The French Exchange

Here’s my new website for my directing/ film making work - http://thefrenchexchange.com/ , I’ll still be putting the films on this site but it made sense to have it separate as well. Hope you like!

A film about Dean Kemp

 

Stills from my film about Dean Kemp

I had the pleasure of making a film about the brilliant sculptor Dean Kemp before Christmas. Filmed in his very cold studio on 2 of the most rainy and dark days – oddly this kind of light usually induces mild terror in me but it was perfect for the black and white film.

Here’s some frames from the film for now. Thanks to Rob Julian for his fabulous sound recording. Rob and I were supposed to do the music together but in my usual impatient fashion I couldn’t wait and spent boxing day recording the music myself !

New Poster Campaign

Here’s a couple of shots from a recent billboard campaign, seems to be all about iPads at the moment!

Tag-Team Preacher film – Autumn 2011

Here’s a film I’ve just finished. Any spare time in the last few months has been spent working on three short films with this being one of them. Rather than using a crew of people I decided to concentrate on doing these in a really stripped down way and I think it helped to capture some real moments to mix in with the interview bits.

Thanks to Rob Julian for recording the sound. I may grade the film differently and change the titles a bit but for now here it is and I can get on with the next one… Oh and go and buy some Christmas presents I guess!

Been a long time…

This must’ve been the longest I’ve gone without blogging since I found out what a blog was! I guess this is a combination of being very busy and also mostly working on the film/ video side of things. I’m currently in the midst of three separate projects as well as a couple of personal films.

So, for now here are a few screen grabs from one of the films shot on an amazing sunny afternoon, I’m loving the graininess ! Health and safety note – smoking is not cool but unfortunately I still think it looks cool – think I watch too many old French films!

Legal company Graduate Recruitment Campaign

I shot these studio images for Walker Morris through Thompson Brand Partners a few months ago and it’s great to see them on such nice banners! Lovely to work with Ian Thompson as well. I don’t usually show studio shots on my site but when I do shoot in the studio I like to still aim for really fresh looking lighting that people can move around in without disappearing into some nasty shadows. These guys (and girl) are on the Graduate Program – who needs models eh!

Blog frustrations

I am impatient it must be said but I’ve done some great shoots recently but the images won’t run for a while so I can’t put em up here! Highly frustrating!!

However here’s a test shot from one shoot, I love the early morning haze coming through the glass atrium. My stand in model is the fabulous assistant Santi, a Californian trying to come to terms with the cold British autumn! He may be contemplating that in this photo or maybe why he’s been carrying around a large amount of lighting only for me to use daylight all day!

Children’s Social Work Matters – screen grabs

Here’s some screen grabs of the lovely site for the Children’s Social Work Matters site, great to see my images used so well – bravo!

Also I was up in Leeds yesterday and saw one of my shots from a recent Leeds Met campaign up on a bus, it looked great but by the time I’d got my camera out it had made haste round a corner. I’ll put up some shots from that shoot soon though (I’ll probably be looking like a bus spotter to get the shot though!)

Children’s Social Work Matters – Image Bank and Campaign images

Here’s some images I shot for the COI Children’s Social Work Matters campaign and website. Some were for specific uses and others for generally collateral, it was so overcast it was almost dark for the whole shoot but we got some fresh looking shots I think. These ones are some of the portraits.

The most important thing for this shoot was striking the right balance, the images are supposed to portray children after they’ve had some help from the social services but we still wanted to stay away from overly smiley shots of kids that can just look cheesy.

We had great models and the guy in the first shot is the Honey Monster kid from the Sugar Puffs ads – we were genuinely starstruck!

The site is here - http://www.childrenssocialworkmatters.org/