Today we’d like to introduce you to Lucios Sallouti Guimaraes.
Hi Lucios, 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?
My name is Lucios Veiga Sallouti Guimaraes. I am 23 years old and currently living in Los Angeles.
I was born in Brazil and lived there until July 2021, when I moved to Los Angeles to study Cinematography at the New York Film Academy (Burbank).
All my education was at a Waldorf School in Brazil. The Waldorf education focuses on the imagination and creativity of the students, integrating intellectual, practical, and artistic instructions during the curriculum. All types of art and manual work has been involved in my life since I was a child, and that helped me to get here and still helps to have an artistic approach to the projects I am involved in.
In 2016, I started to take pictures with my brother’s camera just for fun. But it didn’t take too much time to become a hobby and then a passion that I wanted to take as a career. After two years of learning and experimenting with still photography, I saw that there was more that I could create with cinematography.
In the beginning of 2018, I took my first Cinematography class at “Instituto de Cinema (INC)” in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was a one-month program to introduce the art of controlling cameras and lights to tell a story. This program opened my mind to all the grandness that is involved in shooting a film. After that, I took a few more advanced classes, but unfortunately in Brazil, the art of Cinema is not recognized, and there are not that many practical schools and opportunities for someone that is starting.
After the Covid-19 pandemic got better, I decided to move to America to study and work on the industry here. During my studies and working on movie sets, I found my passion at the position of Gaffer, the person who is responsible for creating and executing the lighting plan of a film.
On this position, I can manage to mix my creativity and artistic vision with my technical knowledge of lighting. The feeling that I have when I light a scene on a film is something that I can’t find anywhere else; it is a mix of relieve, happiness, and satisfaction.
I want to pursue my dream of being a Gaffer for narrative films and in the future a Cinematographer as well. But I also want to get in the Documentary field.
Documentaries are something that always amazed me, and I want to be a part of. It is such a beautiful way to bring information to people. Personally, I want to be part of documentaries that show social and environmental issues around the world or the ones that bring information about other cultures that we don’t even know they exist. For me, it is a way of combining my artistic side with the hunger of telling real stories and changing people’s perspectives about things.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Moving to a different country was certainly a big decision that I had to make to pursue my dream. It is always hard to get into something new, without knowing anyone and with doubt about if it will work in the end.
Luckily for me, I had a great reception in the US, meeting amazing artists at my school and starting to make connections in the industry. After two years of living here, I can say that I am satisfied with the direction that my career is taking. I have been working on projects that I thought would have taken more time to get into.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
For the past two years, I have worked in many different positions in the camera department to find the one I identify the most. This helped me to understand all the variables that I can use when I am creating something.
Right now, I am specializing and studying more about light design and working as a gaffer on short films, web series, music videos, and commercials. Each of them can have a different approach to lighting, and at the same time, I can use something I learned in a commercial to light a narrative film or vice-versa. This helps me to develop my craft and enhance my creativity.
I have worked on bigger sets, but I have to say that the ones I am most proud of are a couple of short films I did gaffer on. Those were the ones that I felt like I was able to improve the story with the light that I designed with the director of photography, and I also had a big freedom to give inputs and make decisions by myself, all of this thanks to a good relation with the rest of the crew. So, the projects that I am proud of are not the ones that had a famous artist involved but the ones that I did the best at my work.
I am also proud of the projects that went to theaters (national and international) and OTT platforms; it is fulfilling to see something you helped to create on a big screen.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
I can’t name anything in specific, but reading and studying about different themes certainly helps me. I find it very useful to read about the big directors and cinematographers to understand how they put their creativity in the practical world. This helps me to organize my ideas when I am reading a script or talking about it with the director of photography.
Another thing is to of course watch all kinds of movies. The way I like to do it is to rewatch something I liked at first and try to understand how each scene was shot and how they lighted that scene. So I study every scene (or the ones I like the most), pausing the movie and creating my own lighting plan for that scene. Sometimes I can find the answer on a BTS or an interview about that movie, but even if I can’t confirm if my thoughts were correct, it is a good way of learning.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13946774/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_0_nm_8_q_lucios
- Instagram: instagram.com/lucios_sallouti/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucios-sallouti/
