My latest film commissioned by UW Medicine features Charles Burt, an artist whose Parkinson’s diagnosis seemed destined to spell the end of his career. But a surgical team was able to quiet the tremors in his hands using deep brain stimulation, a surgery in which the patient has to be awake to ensure proper placement of electrodes within the brain.

The creative team at UW Medicine was able to get me and my small crew into the surgical suite to film the operation, which was unnerving! Charles was speaking with his doctors throughout the surgery, and the climax of the film is when they apply stimulation to the electrodes and ask him to draw something.

I couldn’t have done this project without the amazing team I work with, Jamie, Jenny and Zack, at UW. They brought me in early on this project so I was able to film Charles attempting to paint before the surgery, with tremors that made his work almost impossible. And then after the surgery, the contrast couldn’t be more striking.

This is the kind of work I (as a cancer patient myself) was born to do: to tell stories about the men and women who dedicate their lives to helping patients like Charles and me to live their best life. As long as we can.

The Bloomberg Greendocs festival was next-level awesome. Not only was it an honor to have my short film, Shaped by Ice, selected as one of five finalists, but the four other finalist filmmakers have given me a renewed enthusiasm for continuing to focus on environmental work. I’m leaving the festival with what feels like friends for life.

From left to right: Finalists filmmakers Thomas Klaper (winner!), Ángel Linares, Carter Kirilenko, Dan McComb and Gideon Mendel.

We all liked each other so much that we proposed the idea of sharing the $25,000 prize (over drinks the night before). The jury quashed our idea when Gideon presented it to them, and after seeing all the films, I believe I know why. It’s because Thomas’s film about migrating toads in Switzerland, which took 4 years to make, truly deserved to be the winner. Its use of humor and absolutely stunning cinematography, as well as the fact that it focused on a subject so small as to be invisible, was moving. Go Thomas and team! What an honor to share the stage with these four.

I also made some potential fundraising contacts for my Afterdrop project, which was the genesis of Shaped by Ice. And I’m on the hunt for more stories, particularly about scientists who are continuing to do the important work they do in the face of increasingly difficult and openly hostile environment to the truth of their work.

I’m honored to be one of five finalists in the Bloomberg Greendocs film festival, which is being hosted in Seattle this year. My short film about glaciologist Mauri Pelto and his daughter Jill, Shaped by Ice, will screen at Seattle Art Museum on July 16.

Shaped by Ice is an Afterdrop spinoff. Originally I wanted to find a way to link glacier science with the ice swimming record that Melissa Kegler was attempting to break. That project was unable to secure funding, but I’m thrilled this one is finding an audience and bringing attention to the vitally important work that climate scientists do.

The North Cascade Glacier Climate Project begin in the early 80s when a then 20-something Mauri Pelto began visiting a group of about a dozen glaciers in the North Cascades. His idea was to return 50 years in a row to document how those glaciers respond to climate change. The results have been sobering: two of those glaciers no longer exist, and in the 42 years he’s been visiting the glaciers, they have documented a 30 percent loss of ice.

I hope to see you at SAM on July 16 – here is your registration link so you can join us.

It’s been months in preparation, and now it’s official: the campaign to raise production money to send our small team to Alaska to film Melissa Kegler on her quest to set a new world record is now live!

Here’s the link to the Afterdrop Kickstarter Page.

We’re raising $42,000 which is enough to send a crew of 3 (two filmmakers and Melissa) to alaska for two weeks in June, during which time we’ll meet with glaciologists and learn what’s happening to Alaska’s big tidewater glaciers while Melissa seeks the perfect water temperature – just under 41 degrees Fahrenheit- to make her attempt.

As it turns out, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation and established 21 March (today) as the annual World Day for Glaciers.

As scientists who study disappearing glaciers come under attack from the highest levels of government in the United States, I believe it’s on us to keep sharing their work. So I am making this documentary as much a climate film as it is a sports documentary.

