Jana Pape is a Director of Photography based, but not tied to Berlin. To translate a story into pictures and develop a visual language for a movie, is as much fun for her as finding solutions for logistic and technical challenges.

She moved to a technical secondary school with a focus on design to have more artistic education, and the possibility of doing a year long internship working as a news camera operator and editor at the local TV station Oldenburg 1. She was also a member of the local short film festival zwerkWERK and she freelanced as boom operator for public TV. After school she worked at Studio Hamburg Postproduction, where she was trained as AV-Media designer for three years, witnessing the last years of the telecine workflow and the arrival of digital cinemar cameras. Her journal’s piece was nominated for the junior cinematographer award from the IFFF, which was judged alongside final pieces of established film schools.

Light is her most appreciated tool, which can’t be replaced by any update. Because of that she left the post-production house to be more on set. She was working as a lighting assistance as well as to shooting her own short films and music videos as a Director of Photography. Subsequently she studied Cinematography at the film university in Babelsberg. Her BA thesis film is a unique mix of old film-tricks and modern compositing. The paper about dealing withs such tricks was honored the best BA-thesis of the year. MASCARPONE was screen at over 90 Festivals and won servil prizes and was shortlisted for the BAFTA student award 2018 . Meanwhile she participated in a lot of international workshops, as well as studying a semester at FAMU-International and taking a nine month post-graduated color grading course – up.grade. Her MA thesis film is a full length feature film O my God . Following her penchant for unusually storytelling and new techniques she worked on 360° VR films as well. Most recognized is ROOMS, it premiered at the Venice Filmfestival and won the Prix Immersion Award in Montreal.

Since graduating Jana is working as a freelance DP in fiction and documentary for various productions. Additional she has been working a a camera operator as well, most recently for NETFLIX Unorthodox.