MICHAEL ROBLES

Imagine you’ve just finished a long day at the o5ice. You’ve come home to start cooking dinner and start settling down for the evening. Now – imagine your eight-year-old son absolutely yapping your ear o5 about every single known fact about the Titanic at the dinner table. Well, this was the reality for my parents. I mention this because – as you could probably guess – the Titanic was what got me into filmmaking. I was obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with the story of the ship, and so my little eight-year-old brain decided that if grown adults with millions of dollars could make a story about the ship, then so could I – obviously. So that’s what I did – I had a full shipyard in my living room, producing models of the Titanic out of cardboard and construction paper for all my shoots. Mind you – I’m shooting a ship’s sinking, so naturally, there were plenty of versions of my ship. I made so many versions of the Titanic that it would put the real-life Harland & Wol5 shipyard to shame. Now, at this point of the story, we’re still in the pre-production stage of my film, even though my little eight-year-old self wouldn’t understand what that meant for another decade or so. I would test, plan, test again and eventually I was ready to shoot. Luckily – my mom had a phone with a camera and iMovie, which was all I needed. So as the young producer, director, dp, and editor that I was, created my first movie: The Sinking of the Titanic (in my kitchen sink). It was a hit! All the aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. got copies and loved it (or so they said). All of this is to say that, even from a young age, I was practicing the workflow of a storyteller and specifically, a filmmaker.

Since then, I decided that I should take filmmaking much more seriously and go to school to learn from professionals, which has worked out well for me. I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the cinematography concentration at Temple’s film school during my sophomore year, and since then, I’ve learned and grown very quickly as a DP. I was fortunate enough to have the chair of the cinematography department invite me to the program and teach me so much along the way. I absolutely love talking about cameras, lenses, codecs, etc. (and could do so for hours), so this is definitely the niche for me.