Amanda Torres was a film student and gaffer based in Los Angeles who was weeks away from shooting her thesis film — a full production with a crew of 25 scheduled for a three-day shoot in early March. Isaac and Amanda talked about how she worked her way up from PA to lighting crew on professional sets, the film photography dark room practice that quietly ran through everything she made, and what it meant to step into the director role for the first time at scale.
From PA to Lighting Crew
Amanda’s path to gaffer wasn’t a straight line — it started on the ground floor. She came up through production assistant work, learning how sets moved before she understood how they were lit. Over time she gravitated toward the lighting side, finding in it something more technical and more tactile than the general PA role allowed.
Working as a gaffer meant reading a space the way a DP would — understanding what the light was doing, what it needed to do, and how to get from one to the other fast. The set experience gave her something film school alone couldn’t: fluency. She knew what the crew expected of each other, how to communicate under pressure, and what a day actually cost when things slowed down.
That practical foundation shaped how she thought about directing. When you’ve worked crew on enough sets, you stop thinking about filmmaking as a solo act. You start thinking about how to build the room that makes the film possible.
The Thesis Film
When they recorded, Amanda was twelve days out from the shoot — March 9 through 11, three days, a crew of 25. It was the largest production she’d directed, and the pressure of it was real.
The thesis film represented a different kind of responsibility than anything she’d taken on before. On a set as crew, you’re accountable for your department. As director, you’re accountable for all of it: the script, the performances, the tone, the schedule, the people. She’d built out the full crew, was deep in prep, and was navigating the particular anxiety of having spent so long on something before a single frame had been shot.
What she kept coming back to was the collaborative part — the way a production at that scale forced you to trust other people entirely. You couldn’t be everywhere. You had to hire well, brief clearly, and then let the people around you do their jobs.
“You have to be really clear about what you want and then actually let the people you’ve hired do their thing — if you’re trying to control every single piece of it yourself, you’re going to lose the whole thing.”
The shoot was close. The prep was done. What was left was showing up and leading.
Film Photography and the Dark Room
Alongside her film work, Amanda had a deep practice in still photography — specifically in film and the dark room. It wasn’t a hobby she’d picked up alongside her main work; it was something closer to the center of how she thought about images.
The dark room had its own logic. Developing and printing film by hand meant slowing down in a way that digital work didn’t require. Each choice had weight — the exposure, the chemistry, the paper. You couldn’t undo anything. The process demanded presence in a way that translated, even if indirectly, to how she worked on set.
Cyanotypes pulled her in the same direction. The cyanotype process — a photographic printing technique that produces a cyan-blue image through UV exposure — is one of the oldest photographic methods still in active use, and Amanda had been experimenting with it as a medium. The appeal was partly aesthetic and partly the same thing the dark room offered: a process that pushed back, that had its own rules, that you had to learn rather than override.
She talked about Willem Verbeeck, the Belgian filmmaker and photographer whose work has circulated widely online, as a reference point — someone whose commitment to craft in the image felt like a north star.
“There’s something about working with a process that has real limits — you start to make better choices because you can’t just fix it later.”
Collaborative Filmmaking vs. Going It Alone
One of the things the thesis film was forcing Amanda to reckon with was the difference between making something alone and making something with other people. She’d done both, and they weren’t the same experience.
Solo work — a roll of film, a cyanotype, a short she’d directed with a small crew — had a certain clarity to it. You were the only one accountable. The decisions were yours, the failures were yours, and there was something freeing about that even when it was hard.
A crew of 25 was a different animal. She’d been in rooms like that as crew and understood how they functioned. Being the director changed the position entirely. You were no longer one part of the machine — you were responsible for the machine running.
What she’d found, preparing for the shoot, was that the collaborative version wasn’t harder so much as it was different. You had to externalize your vision clearly enough that 25 people could execute it with you. The discipline that required — making the thing in your head legible to other people — had made her a sharper thinker about what she actually wanted.
Robbie Wheeler, who talked in an earlier episode about building a creative practice across disciplines, had touched on the same tension between solo and collaborative work — how each mode sharpens something the other can’t.
Marketing Yourself as a Creative
Amanda was direct about something a lot of film students weren’t: that the work wasn’t enough on its own. You had to be findable, legible, and present in the industry before you had a real foothold in it.
Networking on set was part of it — showing up, doing good work, and making an impression on the people who could call you on the next one. But that alone was slow. The people getting hired consistently were the ones who made it easy for others to see what they did and what they were capable of.
For her, that meant being thoughtful about what she put out and where — not flooding feeds, but being intentional enough that the work represented her. The still photography and the film work told different parts of the same story. Together they communicated a sensibility.
“You want people to be able to figure out what you’re about pretty quickly — if someone lands on your page and can’t tell what you do or what your work looks like, you’ve already lost them.”
What Comes After School
When they talked about what came next, Amanda was clear on two directions she wanted to keep building: cinematography and concert photography. The paths weren’t unrelated — both were about understanding light, reading a moment, and capturing something before it was gone.
The cinematographer path was the long one. Getting from film school to DP-level work on real productions took years of set time, good timing, and a portfolio that could speak for itself. She knew that. The thesis film was a step, not an arrival.
Concert photography had a different timeline and a different energy — faster, less controlled, the kind of shooting where your instincts had to outrun your thinking. She’d shot shows and found in it something that scratched a different itch than narrative film. The goal was to take both seriously and see where they led.
The thesis film needed to shoot first. Then the festival run — submitting, waiting, finding out whether the thing she’d spent months making could travel beyond the classroom.
“I’ve spent so long in the prep and the planning — I just want to actually make the thing and see what it is.”
Key Takeaways
- Set experience teaches what school can’t. Working crew before directing gave Amanda fluency in how productions actually run — knowledge that changed how she approached leading one.
- The process is part of the practice. Dark room work and cyanotypes aren’t just techniques — they’re disciplines that train better decision-making by removing the ability to undo.
- Directing means externalizing your vision. Making a film with 25 people requires making the thing in your head legible to everyone else — a discipline that sharpens creative thinking.
- Collaborative and solo work sharpen different things. Each mode builds something the other can’t. Moving between them makes you a stronger creative overall.
- Be findable before you need to be found. The people getting hired consistently made it easy for others to understand what they did and what they were capable of.
- Let the people you hired do their jobs. Trying to control every element of a large production is how you lose the whole thing — good hiring and clear briefing are the director’s real work.
Follow Amanda on Instagram. Connect with Isaac at isaacjarnagin.com.
