Takeaways:
Do your work “off the radar.”
Find the type of work you love and do more of it — even if it’s for free.
The last 5 percent of effort you put into a project is the difference between something being crap and something being unbelievable.
Salomon Ligthelm didn’t set out to become a filmmaker. If anything, filmmaking found him. And when it found him, he was holed up in his bedroom, creating otherworldly audio tracks and imagining what kind of otherworldly visuals might accompany them. It wasn’t long before Salomon was bringing those visuals to life himself, experimenting with video in his spare time and developing a visual style that would soon be sought after by brands like Nike and Everlast.
But big brands were never what Salomon was after. Even today, he’d much rather talk about his personal passion projects — projects like A N O M A L Y — than name-drop his high-profile clients. Salomon approaches his craft with an earnestness and humility. He still makes work for the love of it, and it shows.
This is our conversation with Salomon Ligthelm.
How did you get into filmmaking?
It all happened unintentionally. I was very much just playing around, and before I knew it, this thing I was doing purely as a hobby turned into something people noticed. People asked me to keep doing it. At first it was mostly churches and nonprofits, but pretty soon I was working on projects for Nike and Everlast.
It all felt very natural. If I wasn't enjoying it, then I wouldn’t do it. I realized very early on that I just cannot do corporate work. I just don’t have it in me. So I ended up doing a lot of passion projects, a lot of things that didn’t necessarily pay, but the work was interesting. I did projects that were fun to work on, which in turn led to more opportunities to do stuff I was interested in. It actually turned out well that I wasn’t good at corporate-type work, because that meant people were coming to me with projects that were more creative and abstract, which is what I liked doing anyway. Now that’s the stuff I get paid to do.
In the very beginning were you getting assignments, or were you assigning projects to yourself?
When I started, I was really fortunate to be employed at a church as an audio engineer. That’s all I had to do. But I had so much time on my hands that I could, of my own volition, start getting into video. It felt like a natural progression for me. It felt like the next thing. I started messing around with audio that felt like it had a visual quality to it, and then I picked up a camera as a by-product. Those two things just started working hand in hand with each other.
I guess I was fortunate. At the time, nobody was expecting anything of me other than audio. The video was always extra, something they weren’t expecting. So I was able to experiment a lot and play around with their gear without having the pressure of actual assignments. They were just happy they were getting a video at all — and really happy that it was cool and different and whatnot. It gave me the freedom to play around, which eventually led to some corporate work, which was very draining, and then passion work, which was incredible. It was work that spoke to me. I’m thinking of some of the first projects I did with Variable. Doing that type of work started bringing in similar types of work.
A shot from Holi, a Variable film. Original score and sound design by Salomon.
Did you always have a good sense of the types of projects you were interested in, or was it more process of elimination?
You just keep asking yourself: Is this satisfying me? If the answer is no even though the money is good, then you might decide, like I did, “Well then, I’m not going to do it.” I honestly cannot force myself to do work that I do not enjoy. I understand that not everybody has that luxury. But you know, if you want to do this for the long haul, you have to set yourself up to do things you love to do and not just things that make you money. You have to set yourself up to be creatively satisfied.
Do you think it helped that no one was expecting anything from you at first?
Yes, totally. Sometimes I wish it were still like that. I wish every time I made a video, people said, “Wow! I didn’t know you could do that.” But of course that changes. You become the “video person” or the “film person.” But it definitely helped at the beginning not to be seen that way. Sometimes setting expectations can help, especially in terms of marketing. But for me, I love creating in the shadows. I love it when people aren’t expecting anything, when I’m not even expecting anything. And then all of a sudden something amazing happens. I like working under the radar.
How do work under the radar when you’ve built up such a dedicated following? Do you trick yourself into thinking nobody cares about what you’re working on?
I think you try and be selective about what you show. I’d love to post more, but you have to be intentional about posting stuff that’s good — especially if you want to maintain quality and maintain interesting work. Some people think being super-prolific is key. And I agree. But the other part is deciding what you show and what you keep on the shelf. If I’m silent, it’s not because I’m not working. It’s because maybe the thing I’m working on isn’t the thing I want to show. Maybe that project is about me learning rather than me showing. Not all experiences are worth showcasing.
Can you throw out a ratio of work you create to work you show?
I’d say it’s like 50/50. Maybe even more. No, it’s probably not. Let me think… Yeah, it would probably be about 50/50.
How many projects do you complete in a year?
