Gabrielle Blackwood: A Few of my Favourite Things

From hauling camera gear through customs to translating Korean novels for fun, Emerald Pictures' Gabrielle Blackwood's creative process is as multifaceted as her filmography. 

The award-winning Jamaican director and DoP – whose work spans narrative films, global documentaries and commercial campaigns for brands like Adidas, Nike and Apple Music – has shot and trained in locations from New Zealand to South Korea, whilst relishing the tactile comforts of writing tools, home-cooked meals and trusty manuals. 

Here, she shares a few of the objects that keep her grounded, inspired, and ready to shoot.

The Manual And Stationary

Whenever I’m writing a screenplay or having a Zoom meeting on my balcony - which is a lot of the time (the light and air are just better) - these are my absolutes.

To this day, even though most of it is in my head, I still keep my old screenwriting manual from 15 years ago handy when beginning a screenplay or treatment.

It’s a literal booklet of scanned articles from various screenwriting texts. 

Ironically, I feel like I’ve benefited more from them now than I did when doing my Master’s.

In meetings, I also love a good highlighter, pen, and sharpened pencil. 

I’m a very tactile person and I love making quick notes and creating and executing to-do lists. 

It puts me in a very organised state of mind, which is super helpful for action tasks that need to be achieved before a follow-up Zoom or any project I’m working on.

The Chopsticks And Korean Novel

These are literally the first things I see in the mornings when I’m writing grant proposals or sending emails. 

I travelled to South Korea four times between 2023 and 2024 while directing a documentary series. 

I’d developed an appetite for Korean dramas just the year before, as I’d decided to study their screenwriting style and formula. 

Their writers are literal psychological students of life, who write in the most poetic, metaphorical and enlightening way - which is probably why people are hooked on their films and dramas. 

They also have an established visual storytelling language in their cinematography, which I’ve used in my own work.

Now, having been there and fallen totally in love with the people and culture, I’ve developed a huge appetite for the food too. 

I love Jamaican food, but now I cook a lot using both Jamaican and Korean ingredients.

If I’m not on set and I’m at home writing a screenplay, commercial treatment or applying for funding, I’m usually cooking something slightly Korean-influenced. 

Outside of that, I’m also teaching myself Korean, and I try to do an hour of online lessons three times a week in the mornings - hence the novel, which I intend to fully translate within a year.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera 2.5K

My first digital filmmaking camera - ‘Doris’.

I’d been experimenting with photography and dabbling a little in digital video, initially on my Canon T3i, but ‘Doris’ was the camera I used to direct and shoot my first documentary feature, DENIS. 

The image of my dad lying sideways in the cover photo [above], in this desert-looking landscape, always reminds me of how I started - bare bones. 

I also took a photo of ‘Doris’ by the sea because I’d recently kitted her out after months of saving and was super proud and excited about the journey ahead. 

No one had ever heard of a female director of photography in Jamaica or the Caribbean, and I was about to prove them wrong.

The blue handlebars came from my first shoulder rig, which also reminds me of how expensive it is to ship or clear camera equipment in Jamaica. 

Jamaican customs are no joke! 

They literally double the cost of any gear brought in. 

Ironically, in this case, they mistook my first rig accessory for a car part - but I was still charged double, so essentially I bought two shoulder rigs... just didn’t possess one. 

Lovely.

The Photos

Location plays a huge role in my cinematography and visual storytelling. 

When I was studying directing over a decade ago, I was fascinated by the idea of making Jamaica a virtual stand-in for somewhere else.

When I returned home after studying film in New Zealand, I asked a good friend and her sister (who acted as makeup artist) to follow me out to this mosquito-infested swamp with visually interesting barren, mucky terrain. 

We shot a slew of images of her looking slightly Polynesian, dressed like a geisha, but with a Jar Jar Binks mask - to play a bit with surrealist art that I’d recently become obsessed with.

This shoot always reminds me of when I was just getting my feet wet in cinematography, starting to think visually outside the box and finding interesting ways to tell different stories. 

It was also when I developed a passion for colour grading, which fuelled my need to create dark skin tone LUT packs about four years ago, now used worldwide. 

As I began experimenting with grading, I also started to investigate how different camera colour sciences, lens and filter tints, and light CRI (Colour Rendering Index) interacted with various skin tones.

The Easy Rigs

Always stashed somewhere in a corner with my camera gear, these are essential to my craft - but also a reminder of the back injuries (bulged discs) I developed from constantly lifting heavy equipment. 

Three years ago, I was on complete bed rest for three months, unable to walk because of the injuries.

They’ve become one of my favourite things because they were a wake-up call that I needed to prioritise my physical health working in such a robust - and often physically draining - profession. 

If I had any advice for anyone pursuing cinematography or camera operating: take care of your body first. 

That might determine how long you can physically last in this field.