Start a project
Documentary · Film · 2026
Red Dot Gallery is a small ceramics studio in Birmingham run by Dori DeCamillis and Scott Bennett. They host classes, sell work, and have quietly built a community of creative regulars over the years. The brief was simple; spend time at the studio, capture the people and the space, and come back with a short film that conveys why the place matters.
The plan was minimal direction and maximum observation. Long-form interviews with Dori and Scott, B-roll of the wheel, the kiln, the studio members working, and the gallery walls. The goal was a film that felt found, not staged. I shot over two days, conducted minimally scripted interviews, and let the conversation flow where it wanted.
Early in the first interview, I caught that the lavalier mic had stopped recording. The on-camera mic was still rolling, but on-camera audio in a working ceramics studio is noisy. I had to decide whether to stop and troubleshoot, or keep rolling and solve it later. I kept going, and used the rest of the shoot to compensate. Tighter framing to keep subjects close to the on-camera mic, more careful level monitoring between takes, and significantly more B-roll than originally planned to give myself flexibility in the edit. Cleanup happened in post: de-noising, EQ, and gain staging to push dialogue forward and pull room sound back. The final cut paces a little differently than I'd planned, but it holds together.
Production work is mostly problem-solving in real time. The documentary I shot isn't the one I planned, and I'm glad I left space for the narrative to take shape as I engaged with the subjects. Catching the audio issue early gave me time to adjust how I shot the rest of the day, and the constraints in post forced me to make tighter editing decisions.
