Life & Work with Emilia Mendieta

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emilia Mendieta.

Hi Emilia, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was born in Wichita, Kansas and lived there until I was five – my family then moved to Quito, Ecuador where I grew up. My parents both work in academia in the sciences (they have been professors but are now mostly administrators) but they also have always loved movies. In fact, when Blockbuster went out of business and they were selling off all their VHS cassettes, enough of them ended up at my house that I was able to use them in lieu of dominoes for a physics class project in high school! So I grew up watching a lot of 80s and 90s classics.

When I was around eight years old, my dad brought home a laserdisc player and a projector from the university and projected the original Star Wars trilogy on the wall of the house. It changed my life forever as it made me realize that I wanted to make movies when I grew up.

I was hell-bent on becoming a film director for a while and made decisions that supported that path as much as I could. At 17, I enrolled at Vassar College and I graduated in 2010 with a double major in Film Studies and Chinese Studies. I also was heavily involved in music – continuing to take cello lessons (I’ve been playing the cello since I was 9), playing as part of the college orchestra, and taking some music theory and composition classes. While at Vassar, I was also lucky enough to meet Charley Young, who I now consider one of my main creative collaborators.

After college, I worked briefly in the commercial world in Ecuador as an Assistant Director before making my way back to NYC. In early 2012 I landed a job as a Graphic Designer and Videographer for a start-up tea company in Brooklyn. As this was still in the early days of social media, we were trying to figure out what sort of content we could be making to support the business so they sent me to the Ecuadorian Amazon to shoot some video of their operations and the tea farmers they collaborated with. As I was hiking through the rainforest with a Canon T2i strapped to me while trailing a local farmer and a peace corps volunteer in search of guayusa trees, I realized that I was frustrated that I didn’t know how to operate the camera well enough to capture the beauty of the forest around me. I realized then that what I actually really loved about the filmmaking process was designing the visual language of a piece through the use of camera and lighting. Shortly after returning to NYC, I applied to grad school, quit my job, and moved to Los Angeles once I got into the AFI Conservatory’s Cinematography program. I’ve been working as a Cinematographer / Director of Photography ever since.

After graduating AFI, I returned to Ecuador for medical reasons (my parents are still there) and got involved in teaching during that year. I taught cinematography and audiovisual production at Universidad de las Américas and then Universidad San Francisco de Quito. I returned to LA in early 2017 where I started working at the AFI Conservatory helping the Cinematography department run the 2nd Year Visual Essay Program and eventually the Cinematography Intensive for Women. As I was doing that, I shot my two first feature films TO THE NEW GIRL and HOTEL REFINEMENT as well as a bunch of short films. CODE_SWITCH is one of the ones I’m the most proud of – I was super excited to be shooting my first sci-fi and the woman behind it, Sigin Ojulu was absolutely amazing to work with. I also reconnected with Charley Young as her music career was taking off and started collaborating with her on her music videos. We’re collaborated on 14 music videos to date, with the latest “Sugar” being released on March 31st.

Shortly before the pandemic hit, I took a job at a local news station in Sacramento (KXTV/ABC10) where I worked as a Creative Producer / Lead Cinematographer in the marketing department. I am really lucky to say that I was employed throughout the pandemic. Being quarantined at home with the marketing department’s Sony FS5 led to a short-form food show that I was shooting from my own kitchen as we needed some lighter content. After returning to the station, I also shot a PROMAX-nominated promo for the station’s Stand Against Hunger campaign.

While in Sacramento, I met Mark S. Allen who is one of the anchors at ABC10. He had already produced 6 independent feature films with his producing partner and he brought me on as the director of photography for his directorial debut AMY’S F-IT LIST which was just released in early February 2023. We shot it in 9 days in Sacramento in September 2021. In 2022 I was named one of the Zeiss + Altitude Awards 2022 Semi-finalists for excellence in camera and lighting. After 3 years in Sacramento, I moved back to Los Angeles last summer and have been freelancing as a Director of Photographer and occasionally guest lecturing at universities since.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely has not been a smooth road! For one, the decision to become a cinematographer rather than a director when I was 24 was a really big pivot for me. I know it doesn’t necessarily sound like it, but I had made a lot of decisions trying to support that directing career and going into cinematography really felt like going back to the drawing board and starting over again. For me, it also meant going to grad school, which wasn’t something I had been intending to do. But pivoting my career and my life was absolutely the right decision – I love being a cinematographer and being able to teach because of my MFA has been life-changing.

