ABOUT

Canopy Cinema is a boutique filmmaking company focused on wildlife and outdoor adventure documentary filmmaking. The company currently consists of one person – Sam Nuttmann. I am going to try to make this website as approachable and simple as possible so you can decide if you want to work with me on either your project or mine. Hopefully there’s a decent budget either way 🙂

A quick background – I’ve been in the film industry for a little over 15 years and have been a union camera operator for 12 years. I have worked on feature films, tv shows, music videos, and commercials, budgets of all sizes. I spent many years working in Los Angeles and have worked under some excellent DOP’s and Directors, honing my craft the “Hollywood way”, you could say. Check out my IMDB if you want to see a list of credits.

After spending many years jumping from one project to the next, I landed my first travel show series called “Now Go Build”, directed by the brilliant Tony Fulgham, which took us all over the world. On a shoot in Norway, I witnessed the Northern Lights for the first time – not the faint fog way off in the distance – I’m talking the huge lights display that only someone who has witnessed it full-on themselves would understand. I tried to film it and found out that after all these years, there are still some things that are incredibly difficult to capture on camera. And then we took the show to South Africa and went on safari. Capturing wild animals on camera in any sort of meaningful way proved to also be very difficult. During peak covid times I escaped to Hawaii and started dabbling in underwater filming – maybe the hardest filming challenge of them all! To sum it up, I have become obsessed with capturing the most challenging situations on camera. For the love of the challenge, but most importantly for the love of the image and the experience!