There is a moment in every ice swim when the body begs to stop, when survival instincts scream for warmth, for safety. Melissa knows this moment well—she lives in that threshold, mastering the delicate balance between pushing forward and knowing when the cold is too much. This is the razor’s edge where endurance becomes something more than physical. It is here, in this battle between strength and fragility, that Melissa’s journey reflects something far greater. Her struggle is not just about breaking records; it is about facing the unknown, about adapting, about enduring. As the world around her changes in ways we are only beginning to understand, her pursuit becomes a quiet but powerful reminder: resilience alone is not enough. The question is not how far she can go, but how much longer we have to hold on to the world as we know it. 

Join us. Let’s make history together.

I recently completed a project that involved shooting a half-dozen interviews in a location that had some nice depth and windows with interesting shapes. I’m really happy with the finished piece, which is the first project I’ve finished using the Dehancer plugin in Davinci Resolve to apply a film stock and grain. Here’s the finished video, and I’ll explain how it came together below.

During the shoot I placed the subjects so that the lights visible in the background provided motivation for the placement of our own lights. We used two: a key light and an edge light. We also used varying amounts of negative fill on the shadow side of these faces. Here’s an example of that on location:

You can see we’re using a 50cm CRLS reflector (#3) with a Dedo DLED-7 with parallel beam adapter bounced up from the floor as our edge light. For our key, we’re using a Snapbridge reflector with a 25cm #3 CLRS reflector, and you can’t see it in the shot above, but the key is an Aputure 500d with fresnel lens. The Snapbridge takes that fresnel beam and splits it into a nice combination of hard and soft light that I just love working with.

When I was close to finishing this project, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t quite happy with the way the skin tones were looking. Even after substantial color correction in Resolve, I felt like the faces looked a little too colorful for my taste. Just then, by coincidence, I got an email from Dehancer asking me if I’d like to review their film emulation product, Dehancer. The timing was perfect, so I said yes.

The results really impressed me. Check out the before and after frames, and then I’ll explain the settings I used to get these results:

Here’s what Dehancer does for me:

• Color compression in the skin tones. There is a lot of color in the first frame in those skin tones, and that takes a lot of adjustment to get right. The second one feels much more filmic to me in the skin tones. Not that every project needs to be filmic, mind you. But when you have a lot of talking heads back to back in a project, like this one does, color compression like this puts them all on the same wavelength and makes them feel related. There is also a general reduction in saturation that comes from the choice of specific film stock (Kodak Gold 200), which is down to personal taste.
• Film grain. I find that a small amount of film grain added within the plugin gives a pleasing effect by “dirtying up the frame” a little. For this project, I chose just 2.8. Be careful not to overdo it – the default setting is WAY too much.
• Vignette. The vignette tool inside Dehancer is superior to Davinci’s vignette tool, offering more control and super smooth gradations.

I started out by applying Dehancer to all the footage at once, using a Timeline node. But I noticed right away that the tight shots needed a different vignette shape from the wides, so I created a group for each, then added Dehancer to both Post-Clip groups.

Adding it to a Group saves you time because you can tweak the settings and affect all clips in the group, rather than having to apply them to every clip in your timeline. I was also thrilled to see Dehancer works nicely with Resolve color-managed workflows, like the one I use. It’s the first setting in the tool, Source, which also offers options like Rec 709, and a bunch of other options including log decoding for those of you not using color management.

The next tool in the interface is also I think the coolest thing about Dehancer, Film. There are a ton of options here. You can get a little lost auditioning different film stocks. But after playing with them for a bit, just a couple of options really did what I was looking for. You have to be careful here. Many of the film stocks frankly made the images look horrible. It’s important to choose the right stock for the project, and then you can tweak the settings to refine it. Make sure you like what you see when choosing one, or else you’ll be fighting it to get the look you want.

Dehancer offers a ton of ton of options if you want to go further in controlling your image from within the plugin. Personally, I prefer to use Resolve’s tools for many of the options provided in Film Developer, Expand and Print. But Film Compression gives a nice quick way of controlling highlight rolloff that I find super useful and fast. Overscan lets you add dancing sprockets to the side of your image, and Film Damage gives you dust and scratches for those times when you need a truly vintage look.

Once you’ve dialed in a look that you like, you can save it as a LUT with the LUT Generator for pre-visualizing your look on location. For the documentary work that I do, I prefer to shoot with a standard Rec. 709 LUT for most projects, then dial in the look afterward. But for those of you more proactive than me, this could be very useful.

