Ripple Effect

Ripple Effect is about the unspoken alliance between a young Afghan and a U.S. Special Forces soldier in wartime. With L.A.’s Blue Sky Studios standing in for Afghanistan, 1^st Assistant Keet, who hails from South Africa, took his aesthetic cues from conflict reportage – press stills that sometimes veered toward the abstract. Keet managed to spend his compulsory year of military service in South Africa behind the lens, having bluffed his way in as a photographer. “I didn’t even know how to load film, but I got a book,” he recalls. “For one year at the army’s expense, I was just taking hundreds of photos and learning the craft.”  Soon after, he was assisting Academy-Award-winning DP Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC on The Ghost and the Darkness and climbing the ranks, before the 1992 U.S. Green Card Lottery brought him to L.A. He joined Local 600 in 2003.