Currently preparing for a labor-of-love shoot in Trinidad, Nancy Schreiber, ASC is bubbling with enthusiasm for the project, Moving Parts, a fictional narrative that centers on the international sex trade. “I was just drawn to the subject matter,” she says. Ever vocal for the rights of women, Schreiber says that she will work on several PSAs over the course of a year in between other work, but for this feature length, she has dedicated herself to seeing the project through despite a very small budget. “We did a Kickstarter for it,” she says enthusiastically, “and we didn’t quite get all the money that we hoped, but we’re going to make it work!”

“I mean it’s not like the Panasonic VariCam with a 5000 ISO,” she continues. “It’s not “that” low light, so I do have to light. But I don’t plan to tie in and I’m not using any big lights. The biggest I’ll use is a 1.2K HMI, a couple smaller HMIs and tungsten fresnels. And they do have Chimera down there so we’ll be using them!” In contrast, Schreiber also spent several weeks this last year working on the big budget ABC television series The Family with Joan Allen, Allison Pill, Rupert Graves and Andrew McCarthy. She says in this case she was basically a kid in a candy store. She found herself working with three top-of-the-line ARRI ALEXA cameras, full Steadicam access throughout the shoot and a huge crew that included large grip and electric trucks that would prep and prelight the next location for shooting prior to the production’s arrival.

“One day we shot a political scene of Joan Allen being sworn in as Mayor outdoors, on courthouse steps.” she explains, “I used a fifty-foot Technocrane where the shot started looking straight down, overhead and then craned down dramatically.”

“One day we shot a political scene of Joan Allen being sworn in as Mayor outdoors, on courthouse steps.” she explains, “I used a fifty foot Technocrane where the shot started looking straight down, over heads, and then craned down dramatically. Very effective. Just indoors this large facility, Joan was giving a fundraising speech for another scene that called for a crane to move over the heads of the crowd to a close-up of Joan at the podium. The fifty would not fit inside, so I was able to get a thirty foot Technocrane instead! Quite a costly day! But I am not a snob about doing these little projects that are very different. There’s no studio or network looking over your shoulder, you can do what you want stylistically, and nobody is at the monitor asking about certain choices. The projects can be very creative and rewarding. So I think that’s why I decided to do this Trinidad film. It’s certainly an adventure!”

She also just completed a feature in Atlanta called Folk Hero & Funny Guy with Alex Karpovsky of the television show Girls and Wyatt Russell, son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell who she says is a terrific singer-songwriter and a wonderful up-and-coming actor. The plot follows a comedian and folk singer on a road trip of sorts, with a large majority of the film involving performances that had to be shot as if they were live. “It was a lot of performance and music, so I needed a variety of lights,” she says. “The production relied principally on local crews, and producers had two RED Dragon cameras to shoot with.” Schreiber says that though she’s owned an ALEXA, she’s fairly agnostic when it comes to cameras, though of course her first preference is always film, even if she doesn’t find herself shooting on it very often. “Sometimes you can’t even find a film loader,” she laments, “although the union is having workshops now for this bit of a celluloid resurgence.”