Click to view a selection of my recent work:
Vertu Signature "Kissho Collection"
Lion TV "Victorian and Edwardian Farm"
A Smoke job for MTV. I did it at Concrete which is now sadly defunct. Shot on HD with some lovely lenses it was essentially all about the grade, although I managed to bring out a great flare with a bit of my own on top. I liked this gig because whenever I asked the director if I was going to far with the grade he kept saying, "Nah, a little bit more". So we did. You can link to the MTV microsite here.
Graded master (with guide graphics on the end):
And the ungraded master for reference. Ain't colouring grand?
This was one of those jobs where I can bring my experience of all the post production disciplines to bear. A RED job at Evolutions for Diamond Bullet, I offlined in Avid and onlined in Smoke. Taking the beautiful 2K shots of Vertu phones and piecing them together with an agency attention to detail for every frame is one of the simplest pleasures an editor can have.
Vertu create luxury phones and they invited Murose Kazumi to style this range using the Maki-e technique. They went to Japan to film the greatest living proponent of the lacquerware craft creating priceless works of art.
The Albion digital agency were commissioned to provide a case study to show how Skype can make businesses more efficient. This was my first Canon 5D project. I do love the industry for its constant evolution. There is always a newer better way. The pictures from the 5D were fab, primarily because of the quality lenses. I noticed a bit of artifacting from the H.264 compression but on the whole it really delivered. You do have to be spot on with your focus however. The depth of field is very narrow. Interestingly they used a Panasonic P2 as a second camera and I found the P2 wasn't up to the quality of the Canon. There was no way I was going to get them to look similar, hence the B&W treatment for the cutaways.
You can view the final result in situ here.
Ahh, Lion TV. I have rarely in my career had a client I've disliked. We spend a great deal of time at work and I think it's a crime not to enjoy it, but sometimes, very occasionally, going to work is a sublime experience. A joyful, almost religious uplift. From the commute (a bicycle ride along the Thames to Ravenscourt Park) to the team I love everything about the Victorian and Edwardian Farm projects. The team are fantastic, from exec David Upshal to production coordinator Felicia Rubin, and the subject matter is great. The way director Stuart Elliot and his crew capture the programme sings to my soul. Every time I go back I regard it as a gift.
I've put two scenes up. The first is the Copper Mine. Stuart's goal throughout the productions was to never allow a trace of the modern era to appear to ruin the sense of century. With that in mind he shot this entire scene on the Panasonic P2 using only candle light. It's the type of thing as a colourist where your heart sinks becasue you know he didn't have as many candles as Stanley Kubrick! See for yourself. I think he did a great job and the atmosphere it provides is undeniable.
This next is from the triumphant final sequence of Edwardian Farm. I put it in because it's one of those shots that looks so innocent and belies the amount of layer and detail that's gone into it. From flares to luma and colour shifts this shot has it all, but Stuart Elliott's grand track is a fitting finale to the series.
RDF had been commissioned by Publicis Entertaiment, a UK division of the massive French agency, to create the world's largest branded TV network. They originally launched as an online service but it's now also on Freesat and Sky. Starting from scratch they needed programmes but they also needed promos. For a solid month I worked on brand promo after brand promo. In English and French. Being viewed by agency committees in England and France. Before being presented to Renault. In England and France. It was changes hell! I made so many versions in that time. It was a great experience though and I loved being part of such a grand concept.
A League of Their Own is a Sky 1 sports entertainment quiz show fronted by James Corden. It is one of the hardest gigs I've ever had. We cut the pre question inserts, 30-40" high energy edits to lift the studio. Lively stabs of fast cut pieces to drive the show along. Music choice is crucial and we trawl through hundreds of tracks, often selecting one and taking an hour to get a neat music edit before discarding it as unsuitable. Once the track is selected we then view hours of sports footage, reducing and selecting until we have a tight fast quality sequence. The whole process can take eight to ten hours of solid, focussed hard work before we looked at grade and treatment.
CPL Productions book enough time to do a question a day so they are long days but achievable. Unfortunately questions can change as fast as the writers can knock them out. However, even in the most stressful deadline driven projects there are brilliant moments. I was given the Pendulum track "Showdown", fifteen different camera angles and amazing super slo mo of the fastest man on the planet and asked to see what I could do. Sometimes my job is a gift.
A viral job I did in Smoke at The Mill. There is a a bit of clean up, grade and some four point tracking going on in there. I like it because it's pretty, clean, sharp and a simple concept.
A League Of Their Own was post produced at The Farm. We had worked well together under trying circumstances so they knew I could handle stress. When they had an offline editor fall sick on The X Factor they gave me a bell. Why not?, I thought to myself. How hard can it be?
Whatever your feelings about The X Factor you should be under no doubt it is one of the most massive television projects in the country. It is ob doc, singing competition and shiny floor show all rolled into one. A massive crew works around the clock seven days a week to deliver what you see on the screen. The attention to detail is immense and the capacity to rip everything up at the eleventh hour and start again to get it right unlimited. If you work on it know that you will be required to deliver your best but you won't go home on time once!
Giant Post called me to cover their holidaying Smoke artist for this Channel 4 job. It was a 40" and 20" promo for an in production documentary. Unfortunately the promo edit had been cut using an old offline which bore no resemblance to the conform we were sent. To further complicate matters the conform was missing more than half its media. So the offline didn't reflect the right clips in the source tape and if it did there was a 60% chance the clip wasn't there anyway.
Disastrous you might think. And it was for the original cut but this is where the Smoke's editing capabilites came to the fore. After eyematching as many shots as I could I then began to look for suitable replacements and dropped them in, grading, vignetting and lens flaring in the timeline as I went. At the end of a very long day I feel we may have made an even better version than the original. I've put the 20" up as it is pure pared down emotion.
Every now and then I get one of these pack change jobs. They aren't particularly challenging creatively but they are often very technical. I end up using pretty well every tool in the Smoke's extensive tool box. Here there was plate stabilization, two, four and three point tracking, lighting and texture natching. It took a few hours but it was a hoot.