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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Missing an eye?

D

Dan McCain

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I was recently contacted by a friend who's brother was recently in a car accident and lost an eye. He was writing to ask me what impact that would have on his brothers career as he is currently studying film production. He is asking me If his brother should abandon his dreams. His brother was planning on working on west africa.

I'm not sure how to advise him and would like to see if anyone has insight into what impact missing an eye is to being in this industry. I was thinking on encouraging him to focus more on the business side or audio. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
 
with the exception of 3D productions.
how does having one eye make any difference AT ALL?

dude havent you seen def leppard drummer has one arm and plays fine.
or look at the diving bell and the butterfly man was paralyzed and wrote a script
a director DP or whatever wouldnt be affected...a director even less.
 
Dan McCain said:
I was recently contacted by a friend who's brother was recently in a car accident and lost an eye. He was writing to ask me what impact that would have on his brothers career as he is currently studying film production. He is asking me If his brother should abandon his dreams. His brother was planning on working on west africa.

I'm not sure how to advise him and would like to see if anyone has insight into what impact missing an eye is to being in this industry. I was thinking on encouraging him to focus more on the business side or audio. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

You are asking for someone else, but I wrote my reply as if it was to you.

There are a lot of positive notes on here.

I generally agree that having just one eye shouldn't be a bar to working in the business.

That said... it is a visual medium. This is not going to be easy.

There will be prejudice. "How can a one eyed (fill in the job title) work?" they'll ask. The only way to counter that is with results. This way you can answer, "Its one heck of an eye though, better than most people's two eyes really." Its a joke, but do your best to make it true!

Plan on working longer and harder to learn and to deliver those results.

Learn to work around the limitations, so that it is NEVER an issue for others on set. You don't want to be the operator who needs extra takes, or who requires 2 AC's to work, etc etc.

Learn to take excellent care of the remaining eye. What you can learn to work around with one eye is completely impossible with no eyes! Always wear glasses with impact ratings- even if you don't need correction! Don't look at lasers... (sorry couldn't help myself) always use the appropriate lighting for whatever task you are about- especially your nighttime reading.

To reiterate, you can definitely work in this business with one eye. It will be hard to learn to work around having one eye in a visual workplace. You can do it though.
 
If he can work as well as anyone else, and gets a glass eye I don't even necessarily see a reason anyone would know.

Exceptions being where depth perception would be important for safe working: aka operating a jib might be ill advised in case you bop someone on the head. I would imagine 1st AC is probably also out as a career path.

He would have very little trouble in post production. Even as a 3D artist. Most stereo work is done one channel at a time anyway and commercial work is still pretty much exclusively flat.
 
Life is what you make of it. We ALL have handicaps to varying degrees and learn how to overcome and adapt. I myself am colorblind, anathema to what I do. But I've spent many a time on press checks correcting color, as strange as that may seem. I'll always defer to someone who has better color perception, but isn't that what we're talking about here, perception? Those who aren't colorblind, do not understand what I see, and tend to make a joke out of it, "what color is this?" But I CAN see color, so I don't let it slow me down.

Not one of us is capable of doing everything in life, so we each tend to gravitate towards those abilities that we enjoy and do well. He will do the same. This industry has many facets.

I'll bet he even gets used to the depth perception issue. My father-in-law lost an eye in a welding accident, didn't slow him down. We are our own worst enemy sometimes.
 
Terry Gilliam's longtime collaborator and streadicam pioneer, cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, has one eye.
If your friend has talent, is passionate and works really hard, he'll have no problem.
 
I don't have binocular vision, so I use one eye or the other. If I had a contact lens in the right eye then I used that one, in not the left eye. I probably light with slightly more seperation so things look good for one eye, that works well for the camera as well.
 
There's a man who is known within the photojournalist community who lost his sight in both eye's, he has continued to both take photos and process them in his own darkroom.

They are some of the most amazing photos I've ever seen and are intensely emotive in many ways.

A disability is only one if you allow it to be.
 
Jay Gannon said:
There's a man who is known within the photojournalist community who lost his sight in both eye's, he has continued to both take photos and process them in his own darkroom.

They are some of the most amazing photos I've ever seen and are intensely emotive in many ways.

A disability is only one if you allow it to be.
Click to expand...

There are many blind photographers amazingly; just google it. Here is a website dedicated to photographers with visual impairments:
http://blog.blindphotographers.org/
 
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