Ryan Funk used to be a touring skateboarder, but an injury helped him find a new passion: filmmaking. He started filming other skaters while he was on his skate shop’s injured list, 一周之内, 他贷款买了一套专业摄像系统. More than 20 years later, Ryan is running his own production company, 国家形象, 和 sharing his professional experiences with students in 满帆’s 数码摄影 项目的课程主任 生产基础1 和 位置的照明.

一旦瑞恩致力于电影制作, he shot footage of skateboarders in San Diego 和 worked on other projects like a half-hour documentary about a folk singer called 爱达荷州蓝色喷气航线. 当他回到佛罗里达时, he worked on union shows as a lighting tech in the grip 和 electric department for Panavision Cameras. Ryan started teaching at 满帆 in 2003, but he continued to work on film sets in Central Florida.

随着时间的推移, Ryan connected with other local crew members 和 noticed a problem: They were all struggling to find work in the area, 当他们这么做的时候, they were exhausted from long hours 和 stressful conditions. In an effort to improve the on-set experience 和 create new opportunities, 瑞安创立了自己的制作公司, 国家形象, in 2018. He decided to put more time 和 resources towards pre-production to reduce the time spent filming 和 decrease the crew’s stress levels.

“Our theory is the design 和 the creativity comes in pre-production 和 the execution's on set. 所以我们不需要让人来片场, 压力, 试着找出如何尽可能地发挥创造力, 当它已经写下来的时候, 已经组织了,瑞恩说。. “到目前为止，它取得了令人难以置信的成功. We have a feature that we have offers on now that we shot in 15 days. We never went over 10 和 a half hours per day; a normal day is 12 hours… The basis behind 国家形象 is more scientific than it is creative, because we want to really try to set a tone for filmmaking in general 和 make everybody safe.”

Ryan’s done plenty of work with traditional on-set crews through 国家形象, 包括演出 爱的囚徒 在探索+和 主题女王 在HGTV，以及故事片 每个目的都有时间. But the company’s passion for documentaries, like the bull-riding movie 骑到死 迷你纪录片 为勇士守灵, lines up with the 数码摄影 program’s independent, jack-of-all-trades skills.

“纪录片制作是一切的一部分. We have to go out sometimes 和 do singular interviews by ourselves… I take a lot of my free time 和 I'll go out 和 do tests 或者我做小的 interviews, 或者我做小的, 短片之类的, to be able to connect or have answers for [数码摄影] students,瑞恩解释道.

国家形象 also lets Ryan foster community with his online students: He often shows his class his on-set life with live-streamed events.

“I'll walk around on set as another instructor films me 和 I'll show the camera systems. I’ll ask the assistant camera 和 camera operators questions about the camera, 他们为什么要这样安排, 我们为什么要使用分辨率. We also compare the students’ equipment to our on-set equipment. So we let the students know the cameras that they have in their LaunchBox are equivalent to the ones that we have on set… Then I'll go into lighting schemes 和 talk to the students about different contrasts, why we're utilizing high contrast for suspense 和 dramatic [films], 还有不同的色温等等. 当我在片场的时候，我们就是这么做的。”Ryan说.

Ryan’s commitment to showing his classes real-world working conditions folds neatly into his teaching philosophy – he focuses on problem solving 和 treats his students like they’re working professionals.

“I talk about ways that I have failed in the past 和 how we were able to overcome those failures. And how we now, from those failures, have formulated ways to succeed,” he says. “The one thing that I try to do with our students too is not treat them like students. 我不是来教学生如何成为更好的学生的, I'm here to teach the students to be phenomenal filmmakers.”