Dott – Leave Tonight
Composer Tony Higgins has been a great addition to my documentary filmmaking for a very long time, he has created some amazing soundtracks! Tony recently joined an Irish ‘all-girl’ garage pop band based in Galway ‘Dott‘ as their Drummer and I really wanted to assist them with a music video to help promote their catchy Debut EP track ‘Leave Tonight’. The biggest difficulty being budget – I managed to pull this video together for less than £25! Enjoy!
Also available on YouTube here
A Special thanks to the cast; Concordia & Sam and the support from the Graham & Cooke-Thomas family.
Kurt Perschke’s RedBall California Tour! (UPDATED)
This past week I have been working alongside talented filmmaker Tony Gaddis on Kurt Perschke‘s exciting RedBall California tour. As a contrast to my last RedBall film, Tony and I are collaborating to produce a series of experimental shorts, re-imagining the way the project is captured on film.
The tour has wrapped in Los Angeles and now we are moving on to San Francisco to start the next half of the journey. You can find more about the project on redballproject.com or follow the official Facebook page for updates. Take a look below to see the videos released so far!
UPDATE: The CA tour has finished, check out the final edit by Tony Gaddis!
The Making of John Mayer’s ‘Born & Raised’ Artwork
Several years ago, I created a short profile documentary about UK based David A. Smith; a traditional sign-writer specialising in high quality ornamental hand-crafted reverse glass signs and decorative silvered and gilded mirrors.
David recently produced a wonderful turn-of-the-century, trade-card styled Album Cover for popular American singer/songwriter John Mayer. ‘Born & Raised’ is the fusion of Mayer’s exceptional blues/rock music and Smith’s outstanding designs.
My new film captures the ‘Behind The Scenes’ creation of the ‘Born & Raised’ and ‘Queen of California’ artwork, as well as 2 unique reverse glass panels, hand-crafted in England by David A. Smith.
Also available on YouTube here
A special thanks goes out to John Mayer for the web-chat interview as well as Sony Music & Columbia Records for providing the instrumentals and licensing music from Mayer’s fantastic new album.
Incendia – Sony FS700 slowmo test with firebreathing
With its organic nature, fire is a beautiful element to capture in slow motion. I performed this test as an experiment with the overcranking mode on the Sony FS700 camera (240fps/480fps) in order to directly compare the results to ‘Incendium’ where the slow motion was interpolated using Twixtor and shot on Canon 7D (60fps).
Special thanks to Elliott Montello for his fire-breathing skills, Blear Moon for his awesome soundtrack and Alex Thornton for assisting on the night.
Bicton College at Dartington – A pioneering new partnership
I was given the task to make a corporate style i.e. talking heads film (I’m not a massive fan of talking heads!). Also, I only had 2 days to shoot the film with a very quick turnaround and no time for pre-planning whatsoever! I don’t normally jump into something like this, however, I have enjoyed working with Dartington before. It is such a beautiful place to visit.
The first day of filming turned out to be a weather nightmare! It was quite literally bucketing it down with rain. Luckily, my assistant, Miles Cooper was able to shield my camera with an umbrella whilst also holding a shotgun mic! I edited the majority of the project over the weekend and the following few days were there for any additional shots and re-edits.
Drift Allstars 2012 (Round 5: Hungary) BATTLE OF THE IRON CURTAIN
I’m becoming quite a Petrol head now, I understand simple terms like ABS, Traction Control and now even changing a car tyre is just plain old easy!
All this unparalleled knowledge has led to Aatomotion wanting my take of the Drift Allstars Drifting event at Máriapócs Hungary. So here it is: Filmed mostly on FS700 and Contour cameras, edited by me for your entertainment:
You can also watch on YouTube below (more…)
Disturbing themes 6 feet under!
A few weeks back I went up to Nottingham to essentially film someone dig a ‘pretend’ grave (which I ended up helping dig too) and place in ‘what I was told’ a ‘pretend’ dead body. Elliott Montello did a great job with the corpse, probably too good – it might have actually been real, who knows? Now it’s certainly 6 feet under.
This messy work was all for a promo vid directed by Michael Holyk for Subscape – ELEMENTS – Graveyard Shift:
Drift Allstars 2012 (Round 4: Romania) video now live!
Last month, working with Aatomotion, I toured Romania & Hungary with the Drift Allstars team with the sole aim to shoot “Slow motion dogs, unnecessary sun flares and hot girls. Oh and some drifting”. I filmed all the slowmo stuff using my Sony FS700 and various lenses (my fav and most useful being the Canon 100-400mm 4.5-5.6 IS whilst using a Metabones adapter). Vince Knight did a great job on what he calls the ‘full bullshit edit’ – Interesting terminology!
This was my first experience filming drift cars and I learnt a lot about the motorsport as well as met loads of cool people and racing drivers. Although very different countries, Romania and Hungary shared one thing in common – bloody hot temperatures!
Below is the first of the vids ‘Round 4: Romania’, stay tuned for Round 5!
