Eben Bolter | Cinematographer

Eben Bolter | Cinematographer

Eben grew up on Hayling Island; a small town just off the southeast coast of England. He started off working in recruitment and didn’t pick-up a camera until he was 24 when he shot his first 30-second short. As of that moment, Eben says “I thought of myself as a DP. I was the worst DP in the UK, but I knew I wanted to get better, to work on the job and improve”. Over the space of a year he immersed himself in how-to videos and directors’ commentaries, managing to shoot 50 short films along the way. He compares this time to learning carpentry, saying “you can go to school and spend a year learning how to make a chair, or you could just make a thousand chairs”.

The number of shorts he’s now shot is closer to 100, with 15 features also in the can including Chicken and UK Netflix feature iBoy. Eben enjoys the empathy he shares with the characters he’s shooting, acknowledging that a lot of his job is about creating an atmosphere on-set in which an actor can deliver their best performance. In that respect, he says, “beyond the technical aspects of lighting and framing, a DP needs to build trust with their director and performers.”