The Black and Blue: 'Three Must-Have Skills for Pulling Focus and How You Can Improve Them'

Evan Luzi over at The Black and Blue Blog has written a really helpful article on focus-pulling, an essential skill for anyone considering a career in the camera department:

Pulling focus is hard. Really hard. It’s certainly no walk in the park.

In fact, it’s one of the most stressful, pressure-filled, ridiculously tough tasks that you can shoulder on a set and the consequences are as simple as they are brutal: miss the focus, ruin the take.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

For those who are good at it, it is. Nothing is more satisfying than keeping an actor’s eyes in sharp focus throughout the entirety of a 30-foot-dolly shot.

But that kind of skill has to be earned — forged in the fires of experience by tapping into and improving certain qualities necessary to pull focus in a seamless way.

So today I want to talk about three of these must-have skills for focus pullers and show you practical methods to improve them so you can panic a little bit less when the DP sets the stop to T 1.8.

Read Evan's list of three essential skills, and how you can practice to improve them over at The Black and Blue.