For me, Dehancer doesn’t replace the already incredible tools that Resolve gives me to balance and color correct my work. But as a “last mile” tool to really dial in a filmic look, Dehancer is incredibly useful and a great way to achieve a result I would be hard pressed to achieve on my own.

But clients are the ones who get the last word on every project. For this one, when I sent the Before Dehancer version, my client accepted the project without comment. After I sent the After Dehancer version, I got back three words: “This is beautiful!”

The 42-minute documentary, Ice Mermaid: Cold Resolve, that I made about Melissa Kegler’s quest to swim farther and colder than any American is now streaming on KCTS. You can watch the trailer and stream the film via the KCTS 9 Passport app.

I’m thrilled that the film has received this distribution from PBS, and what’s more, I’ve recently learned that it has been selected for a major international film festival! More details on that coming soon in a separate post.

I first met Melissa a couple of years ago, when I was teaching a cinematography workshop at Seattle Film Institute. I wanted to give my students an opportunity to work with some high-quality footage, and I thought this topic might provide us that in an accessible environment for the class. I found an open-water swimming group on Facebook, and the page owner, Oscar Brain, agreed to let us film him doing an early-morning swim at Golden Gardens. Here’s the little film we made from that:

While we were filming this, Oscar kept mentioning this person named Melissa Kegler. She’d swum the English Cannel, around Manhattan, Catalina Island, on and on. So that made me curious about her. After this short video was published on the group’s facebook page, I noticed that Melissa liked it. So I reached out to her and asked if she’d be willing to be our second subject for the last half of the class. She agreed, and we made this little video together:

It’s worth mentioning that our inspiration for the making of both of these videos was the film Nomadland. We definitely sought to mimic the use of early-morning light used so effectively in that film. Astute observers may even note the presence, in Oscar’s video, of the same lantern as the one carried by Frances McDormand in the Badlands campground scene.

While we were filming Melissa, she mentioned that she was kind of thinking about tackling the US record for ice swimming. I thought that sounded like something worth a longer project, and she agreed. So that was how the longer documentary project got started.

If there’s one video emblematic of the work I’ve done over the past 14 years, it’s probably this one, a fundraising video for cancer research. It’s work that I’m proud of. I’m lucky to have among my clients UW Medicine, an organization with a vast commitment to both treating and researching the underlying causes and possible cures for this disease. I’m a pretty empathetic guy, but always cancer has been something that happens on the other side of the camera. Until now.

My cancer diagnosis

One day at the beginning of May I noticed a lump in my throat. I’ll spare you the details, but after a month of ruling out other things, I got the word: throat cancer. Mine stems from HPV-16 infection when I was younger. I’m not alone in this – estimates are that at least 40 percent of the US population is positive for this virus, which is now preventable with a vaccine that wasn’t available in my day. I am one of about 1 percent of those infections that develop into cancer.

The good news, my doctor told me, is that if I was willing to undergo a brutal regime of chemotherapy and radiation, I had an 80 percent chance to beat it. Of course I took those odds. Most cancer patients are lucky to have 50/50 chance.

It’s now the end of August, and my last day of treatment was August 28. I’m in my first full week of recovery from treatment. Along the way, radiation in my throat took away completely my ability to taste food. Chemo made me as sick as I imagined it would, and then some. But I kept my hair. Not my beard – radiation on my throat fried that. Losing my ability to taste took the biggest emotional toll. I’m a closet foodie, and love to cook. It came as a shock to me how disgusting eating is when everything tastes like cardboard. Right now, food is like poison. Lucky, I accepted when given the option to have a stomach tube surgically implanted at the beginning of treatment, because I’ve relied on it exclusively to get the calories my body desperately needs to survive this treatment. I’ve lost about 15 pounds, and it could have been far worse. They say I’ll get my ability to taste back in about a month.

My commitment

Cancer changes you. After all this suffering, I now know that I’m alive for a reason. Before cancer, I had a keen interest in making videos to support organizations in search of cures. But now, it’s different. Now, it comes from inside me. And it’s time for me to give it a voice.