Another big challenge has been the financial aspect of my career. I’ve had moments in my life where I’ve had to take on more traditional jobs to keep afloat financially but I’ve always been really strategic about what I’ve taken on. I’ve made sure that the jobs I’ve taken have been in cinematography (or in a cinematography adjacent field). They have provided me opportunities to grow as a cinematographer and storyteller but also that allowed me to continue to work on projects that I could shoot on the side. Working at the news station in particular presented really interesting challenges that have made me better at my craft. For example, one of the first things I had to do at that job was help one of my colleagues re-light the newsroom on a low budget, making sure that all of our anchors looked good and that would allow for 360-degree shots around the room. Or I was also part of the team that wrote and produced topicals (15-second and 30-second promos for the daily news) which meant learning how to distill a news story into 1-2 digestable, catchy sentences really fast (topicals had to be produced from writing through delivery in around 3 hours). That made me really fast at identifying and understanding the core of a story.

The other big challenge has been the loss of Halyna Hutchins who was one of my best friends. We were in the same cohort at AFI and were really good friends since day one (we met on registration day!). She was one of my biggest supporters – the last words she spoke to me were “I believe in you Emi!” – and we leaned on each other for a lot of advice on how to navigate our careers and the industry. Her death really shook me to my core. Navigating my grief and the safety issues in the industry that have come to light because of this incident has been really rough. As a result, I’m really committed to advocating for improving set safety both industry-wide and on the sets I am personally on.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I work primarily as a narrative and music video cinematographer (and I’m in the process of getting into commercial work) and I think what sets me apart is my use of color. I really love using color contrast in lighting in particular and I play around with it a lot in the music videos I shoot since it can be a little harder to sneak into narrative work. I just think it can be really expressive and beautiful.

But I love creating images with a higher contrast overall. I’m really drawn to a lot of the higher contrast, darker looks of films like the Paranoia Trilogy from the 1970s or horror and sci-fi films from the 80s. I’m also just very inspired by the way compositions there really play with space and perspective. My work takes a lot of inspiration from that but then I give it a more modern twist.

At the moment, there are three projects I’m really proud of: the music video that I did for Charley Young’s song “Run Away”, my third feature film “Amy’s F-It List”, and an upcoming short that I shot called “Divine Mother”. And they’re all really tonally and visually different from each other!

“Run Away” has a very 80s neon-noir look and feel – our references were “Drive” and the episode “San Junipero” from “Black Mirror”. It was just really fun to lean into saturated, colorful lighting but with a darker emotional bent.

I’m proud of “Amy’s F-It List” because in many ways, it felt like a project that was a bit out of my comfort zone – I wasn’t sure I could pull off a dark comedy considering the kind of work I had done before which was mostly more dramatic in tone. Although I’d dealt with comedic elements before, I just hadn’t really thought about the visual language of full-out comedies before (and it’s actually really complex) so I did a lot of prep work for it. I ended up really loving it and would do another dark comedy in a heartbeat. It was also just a great time collaborating with director Mark S. Allen. He’d produced 6 previous features with his producing partner previously but this was the first time he was fully at the helm of the movie as a director. It was absolutely lovely to work with him on his directorial debut since Mark just absolutely loves movies and loves being on set. His good energy is infectious and it was just great to be around someone who both has a clear vision of what the project needs to be but also still finds so much joy in the work he’s doing.

And last but not least, when I got the script for “Divine Mother” it spoke to me – it was legit one of the best scripts that I’ve ever read and I just really connected with the story and the ethos behind it. I have a lot of friends that have gone through miscarriages and they’ve always spoken about the experience in really hushed tones – if they speak about it at all because of the stigma that comes with it. What I love about “Divine Mother” is that it tells the story of one couple’s experience through it very authentically and with a lot of care. We were able to creatively push the envelope in the cinematography in subtle ways that really enhance the way this deeply emotional story is told. I’m just really grateful and proud to have been part of the project!

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
I think I would like to remind everyone to remain creatively curious and explore. I know that sometimes that involves taking creative risks and with that comes the potential to fail, but it can also lead to something creatively extraordinary. I really value the people who have given me space to do this throughout my career.

I’m also a cellist, astrophotographer, culinary arts enthusiast (currently fussing around with gluten-free baking a lot), and a certified drone pilot. I’m also do a lot of hot yoga and am a proud cat mom. I strongly recommend having hobbies outside of one’s main career path and taking care of your body and mind outside of work – it helps you decompress and definitely helps you lead a fuller life. Work-life balance is important!

I’m also an active member of the ICF+C (the International Collective of Female Cinematographers), the Chicana Directors Initiative, Women in Media, and Women in Film. I’m big on helping other women succeed in this industry since it is women who have actually given me some of my biggest opportunities and helped me jump start my career. I really want to pay that forward!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.emiliamendieta.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emi_mendieta/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emiliamendieta/

Image Credits
Erika Navarro Elise Gill Cheryl Young Laura Hunter Drago