Lighting cameraman Filmmaker Andrei Erastov / about me

I have been a filmmaker my whole life. I was 14 years old when in 1979 a local film festival featured my first film in the three-minute category.

It was the Soviet Era. Five years of study at the VGIK (High Filmmakers' School) and several years of making films for the cinema and television has given me experience which is still useful if we are filming anywhere in the former Soviet Union - a peculiar territory with a very specific society.

I've worked on both traditional shoot, filming on DigiBeta or HD as a member of the filming crew and with small DV camcorder on my own, with director away in his office.

Apart from the usual tasks of a cameraman, my key aim when filming is to make the director feel grateful in the edit suite.

Nowadays the documentary method, when you work as a one man crew with a small DV camcorder in hands, demands a lot from the individual filmmaker. You have to be everything: cameraman, director, soundman, researcher, interviewer, location manager and troubleshooter.

The most interesting aspect of this method is that, if you do it right, your camera becomes almost unnoticeable and you can weave in and out of your subject's ordinary lives and develop close relationships of trust with your characters. I call this method "flying mosquito filming".

My first experience of this was in 1995 when I worked as one of HI8 filmmakers team on "Russian Wonderland", a series shot by Mosaic Films for the BBC.

Welcome to filmmaking in Russia - in thrilling environments which abound here where we are certain to succeed.