Why do people love movies?
Going to the movies is a way of immersing oneself in another world, imagining new kinds of simple or complex heroes, learning about other peoples’ issues, lives and times. We are a species that thrives on narrative, feeding our imagination, constantly learning and wanting more information, bonding through shared stories.
Why do people love making movies? Movie making has its own addictive charms. The challenge of building a story through visual and aural means is difficult but very rewarding. A single filmmaker can cobble together a story but most films are collaborations of large teams of creative professionals.
What does Rob Allen bring to the table? Rob has been using still photography to illustrate advertisements, magazines, business publications including annual reports, newspaper articles and other forms of communication since the late ’80s. He really enjoys working with people to tell their stories, capturing that image that “is worth a thousand words’. Always looking for what legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called ‘The Decisive Moment’, he has used a variety of cameras and creative approaches over the decades to capture truths in subjects both human and otherwise.
Film crews need Stills Photographers to record their process and to generate important marketing and publicity images to keep their film moving toward as wide a marketplace as possible.
Rob really enjoyed working on the set of Andrew Scott’s student film, Volition. He also had the opportunity to participate in AFCOOP’s FILM5 filmmaker program as unit still photographer on Dale Willman’s directorial debut, Invisible.
What else does Rob enjoy? Aside from roasting and BBQing and making cocktails to share into the late hours with friends and family, he still considers himself an athlete and tries to get his heart beating hard every day on the bike or in runners or in the lake he lives on to keep the wolves at bay. He even gets into a triathlon every summer to keep the training real.
Any other passions? Along with being a professional photographer since his early twenties, and earning his graduate degree in Documentary Media, Rob has been blessed to share his deep passion for photography with adult and undergraduate learners at Toronto Metropolitan (Ryerson) University, Humber College, and now NSCAD University. He feels privileged to share his experiences and keep his creative juices flowing through interactions with young people – what an energy source!
And hey, they all love movies!
“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing…”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Images á la Sauvette
(The Decisive Moment)
1952