Well, the types of projects I do vary from like 10 minutes to 30 minutes long. I reckon I do between 10 and 12 projects a year, and it’s probably about 4 or 5 of them that I’ll give a hard push out into the world. Just a, “Look at this. This is my best work,” kind of a thing.
The thing is, though, you have to approach every project as, “This is going to be the best thing.” But you do that knowing it might not be the best thing in the end. Especially when a project becomes very prescriptive; those are my least favorite, when every maneuver is pre-thought-out and preplanned. I enjoy projects that have a lot of freedom.
From Salomon's Silent Transitions project.
You want some wiggle room.
Yeah. Projects where the client is open to anything, open to ideas. That, or maybe the subject matter just has a lot of scope to it. But when a client is very close-minded, that can become quite frustrating.
To be honest, though, sometimes you walk into a project and in your head you’ve built up this sense that the client is going to be very restrictive, or that the subject is going to be very restrictive. And then you realize later on that those restrictions were actually self-induced. It wasn’t the client at all — it was you. That happens to me occasionally, and I’ve got to kill that. You’ve got to realize there’s always creative freedom — you just have to seek it out.
Did you always want to do music and film, or were there any other options on the table?
When I was growing up, I wanted to be everything from a rugby player to a policeman to a fireman. For the longest time, I wanted to be a meteorologist.
A meteorologist? Really?
I had a whole stack of old VHS tapes from National Geographic and Discovery Channel, like Storm Chasers. That’s what I wanted to do. I watched Twister in 1996, and it became this dream of mine to go do these storm-chasing safaris.
Twister is a life-changing film.
Yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. Go to Oklahoma and Kansas and all those places. I still would like to do that at some point. Maybe not as a career, but as an experience. I guess I’ve always liked really dramatic things, and that’s what I saw in storms, you know? I used to know everything about them, the different cloud variations that would spawn tornadoes. Cumulonimbus. I knew it all back then.
I think I was probably about 8 years old when I got into that stuff. And then when I was 12, music kind of happened until I was about 16 or 17. And then when I was 21, I started taking audio engineering seriously. I thought maybe I could become a music producer. And then all of a sudden, [my filmmaking career] took off, and that’s really the thing I’m immersing myself in these days.
For a while I was really interested in the visual side of things, from a director of photography’s point of view. But slowly that’s shifting to more of a directorial emphasis and a storytelling emphasis. I’m really interested in studying screenwriting, focusing on the story. Hopefully this will be my whole life. And then maybe I’ll make Twister 2.
That would be awesome.
Bring back Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt.
An all-star cast.
Truly.
Do you think film is something you’re naturally good at?
Yes and no. Yes in that it felt like a natural by-product of what I was doing with audio. When I was working on some of those tracks at home, they all tended to be more experimental and ambient. I could see these visuals that would go along with them. So I got a camera and just started shooting the things I’d seen in my head. That was the easy part. The hard part has been going from very conceptual abstract stuff to understanding story and understanding the way narrative works. It’s hard work.
I say hard work, but not in the sense that it’s work I don’t want to do. It’s like in any activity or profession: You need to understand your craft and that’s not always easy. I mean, we’re working on our film A N O M A L Y right now, and it’s like 40 minutes too long at the moment. It’s hard work cutting it down. It’s late nights.
I said this to someone recently: “Most projects look like crap when they’re at 95 percent. It’s that extra 5 percent that takes it from being crap to being unbelievable.” I think the trick is to not get discouraged at 95 percent.
Still images from A N O M A LY.
So, speaking of that, how do you deal with discouragement? When you feel like the project you’re working on is actually terrible.
It’s funny, man. I feel like that on every project. I know that sounds crazy, but I do. I look at a project that’s 90 or 95 percent of the way there, and I go, “I don’t know if this is any good at all.” At that point it’s really about who you show it to. It’s about having that voice you trust.
Like last night I sat down with this guy I work with who’s an excellent storyteller, and I showed him the latest cut of our project. He was able to confirm the things I thought I needed to tweak, but also give me new things to think about — things that if we just tweak or change them, it will take a scene from being something good to being something really great. That feedback is so helpful.
The thing with discouragement is not to take it personally. When people give you feedback, they’re trying to make your work better. They’re trying to help you do your best. You just have to learn how to listen to what they’re saying.
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Salomon’s dedication to his craft and to his personal projects is inspiring, and it’s allowed him to carve out a niche for himself in a highly competitive industry. That, and the fact that he’s just a fantastically genuine and talented guy. Be sure to check out his latest passion project, A N O M A L Y, and then be sure to start one of your own. You never know where it might lead.