Today we’d like to introduce you to Tianyu Liu.
Hi Tianyu, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I developed my interest in photography when I was around 15, but I started my journey in filmmaking from the end of 2018 when I entered film school. We jumped on to shooting projects really quickly, even though I didn’t have much knowledge about cinematography, but by utilizing what I knew about framing from my couple of years of unprofessional photography experience, I was lucky enough to get my first DP work. From then on, I developed more and more interest in cinematography. To learn more about it, I also started doing 1st AC work. With the more projects I was involved with, the more techniques I learnt, and I’m getting more and more projects to shoot from the people I got to know on set. Gradually I was lucky enough to have two directors to work closely with, I have been working on their projects mainly recently.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It was especially tough at the beginning since I didn’t have the required knowledge, but it was fun too since we are just trying out stuff and making mistakes. Later on, balancing school work and projects starts to challenge my sleeping schedule and mental health. It took me three or four projects to be able to manage everything relatively well and learn my limits.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I mainly focus myself on filmmaking now, although I do jump back to photography from time to time. Cinematography is my main focus in filmmaking, I also do lighting and editing, partially composing for short films too. It always fascinates me how a frame delivers emotions, and I’m always pursuing that in my works. My street photography experience helps me recognize the ways to show emotion and tell a story from an observer’s point of view. From my editing and composing experiences, it makes me very aware about the rhythm of the film. I previsualize a film in the way it would be played out rather than a lot of separated shots. What beat should we hold on to longer; where would a camera do a slight push in; when should we have a sequence of shots cutting faster and when should we slow down the pace just play the scene out in a long shot.
Combining the two, I think what I’m proud of myself is my ability to utilize framing and rhythm to deliver emotion in a movie.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I would consider myself as hardworking. I’d love to dive all the way into a project, to completely understand the material and to do as much preparation I can. I also think being able to separate personal emotions from work is very important, for example, when we are on a stressful set, stress and anger are some emotions that can be easily triggered, however, it’s usually nothing personal and it will slow down the process quite a lot. Being able to separate these emotions away from work allows me to think quickly about the solutions to problems or make right decisions quickly on set. Lastly, being able to accept and learn from failures, most importantly, don’t get beaten down by failures and mistakes we make. I think these three are the most helpful qualities that helped me along the way.
Contact Info:
- Email: michaellimer0829@gmail.com
- Website: michaellimer.myportfolio.com/gallery
- Instagram: michael_limer
Image Credits:
Siqiao Dong (on set photographies and the black and white photo) Lauren Dreyfus (casual picture in white hoodie)
