Filmed first documentary piece. Everything I thought I knew about framing was wrong.

We spent three hours filming at Othello last Tuesday.

The preparation I'd done felt completely irrelevant the moment I walked in with the camera. The shot list in my head dissolved. The lighting was nothing like I'd planned for. The space was both smaller and more interesting than I'd imagined from the outside.

You can't plan your way into a place. You have to be inside it first.

What I kept getting wrong: I was trying to make the frames look like documentary frames I'd seen before. Composed. Intentional. The camera positioned where a camera is "supposed" to be.

But the interesting things kept happening in corners I hadn't positioned for. A regular customer who came in while we were filming, ordered without looking at the menu, sat in the same chair he clearly always sits in, and read a newspaper without acknowledging us at all. That's forty years of habit in one three-minute observation. I almost missed it.

I'm editing now. The footage is imperfect. Some of it is unusable. But there are three or four moments in there that I couldn't have scripted.

That's what I'm working toward.