After spending the past 15 years delivering projects in this space, I’m at the top of my game. And now, I’m doubling down. So if you work at a cancer research organization, hospital, or health care system that wants to unleash the power of storytelling, I want to partner with you. It’s personal for me now. And I can’t wait to see what we’d be capable of producing.

Let’s work together

I’m available and ready for assignments starting mid October, 2023. For the video above, I traveled to Texas, and I’m happy to travel anywhere. I also speak decent Spanish. Please pass this post along to anyone you know who works in a cancer field.

My portfolio of related work: https://vimeo.com/danmccoomb

Contact info:

Dan McComb, dan@visualcontact.com, (206) 228-0780.

Call me, and let’s get to work making cancer a curable disease for more patients like me, and the extraordinary family in this video.

I recently celebrated my 57th birthday. And the older and more experienced I get with a camera, the more attracted I am to shooting interviews in natural light. Maybe it’s just because I’m tired of all the work involved in setting up lights, grip and everything required to impose your vision on a scene. But I think it’s because, after all these years, I’ve finally realized that nature does it best.

Examples of natural light interviews

A couple months ago I shot for a wonderful organization called Friendship Circle (not my client, but I was hired by the New York based agency to DP most of the Seattle-based production). Take a look at these interview frames:

The two images above are a mother and her daughter, who were interviewed in the same room. I simply reversed the camera angle between shots, to get a different look. By opening and partially closing the blinds, I was able to control the light enough to make it work.

But shooting without lights doesn’t mean shooting without anything. If you examine the frame above, note the diffuse reflection in the upper camera-left side of her glasses. See that soft white glow? That’s the 4×4 bounce, shiny side up, that I placed to try and make that camera-left side of her face a little brighter, to get a bit of wrap.

On her mom’s frame, I needed to use the bounce on the camera left (shadow) side of her face, because the shadow side of her face would have been too dark without it. So depending on the situation, I’m either wanting to add a little or take away a little light. And this can be achieved without light fixtures, just by carefully placing the subjects in the frame.

Natural light (with a little help)

In the two-shot of the couple, I’ve placed them so that they are lit by a large bank of windows in their living room, with the kitchen behind them. There are some lovely small lights in the background that add interest and the window in the kitchen provides motivation for a light (but in this case, does not provide the amount of light I needed to separate them from the background). So this is a case where I added one small light, an edge light as it’s called, to just make them pop off that background. So this is a case where the shot isn’t entirely naturally lit. However, the shot would have worked fine without it. Adding it felt like a nice extra touch.

Because it wasn’t the key light, setting up this edge light (a Dedo DLED-7) was super easy – I just placed it on the floor, aimed upward with a parallel beam adapter. On a c-stand with a boom arm, I placed a #3 Cine Reflect Lighting System panel into the beam, which gives a nice soft light that is easy to focus without needing to set any flags. Done.

Naturally wrapping window light

On another project, for UW Medicine, I shot a doctor interview last week in a conference room that had a long row of windows along a southern exposure (see frame above). Luckily for me, the interview was shot during the day when the sun was at a high enough angle that it wasn’t reaching too far into the room, which allowed me to use the windows as soft key sources of light (sky blue). Note, that if the weather had been mixed, as so often is the case here in Seattle, with partial clouds and sun breaks, this wouldn’t have worked. The exposure would have fluctuated with the cloud movement.

To make this shot work, I used a 4×4 floppy to darken the background to get good separation, and a 4×4 bounce on the shadow side of his face to lower the contrast. I also had to warm the shot a lot in post, as that sky blue is very cool light, and I wanted a warm vibe.

How might this same shot have looked in artificial light? I just happen to have a comparison, because I interviewed another doctor in the same conference room a year ago. Here’s how that looked:

At the end of the day, working with naturally light is all about seeing the light, and realizing what you can do with it with just a little shaping.

Finally, here’s the finished Friendship Circle piece:

I’m thrilled to have shot the first 6 clips of this TV spot from Ford, encouraging people to finish strong in the battle with Covid.

All of the clips originally appeared in the Covid Nurse video I made for UW Medicine last April, shot on Canon C500mkii.

Big shout out to archival producer Stephan Michaels, who jumped through a lot of hoops for me to get this across the finish line.

Now we just have to get ourselves there. Finish strong, people!