Can you see how that square’s askew?
Me too.

I suppose I could adjust it in post, and maybe I wasn’t standing totally level myself, but either way it doesn’t look perfect.

That imperfection appeared infinite to me as I looked through Ryan’s camera lens.

I was tasked, if briefly, with directing about 10 seconds of moving picture footage. Across the thirty to sixty seconds I had any sort of agency over how the people on the other side of the lens ought to be behaving, I was agonized by how near to perfection we were, and how far.

Inhumanely minute degree of adjustment to this square were within my grasp, and utterly beyond it. If Michael could just move it one milimeter...rotate it a degree counter clockwise...if Calvin could just tilt it back a bit, a bit more, a bit less...If he could take one more step to the right, one more, too far. Communication utterly failed, the matter of degrees was simply too small, the nuance too slight to be mastered for more than a moment.

I felt I had for the first time understood the reality of movie directors. It’s thrilling, really. You can see a more perfect version of reality almost overlaid on the one you’re being given weirdly vast control over. There’s no shame in telling someone to move a millimeter, to stand up straighter! To hold that better! TO be still!

To do any number of undignified things that a cruel schoolteacher might require of their students for no particular reason. The reason of a film director is to more perfectly reflect their film, their vision, their aesthetic. There’s something pretty cool about that, and there’s also something ludicrously egoistic.

I’ve not caught the bug.
The still image’s fine for me.