As a videographer, Dennis had decided to minimize his own presence and allow events to unfold around him. His inspiration came from direct cinema , a school of filmmaking that emerged in the US and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Direct cinema filmed unstaged, ordinary events. Dennis realized that he didn’t need a narrator or other aspects of standard documentary filmmaking. He says:

That really fit in with how I like to work: simply being an observer and blending into a situation and really making my presence as minimal as possible, to try to get closer to capturing something that would happen if I wasn’t there. So, much of my effort was gauging the impact of my own presence on a scene and how much I would be changing it. And if I could feel that my presence was even slightly affecting how things were happening, I would adjust.

Dennis also looked to direct cinema when deciding what to shoot. He says:

I wanted to just simply let the story unfold in front of me and then make decisions on where to follow the story and who to follow. But I didn’t want to go in with any pre-set determined idea of what I wanted to tell an audience. I wanted to let the images simply speak for themselves. It is a belief in the power of the image, that the image comes first.

At the same time, he was willing to use cinematic equipment like the Glidecam and other techniques to achieve high-quality footage and broadly accessible visual narratives.

Frontline . In late July, as Dennis prepared to return to his home base in London, he met filmmaker and PBS Frontline Producer Martin Smith, who was beginning an embed stint. Smith was impressed with Dennis’ camera setup, and Dennis showed him some of his footage. Smith was working on Obama’s War , a documentary about the Afghan war. He and his co-producers chose Dennis’ combat footage from Helmand Province to open the documentary. It was broadcast on PBS on October 13, 2009. “This was the immediate distribution of some of the footage, and this was important because this was a very timely news story and I wanted the footage to be seen,” recalls Dennis.

The footage included the scene of the mortally wounded Cpl. Sharp. On his own initiative, Dennis had tracked down Sharp’s father to seek his approval before it aired:

His father didn’t want to see the footage, but felt strongly that the rest of the country should, because that was the sacrifice that his son had made, and he felt that it was important that people see it. [The footage] did cause some controversy among the White House and the military community in general, but I felt it was very important that people see an uncensored version of what was happening on the ground.

Dennis was referring to the requirement that any film that included footage acquired thanks to official military access be vetted by a government public affairs office based in Los Angeles that had final say on what was released. Too often, he felt (though not in Frontline’s case), the result was films that played like military recruitment commercials.

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