This article appeared in the November 1999 issue of ICG Magazine.

In the beginning there was Daniel Pearl. That wouldn't be a bad opening for the bible of the MTV revolution. Pearl was called the prototype music video shooter by Fortune Magazine in 1984. He won the first MTV award for cinematography that year for "Every Breath You Take" with the performance rendered by The Police. Pearl has subsequently compiled six MTV nominations, including 1999's "Miami" with Will Smith.

Pearl also earned the plaudits of peers in the television commercial industry in 1999 for "Wings," a spot he shot for Motorola. The spot is one of only three featuring a cinematographer on the 1999 American Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) reel.

Pearl is a native of New Jersey. He earned a masters degree in filmmaking from the University of Texas at Austin. The ink was barely dry on his diploma in 1973, when he shot the film noir-ish terror flick, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper. The film frightened and delighted critics and audiences at Cannes, and it astounded Hollywood studio execs when it rocked the boxoffice. Pearl's subjective and hyper-realistic camera work was credited with pulling the audience deeper into the story.

"A lot of the emotions came from the movement of a handheld 16 mm camera," he recalls. That wasn't a budget decision. "We shot in 16 mm format, mainly because there weren't any portable 35 mm cameras available." There was also a distinctively tactile texture and color palette that amplified the terror. "We used Ektachrome film (E.I. of 25), because 16 mm color negative film was too grainy at that time."

Pearl became the cinematographer to call if you were shooting a horror picture on a miniscule budget. He quickly collected nearly 20 credits including She Came to the Valley (aka, Texas in Flames), Alien's Return, Zapped and Invaders from Mars.

Pearl also shot commercials, industrial films and documentaries during that period, and a couple of music promos with director Jerry Kramer which were slotted as fillers on the experimental Z channel in Los Angeles and Top of the Pops in England.

Serendipity marked his future path. In 1981, Bob Pittman organized a cable channel that specialized in programming short, interpretive films promoting record albums. MTV went on the air in 1981 with 1.5 million cable viewers. The films were provided by the record companies. A few months later, Russell Mulcahy called Pearl.

Mulcahy was a young director from Australia who was on the leading edge of the MTV revolution. He was directing promo films for record companies.

"I thought it would be fun, and it was a way for me to fill the space in-between feature films," says Pearl. He has subsequently shot more than 500 videos and concert performances ("organized chaos"), and some 250 commercials. Pearl figures that between his music video and commercial projects he has shot enough film since the early 1980s to make two and maybe three features a year.

His first project with Mulcahy was "Its Raining Again" with Super Tramp.

Mulcahey told Pearl they would shoot 30 to 35 setups daily for two days.

"He told me to do the best I could," Pearl recalls, "because we could fix anything, even adjust contrast, in telecine. It was my first time in a telecine bay, but I could see that the ability to manipulate images in post could be a powerful tool for cinematographers."

Three days later, Pearl was shooting "She Works Hard for Her Money" with Donna Summer performing. The director was Brian Grant, a hot import from Britain.

Within a few weeks, Pearl was working with Steve Baron and the team of Kevin Godley and Lol Crème, the other English directors on MTV's "A" list.

"Every experience was new," says Pearl. "The first video I shot for Kevin and Lol was "Every Breath You Take", also by The Police. "It was black and white, and it ran for 14 months. I love shooting black and white film. When I was a kid I use to spend 12 to 14 hours at a time in a darkroom making black and white prints. It's the essence of photography in terms of what you can do with light, darkness and contrast."

Next, he shot "Wrapped Around Your Finger" with the same directors and performers. This video appeared to be shot by the light of 1,000 candles. Pearl exposed the film at 48 frames per second using a crystal motor to synchronize with the soundtrack at double speed. The illusion was unique. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion but the soundtrack was normal. Others do that now, but Pearl was first.

He was also probably the first cinematographer to use a Louma crane on a video. The 1983 video was "This Woman" performed by Kenny Rogers with Jay Dubin directing.

"I had complete control," he remembers. "I could choreograph the movements of the camera in ways that allowed the audience to see inside the heart of the song."

By 1985, MTV was in 25 million homes. People were talking about the "MTV look," which was generally characterized as lightning quick cuts, but Pearl notes that was just one of many techniques. Basically, he and others in the front ranks of the video revolution were dreaming up new ways of thinking about shooting film and audiences were learning how to read images faster and fill in transitions in their own imaginations.

"We were looking for ways to photograph the un-photographable," he says. "One minor example was the use of DayGlo paint makeup and black light which has very low intensity. It was a wonderful look. You could also use argon laser light. It was practically invisible with most film stocks. Most of the light falls in-between the blue and green spectrums. But, when I combined black or argon laser light with the new high-speed films and lenses, I was able to record things no one had seen before."

Pearl shot his first commercial in 1986 with Bob Giraldi directing.

"It was a great experience because he's so film literate," he says. "Bob taught me to trust the film and try anything." It's a lesson he never forgot.

Pearl shot "Wings" with Marcus Nispel. He describes the director as "nothing short of a genius." The spot is totally conceptual. The idea is to associate the sponsor with the notion of freedom. "We created a visual metaphor with an incredible number of strong images filmed at locations and on sets in Barcelona, and on a green screen stage in an old airplane hanger in Los Angeles."

