"As a cinematographer, I have always prided myself on finding the emotional connection to the characters within a scene, whether that characterizes the protagonist or the antagonist. Through my lighting and lensing of the scene, I can reflect those emotions of the characters. All of this is done to connect the audience visually to the scene. This is why I love cinematography, because it gives me the possibility of building emotional connections with people".
Michael Watson
Michael Watson is an American cinematographer based in Atlanta, GA, committed to carrying his audience along with well-grounded images, stories, and characters in their most natural settings. His work spans music videos, television, documentaries, and feature films shot around the world, always driven by a sensitive, subtlety-first approach to light and lens.
Michael grew up in the Cayman Islands, where a Pentax K1000 given to him on his 10th birthday first showed him the world through a viewfinder. Seeing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan sparked his obsession with motion pictures. After military boarding school in Florida, he moved to Miami and found his way into film through CineVideoTech, a motion picture camera rental house, a detour that became a calling.
He relocated to Los Angeles in 2004 and began working alongside acclaimed cinematographers Daniel Pearl, Lance Acord, Samuel Bayer, and Claudio Miranda. Music videos became his hands-on classroom. In 2011, he was among the first class at the Global Cinematography Institute, founded by Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC and Yuri Neyman, ASC — an experience he describes as a profound privilege.
His feature debut, Skyline (2010), directed by the Brothers Strauss for Universal Pictures, was praised for its bold visual style. In 2016, Michael moved to Atlanta and turned his focus to television — a medium he found to be one of the most creatively rich arenas for a cinematographer. The projects that followed speak for themselves.