Incomplete

Adam Carboni grew up in Alabama, along the banks of the Tennessee River.

His early passion for folktales and local personalities in his small town drew him to pursue filmmaking as a way of telling stories. He studied film production at The FSU College of Motion Picture Arts, where he learned from his earliest cinematography mentors, Keith Slade, Rexford Metz, and Johnny E. Jensen, ASC.

Adam moved to New York, where he was fortunate to be hired as the in-house Director of Photography for renowned VFX house The Mill. During his six-year tenure there, Adam filmed more than 100 high-end commercials alongside their roster of talented directors (and friends).

Hoping to branch out into more narrative and documentary projects, Adam parlayed this experience into a freelance cinematography career that has been evolving ever since. Adam recently joined Local 600 and is excited to discover new projects and relationships.

For this short film, Incomplete, Adam was thrilled to get back on set with director Zoey Martinson, with whom he had filmed another short film the previous year. Zoey’s script is a clever and important commentary on the prison system in America, and exploring that metaphor within the horror genre was a unique and exciting assignment.

The film was shot in a Victorian home in Brooklyn, where the creative team leaned into the worn textures of the wood and carpet. Production Designer Lexx Onigbanjo then installed beige, patterned wallpaper around the living room set, which felt like it belonged to a different era, similar to America’s antiquated ideas of the prison system.

Chief Lighting Technician Rahul Sharma accentuated the rich tones of the location by placing CTS gel on the windows and using an Arri 1200-watt PAR and a Joker 800-watt HMI to create an almost otherworldly quality to the world beyond the house.

To create the illusion that the house’s lighting had not been updated, the team relied heavily on exposing for window light and allowing actor Marchánt Davis to move through the dim interior spaces, which were intended to create suspense in a horror movie filmed completely during the daytime.

Currently, Adam has a documentary feature premiering at SXSW 2024 (Lions of Mesopotamia, directed by Lucian Read); and his first narrative feature premiered in theaters nationwide this July (Crumb Catcher, directed by Chris Skotchdopole). He and Zoey Martinson recently wrapped production on her debut feature, The Fisherman, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival this year.