Pearl explains that the Motorola spot expresses an abstract concept about freedom. The visual metaphor is flying, which is expressed with a montage of images supposedly from around the world, including people trying to launch a kite, paper airplanes soaring through the air, children running through an arched walkway flapping their arms like wings, and a girl in China looking out a window at graceful birds in flight. He filmed the birds on the green screen stage at speeds up to 2,500 frames per second.

"When the audience saw the graceful flight of those birds, there was no need for dialogue or a voice-over that said freedom," says Pearl. "They know how to read film. One of the birds was a swan with a great wingspan, and another was a dove. They are remarkably graceful when you slow the action down and watch them in free-flight."

He shot the spot in Super 35 format using ARRI 435 and ARRI 3 cameras in Barcelona, and Panavision Panastar and Photosonics cameras in Los Angeles for scenes requiring over-cranking. Pearl explains that every time you double the frame rate, you lose another stop. Between the pellicle system on the high-speed camera and over-cranking, he calculated losing eight to eight-and-half-stops at 2,500 fps.

"That meant we needed 250 times more light than normal," he says. "It was important for the focus puller to see what he was doing. I used big units, Maxi Brutes and 20Ks, and kept them close to the action. It was so hot that I thought the birds would melt. It was complicated because we also had to balance light on the green screen."

Pearl was using the Kodak Vision 500T film in that situation.

"There wasn't a trace of grain when we composited the birds in flight with the blue-sky background plate," he says. "I'm finding that if you shoot in Super 35 format an expose the film properly, and, you can push both the (Vision) 500 and 800-speed stocks and still get silky, smooth and clean images with the new generation of telecines."

Pearl says that while he earned his sixth MTV nomination (he's won twice) for "Miami," he doesn't count it among his best music video work. His personal favorites are "Ready or Not,"which Nispel directed for The Fugees and Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love," directed by Michael Bay.

"The video 'I'd Do Anything for Love' is one of my personal all-time favorite projects," he says. "I think the cinematography is pure, and it tells a story about the song."

Pearl describes "Miami" as a stylized and fairly literal interpretation of a song about the city. "We had a lot of motion control shots which caused some delays," he says. "The director wanted a shot with Will Smith walking toward a sunset. We were supposed to shoot at 7 p.m., but because of a delay in setting up the motion control system, we didn't get underway until 1 a.m. We had to create the illusion of a sunset, and that's never the same as reality. A scheduled sunrise shot was filmed at noon, "the worst time of day with the sun directly overhead; and an exterior street scene slated for 9 a.m., was lensed five hours later with the sun 110 degrees in the wrong direction."

All the delays were causes by problems in setting up the motion tracking system.

"Miami" opens in a diner in Philadelphia, where Smith and his buddies decide to fly to Miami where the weather is great. He flies there a private Gulfstream plane, and then shows the audience how "cool" the city is.

"We shot some interesting transitions using a 'nested zoom' technique that the director, Wayne Isham, developed for another project in Europe," Pearl says. "It looks like one continuous shot zooming in closer and closer on Smith. We also created a zoom-like effect with a motion control system. A morphing technique in digital post blended the images into seamless shots."

With all the problems, Pearl concedes that the video does its job. It sells the song, and moved enough albums off the shelf to make "Miami" a hit.

Twenty-five years have passed since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre took Cannes and the industry by storm. "The pace of technology has been incredible," Pearl says. "Everything is better than we ever imagined it could be. With today's films and lenses we can use any diffusion - sometimes it is like I'm lighting through a brick wall - in any type of light to get any look. You can create subtle nuances that audiences can read."

Pearl states the obvious that music videos have helped to stretch the visual literacy of a new generation of moviegoers and TV watchers.

"I grew up listening to music," he says, "and when I heard a song often enough, I could sing the words along with the melody. During the 1980s and '90s, young people mainly watched the music in addition to hearing it. I wonder, do they now visualize images when they hear the music?"

That's probably a rhetorical question, because it is obvious that the experimental visual story telling invented and nurtured by Pearl and other music videos shooters has made a deep and profound impression on TV commercials and narrative filmmaking.

In the early 1980s, hardly anyone expected music videos to be more than a passing fad, Pearl recalls. Few people expected them to last so long or cut so deep.

However, he voices some concerns about the current over-reliance on digital post as a substitute for creativity and the moment of photography.

"I've always been quick to embrace new technology," he says, "but I have also learned to trust my instincts when I see something at the moment of photography. Don't get me wrong. I was very happy to get the MTV nomination for "Miami", but the truth is that we could have done a better job without some of the motion control shots. It would have been great to film Will Smith at sunset and sunrise. That would have had real emotional appeal, and we could have done it without a motion control system."

Pearl adds, "That's the great thing about shooting music videos and commercials. It's an on-going learning process, and every job is different. I don't believe we have come close to achieving the full potential of what we can do with film. The human eye has a capacity for discerning a wide range of contrast. You can have rich blacks, splashes of bright light and underexposed images all in the same frame with today's technology. Who knows what we will be able to do in the future?"

The final question for Pearl is always the same. Will he ever resume the career he abandoned when he gave up shooting narrative films some 20 years ago?

A year ago he answered: "Maybe someday, if the right script and the right director comes along. The problem is that you can spend six months shooting a film, and it can close in two nights. I spend three, four or five days shooting a video or commercial, and 40 million or more people are going to see it again and again and again."

This time he answers: "When the right script and the right director comes along."