The opening speech by Louis-Philippe Capelle SBC and IMAGO General Secretary resumes the spirit that was taken to have 50 atendees during the weekend at Louvain la Neuve near Brussels.

Dear friends, 

On behalf of Imago, I would like to welcome you at this Image in Progress conference.
Founded 22 years ago, Imago is uniting more than 4000 cinematographers within 47 countries worldwide under very well defined aims and goals:
– promote in any way the activity of cinematographers in the respect of their cultural identity,
– encourage the improvement of technical and artistic quality, exposure and circulation of cinematographic works by all current or future technical means in each country throughout Europe and worldwide,
– promote and participate in any action of training, education, research, study and standardization of the techniques of the cinematographic industry
I feel that this meeting fits perfectly in our mission.
Therefore we are very pleased to take active part to this great initiative from the IAD, here in Louvain La Neuve.

The cinematography of the future lies in the young people. The same one we are doing our best to teach and share years of experience on the field.

The job of cinematographers is more and more linked to developments of new technologies, and this race sometimes is going too fast for most of us. Film schools are trying to catch the speed train of investments and new tools. But because of financial restrictions, it looks like a vain quest.
We, teachers, understood that films schools, according to their potential should be updated and pedagogy should follow some new paths. New positions emerged on the set like DIT’s, data manager and data wrangler. Tomorrow we will need trained collaborators.
To achieve this, new courses and workshops should be developed.

One should not forget that we as, authors of the image, have multiple hats, we are artists- we create the image- most us are coming from Art Schools, but there is also a huge part of technique which becomes everyday more prominent, so a balance should be found and this is part of our role as professors.
Making images for a specific project is, and should remain first framing and lighting a frame to meet the hopes and wishes of a film script, a director. This should occur according to a production line and a budget.

The conversations we will have today should be as open as possible, there should be no taboo between us.
Cinematography is universal, has no borders, we could be invited to shoot a film all around the planet. So we need to talk the same “film language”
It is maybe the first time that this opportunity is given to teachers coming from such diverse horizons like Belgium-Singapore-Australia-New Zealand… to gather and do serious thinking on these important topics.

I would like also to thank our sponsors who are first “old friends”, meaning friends from long time ago. They also understood that future is now.
So thanks to the IAD for the brilliant idea, to the Belgian Society of Cinematographers, and then Nicola Mazzanti and the Cinematek.
About the companies sponsoring us: Ladies first Kaat de Jonghe and her family representing De Jonghe laboratories, Michel Vandenplas and TV Connections, Bruno Verstraete for Avolon, Marc Galerne and Julien for K5600, Thierry Dubois for Eye Lite. All these companies are working closely with the film schools in Belgium and felt natural to give this event a full support.
Let us talk together and enjoy.

Louis-Philippe Capelle
Imago General Secretary, November 27th 2014