Alice Brooks’ first word was “moon.” She was looking at a big globe light atop a pole in a parking lot, but her family got the point: Young Alice was fascinated by light.

That’s one reason why, after spending a decade as a child actress in New York and Los Angeles, the 15-year-old Brooks told her mother she didn’t want her name in lights. She wanted to be the one in control of the lights.

“I knew I didn’t want to be an actress,” said Brooks, 36, who has a home in Portland and an apartment in Los Angeles. “All I was interested in were the camera guys.”

After graduating from film school at the University of Southern California, Brooks began working as a cinematographer (also known as a director of photography) on shorts and indie films. She decided she’d rather learn her craft by being in charge of the photography and lights on smaller projects than do smaller camera-crew jobs on bigger projects. Her strategy has paid off, with the nationwide release Oct. 23 of her first studio film, “Jem and the Holograms.” The Universal release is a live-action version of a trippy 1980s animated TV series about a young woman leading her own glam-rock band, which just so happened to be Brooks’ favorite show.

The film was directed by Jon Chu, a USC film school colleague of Brooks, and features a cast that includes young actors Aubrey Peeples (ABC’s “Nashville”) and Stefanie Scott (Disney’s “A.N.T. Farm”) as Jem and her sister, Kimber. Film veterans Juliette Lewis and Molly Ringwald round out the cast, with Lewis playing a manipulative and sharp-tongued band manager and Ringwald as the aunt who cares for the band members.

The film opened to mixed reviews. Writing in the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger called the plot “lumbering, overstuffed, unfocused” while Matt Zoller Seitz wrote on RogerEbert.com that the film is “always an observant and sincere movie, and occasionally a beautiful and deep one.” Seitz specifically praised the cinematography, including some “lush” hand-held camera work.

Brooks spends about half the year in Portland and about half in Hollywood, where she has an apartment, working on film projects. Her 4-month-old daughter, June, and her husband, Sam Spencer, have been joining her more on film work so they can stay together as a family.

For Brooks, working on “Jem” was not only her first major studio film but “a dream come true.”

“I was a huge fan” of ‘Jem,’ ” she said. “I recorded it – it was on when I walked to school – and I still have the VHS tapes.”

The TV show ran from 1985 to 1989 and has achieved a cult status with children of the ’80s. It was catchy pop tunes, girl power and science fiction all rolled into a 22-minute package.

INSIDE SHOW BIZ AT AN EARLY AGE

Brooks’ father, the late Stephen Levi, was a published playwright, and her mother, Candace Coulston, had worked as an actress on stage before her children were born. By the age of 5, Brooks was being taken by her mother to auditions. Brooks seemed to be a natural. She did about 40 national TV commercials and landed a regular gig on NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman” as part of a skit where Letterman leads a story time.

But by the time she was a teenager, acting was wearing on her. She liked being on set, a lot, but mostly to watch what went on behind the cameras. Setting up shots, creating the right lighting and working the equipment were the things that fascinated her.

She told her mother about her fascination, and her disinterest in acting, during a walk on a California beach one day, Her mother listened and then pointed out it sounded like Brooks wanted to be a cinematographer. Brooks picked up a feather on the beach that day and saved it. It’s now framed, a reminder of the day her career path was set.

It was while at USC’s film school that Brooks first met Chu. Chu has gone on to direct two installments of the “Step Up” dance film series, a Justin Bieber concert film and the action movie “G.I. Joe: Retaliation.” In film school, Chu says, Brooks was the student who seemed most destined for success, based on the work she did.

“She was the superstar of the USC film school. I was like, ‘Whoa, this girl is awesome,'” said Chu. “She was way too cool to hang out with someone like me.”

But they did work together. Brooks was the cinematographer on Chu’s musical short, “When the Kids Are Away.” That short got Chu noticed in Hollywood, he said.

Brooks, while working in film, decided she wanted to live at least part-time in Maine. She had spent summers in South Bristol, and her mother had since moved there full time.

Brooks didn’t settle in that coastal vacation spot though. She was intrigued by the changes in the old mill city of Biddeford, with a growing reputation as an artsy place, and moved there.

Brooks was involved with the downtown improvement group Heart of Biddeford. In that capacity, she attended a press conference that included a developer who at the time was planning to renovate a former mill building.

The developer, Sam Spencer, is now Brooks’ husband.

Chu said he had wanted to make a live-action “Jem” for several years, being a child of the ’80s and a lover of musicals. When he finally got backing for the film, he immediately thought of Brooks. He said he worried that a movie based on a cartoon about glittery, glamorous teenage girls might look “plastic” in the wrong hands.

“She has soul to her images,” Chu said. “I wanted someone who could take these images and dirty them up, scratch them up.”

Chu also said that, since he was making a movie about girls, he was happy to have a woman in charge of cinematography. Women as directors of photography are rare in the film business, Chu said.

Brooks said that she and the people working for her, including camera operators and lighting technicians, got the look Chu was looking for with a lot of planning. Lighting was very important, since over-lighting is one of the reasons things can look fake or plastic on screen.

The cinematography of a film, including all that goes into it, is not something most of us think about. Brooks’ mother-in-law, well-known Maine painter Alice Spencer, went to see “Jem” in theaters with an eye toward the visual work her daughter-in-law did.

“I don’t think I had realized how important it is to telling the story,” said Spencer, who lives in Portland. “How someone who has set the cameras up and done the lighting is responsible for how an audience understands and perceives what is going on.”

Spencer pointed to one scene in particular, where the band in the film is giving a concert and the power goes off. The band members ask the crowd members to light the show with their cell phones. So the trick was to make the scene look like it was lighted by cell phones, when it was actually lit powerfully enough to show up on film.

Brooks just finished working on a film called “Dance Camp,” a feature-length film produced for YouTube. It’s a teen drama, produced by Chu.

While traveling between Hollywood and Portland regularly is not easy, Brooks feels it’s important for her to come back to Maine. When she’s in Portland she likes to walk around the city and visit the Portland Museum of Art. Coming home to Maine feeds her creativity.

“I feel really grounded,” Brooks said.

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