaefer, ASC on Stranger Than Fiction (2006). She joined the Guild the following year, later interning with Dante Spinotti, ASC, AIC for the 2009 period drama Public Enemies and, more recently, with Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC during the filming of We Need to Talk About Kevin.

RISD classmate Sam Sharp is the writer and director of Fantastic Magnifico, which Dufford describes as a "mini-epic, anti-hero, World War I story." The central character is an American who wants to join the infantry until he sees an airplane and decides to become a pilot. During a dogfight, he confuses a French airplane for a German plane and shoots it down. The film flashes forward to the future, where he is an old man reminiscing about what happened on that sad day.

Fantastic Magnifico was produced with an Arri BL camera, lighting equipment and Kodak Vision2 200T 5217 stock, all provided by Columbia College as a Special Studies 2 project. Dufford and Sharp used a digital still camera to capture images of model planes that were weaved into the story as stop-motion shots.

"I'm really flattered and excited to be one of the ECA finalists," she beams.

"Meridian" Rodney Lamborn

New York-based operator Rodney Lamborn was raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, and studied photography at a two-year college, before later majoring in filmmaking at Brigham Young University. After earning his degree, Lamborn moved to the East Coast where he began his career as a PA. He was hired to shoot footage for a documentary about Chechnya called Immortal Fortress - the first of several documentaries he worked on in war zones before transitioning to narrative filmmaking.

Lamborn made a few trips to beaches in Mexico where he shot time-lapse footage of the moon and stars. Brian Bowman, a creative director at Digital Kitchen, saw that footage and became enthusiastic about building a short film around those time-lapse images. That was the genesis of Meridian. He contacted Lamborn and collaborated with him as a co-director on the production of the film.

"We spent a night in the penthouse suite of the Hotel on Rivington in New York City filming a friend who is a model," Lamborn remarks. "The story is quite vague and ambiguous, which allows the audience to bring their own experiences and sensibilities to it. Meridian led to opportunities for me to shoot beauty and fashion work, which was one of my goals. The moral is to find a way to shoot films you are passionate about and good things will happen."

"The Cycle" Jacob Pinger

Pasadena, Calif.- based operator Jacob Pinger was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, where his mother was a high school teacher and many of his close relatives were either lawyers or teachers.

"I visited Central America when I was 19," Pinger recounts. "I was riding on a bus in Guatemala looking at the local people, mostly farmers, seated around me. It was late in the day. I remember seeing one guy's worn and wrinkled face. He was probably in his early 30s. I was captivated by that moment. I remember thinking this could never be conveyed with words. I don't know where that thought came from, but I remember thinking, I want to be a filmmaker."

Pinger went on to study filmmaking at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at AFI. He began his career pulling focus and working as a best boy on low-budget features. "I met Roy Clovis when he edited the trailer for a low-budget film that I had worked on," Pinger says. "He called me out of the blue and asked me to shoot his short film."

The Cycle is an 18-minute re-creation of a true-life Brooklyn story. The film opens with a mother working in her family's bookstore. She looks out the window and sees a teenager stealing her 8-year-old daughter's bike. The woman races out into the street to confront the thief, but he rides away. Pinger describes The Cycle as a class conflict in a post-racial era. They shot the film on the streets where the incident happened.

"Roy gave me the freedom to follow my instincts," Pinger says. "Because of the almost nonexistent budget, we used a RED camera. It was challenging, because we were working around the schedules of volunteers. Roy embraced my suggestion to shoot the entire film in the shade for a consistent look."

"Android Love" Patrick Meade Jones

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Patrick Meade Jones shot home videos with a Hi8 camera, and went on to study filmmaking at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He interned with James Whitaker on Crossing Over and became a Guild member as a camera loader on Deadline in 2009. Idiot Box, a short film he shot, earned an ECA last year.

Android Love is the story of a down-on-his-luck character, who strikes up a romance with a sex robot. Eventually he realizes that he needs more from the relationship. In a Romeo and Juliet-type ending, he dies and she comes back to life. The twist revealed at the end is that he is an android, too.

"Writer-director Lee Citron designed a world where things are kind of falling apart," says Jones. "Our sets were elaborate, including a bedroom with a floor made of fluorescent panels. We used vibrant colors, especially blue and red, and some yellow. Lee wanted the organic look that Super 16 gave us. I used (Kodak Vision3 500T) 7219 film, and covered shots from two directions with wide-angle lenses to take advantage of the sets. I pushed myself, trusted my judgment, and the process was a true learning experience."

