After years of making films in New York City — short films, features, music videos, things that don't fit neat categories — the education has been less about technique and more about disposition. Here's what this city has actually taught us about the work.
Specificity is the only universality
The impulse when you're starting out is to make things general — stories that could happen anywhere, characters who feel broadly relatable, visuals that don't commit too hard to one place. New York City doesn't allow this. It's too specific, too insistent, too much itself. The films that tried to use it as neutral backdrop failed. The ones that committed to its particular reality — the specific block, the specific light, the specific way people speak to each other here — ended up resonating far beyond the city.
We've come to believe this is true everywhere, not just here. Specificity is where the universal lives. The more precisely you describe a particular human experience in a particular place, the more other people recognize themselves in it.
The city is always collaborating, whether you want it to or not
You don't shoot New York City. You negotiate with it. A truck blocks your frame. A construction crew starts at 7am. A stranger walks into your shot and says something that's better than your scripted line. The city has its own agenda, and that agenda doesn't include your production schedule.
Early on we fought this. Now we use it. The unplanned element — the thing that wasn't in the script but that the city provided anyway — is often what makes the scene live. The skill is being prepared enough that you can recognize it and flexible enough that you can use it.
People are the location
New York City has extraordinary architecture and light and visual texture. It also has eight million people who carry the city's full complexity on their faces every single day. The best work we've made here has been work where the human beings in the frame were as important as the buildings behind them. The city's people are its real location — the rest is backdrop.
Make the thing. Then make it again.
New York rewards persistence in ways that other cities don't, or at least not as visibly. The career of every filmmaker who's made meaningful work here is a story of accumulation — of relationships built, skills developed, ideas tried and failed and tried differently. The city provides an endless supply of material and an endless supply of reasons to stop. The ones who keep going are the ones who make the work that matters.
That's what we intend to keep doing. In New York City. Only New York City. For as long as it takes.
Making something in New York City? We'd like to hear about it.
hello@emberstudios.nyc →