"Mr. Marceau" Cameron Duncan

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Cameron Duncan (who earned an ICG Emerging Cinematographer Award in 2007 for Year of the Dog) traces his interest in photography back to his father's home movies, as well as the many superlative images he soaked up in National Geographic Magazine. He studied film production at California State University, Northridge, where he shot more than a dozen student projects. After graduation, Duncan worked at Panavision for four years, where Dan Sasaki taught him about optics while he was prepping camera packages for cinematographers.

"I the joined the Guild in the mid-1990s as a loader," Duncan recounts. "I was fortunate enough to work with people like Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS (Memoirs of a Geisha), Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC (Atonement) and Bill Pope, ASC (The Matrix trilogy), which was the best graduate film school anyone in this industry could have."

In Mr. Marceau (directed by Jared Allen), Tom Fitzpatrick plays an elderly recluse who collects clocks. As his beloved timepieces begin to disappear, he finds wisdom by learning to accept life's triumphs and tragedies with equilibrium and grace. The 20-minute film was produced in three days in the director's apartment - dressed to depict the recluse's home. Duncan used a RED camera that belongs to a friend.

"I avoided a sharp, digital look by using a 1/8 Classic Soft filter and creating a lot of haze," Duncan describes. "It was a great surprise getting the call from Steven Poster (ASC) telling me our film was being recognized. That tells me I'm on the right track."

"Les Mouches" Brian Udoff

Brian Udoff is a 1st AC who says he spent most of his youth in Baltimore, Md., with some time in Milwaukee, Wis., as well. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University with the intention of becoming a doctor, but switched majors after getting a grant to produce a short film. Udoff later earned an MFA at the London Film School, where he also worked for free at a local camera rental house.

Les Mouches was directed by Leon Yan, who was Udoff's London classmate. Set in France and England, and shot in 35 mm, Les Mouches focuses on a man who suddenly reappears after being estranged from his family for 10 years. [Paul Robinson shot some exterior scenes in France.]

"I wanted London to have an ugly look, because the character doesn't want to live there anymore," Udoff shares. "I used varying intensities of blue-gray filters on the lens to give daytime exteriors in London a washed-out feeling, and low pressure sodium vapor lamps in certain night situations to reproduce the monochromatic look of streetlights. I also used the Arri Varicon system for in-camera flashing combined with bleach bypass 'pull 1' processing for night scenes to retain details in the shadows. I feel lucky and surprised to receive this recognition. It means a lot to me."

"State Of Grace" Tim Bellen

Tim Bellen, SOC was born in Hawaii, and raised in Santa Rosa, Calif. He studied drawing and filmmaking at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, and became interested cinematography after working on a TV series in 1987. "Jim Roberson was the director of photography," Bellen says. "I marveled at his technical and artistic command of his work. He had an answer to every problem. Jim was a huge influence on me."

State of Grace, a 22-minute drama about how an 11-year-old blind girl's relationships with her mother and school friends change while she is going through a procedure to give her sight, was produced, directed and shot by Bellen, who adds that, "the Super 16 film format is perfect for independent, low-budget filmmaking. As a storyteller, your biggest challenge is that moment when the lights go down and with your very first images; you are asking the audience to suspend their disbelief."

Bellen says he was "shocked" to learn that he earned an ECA honorable mention.

"Weequahic" Aaron Medick

Operator Aaron Medick grew up in the small town of Accord in upstate, New York. He was 6 years old when his parents gave him his first still camera. "My snapshots turned into art in high school, when I learned how to frame, expose and print 35 mm black-and-white stills," Medick recalls. "Ansel Adams was my biggest influence. I shot landscapes all over the Hudson Valley."

Medick studied cinematography at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In 2000, he began working his way up through the ranks of the camera crew system, winning a Daytime Emmy as A-camera and Steadicam operator on The Electric Company in 2009, and a nomination as a camera operator on Sesame Street. Medick received an ECA for Para-Normal in 2008.

NYU classmate Jamie Ruddy directed Weequahic. The story is set in 1952 and follows four gangsters who comically fail in their attempt to shake down the owner of their favorite diner in the Weequahic section of Newark.

"The look was inspired by Robert Richardson's (ASC) cinematography in Snow Falling on Cedars," Medick relates. "And the feelings we wanted to inspire were influenced by the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing, shot by Barry Sonnenfeld."

Weequahic was produced in two days at the Summit Diner in Summit, N.J., with all lighting and support gear, including the RED camera package, donated.

"It's an incredible honor to be recognized by my peers and colleagues in the ICG," Medick says. "I gave this film my all and am very proud of it."