Michelle Tofi

Here’s the latest video from my recent collaboration with UK grime artist Jelluzz.  I’m particularly pleased with the split screen footage in this music video; look out for the scene where the girl lights a cigarette by a phone booth - I’d say the two shots almost match up perfectly.  The concept of the video is to demonstrate what life is currently like on West Green road, and what it could be like in a fantasy world. As always, please comment/share. 

Gear Review: Delkin Fat Gecko Camera Mount

I’ve been working on a short film - Play Rewind Forward - for quite a while now.  It’s an improv based piece and that means director Melina Liu is free to add new scenes as talent becomes available and the story develops, giving the film a cool organic vibe.  It’s also meant we can experiment as much as we want with the camera work and visual style, which has meant lying in the grass while parkour kids leap over us, and attempting to attach cameras to mobility scooters as make-shift dollies. That’s where this guy comes in - the Delkin Fat Gecko Camera Mount.

The Delkin Fat Gecko is a standard suction cup based camera mount that features two adjustable suction cups, rotatable to fit a curved surface.  Attached to these is an articulating arm and a rotating camera base with a standard 1/4 tripod thread that should fit most cameras, or even a quick release if you’re daring enough to try that out. I took the above shot with the Delkin mounted to a side window, shooting straight at the passenger wing mirror. Admittedly, my mirror needs a clean! 

I’ve used mounts before but never with my own camera. For example this Hama Car Camera Clamp Support (Universal) is remarkably more expensive but when I used it the design felt cheap and unsupportive, and there’s no way I’d have let my own kit sit on the bonnet of a car attached to it.  The Delkin on the other hand, with it’s unique locking system and double suction mount just feels a lot more sturdy, and for a little over £50 it’s a great bargain.  Not a driver? Not a problem! The day I got mine I mounted it to the front door to get some weird birds-eye perspectives. Because the Delkin articulates you can pretty much stick it anywhere with a flat surface and get an interesting angle of view.  I just used mine for a timelapse sequence in a music video I’m shooting/directing so hopefully I’ll be able to share some footage with you soon.  In the meantime, grab yours here: Delkin Fat Gecko - on Amazon.co.uk.

 

Is this the first time a Facebook status has become a full scale viral video? Possibly! Shot and edited with five actors in two locations in roughly 3 hours, Old Spice teach those pesky rioters a thing or two about how to behave in a civilised society. Enjoy and pass it on! 

Kit Upgrade!

This Monday and Tuesday I worked on a corporate shoot that required a lot of panning and tilting combined with a lot of walking around in the unusually hot July sun. I packed my Benro sticks and Weifeng 717AH fluid head, thinking the combination a perfect (and light!) one for the job. The Weifeng head has had a lot of good buzz online, with popular DSLR blog Cheesy Cam going so far as to label it a ‘hidden treasure’ and perhaps it is. I picked mine up on Ebay for around £40 plus postage and packing, a steal for a 360 pan head with a compact design.

Long story short, however, it turns out my dad’s old saying was right - “you pays your money, you takes your choices” (yes, English is his first language, surprisingly). My head managed to fail me spectacularly on Monday, with the joint between the panning sections coming loose rendering even static shots unsteady, let alone pans. Me and the shoot director defected to the coffee area while I got my trusty hex keys out and disassembled the head, managing to get it ship shape for about the next two hours before it failed again. A word about hex keys: get some. If you’re an aspiring Camera op/DOP these MUST be in your kit bag. Stanley does a great set on Amazon for a fiver so you have no excuses! Fortunately on the day my colleague Mahdi Nejad from MTN Productions was kind enough to drive 20 miles to bring the production house Vinten Pro Tripod to the shoot, and the rest of the day/next day went swimmingly, but I certainly learned a valuable lesson. Which is why I was so super psyched to get this in the post this morning:

Yup, it’s a Manfrotto 501HDV Video Head and I absolutely love it already.  This one is a strong recommend: as a DOP friend once said to me, if you can’t get movements as smooth as butter on your current shooting set-up then it is completely useless.

Just for comparison, here’s the two heads together. You can see which one is the far sturdier and better built:

Of course, the biggest difference is price. The Manfrotto will set you back around £130 on Amazon (a bargain for this piece of kit, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it rise by £20 soon), which is over three times the price of the Weifeng. But if it means the difference between completing a job successfully or ruining your perfect shot composition, it’s hardly a choice, is it?  The load capacity of this head is over 6KG, which is far greater than your average 5D with super heavy 70-200mm lens AND onboard mic AND onboard monitor etc. The Weifeng?  I doubt it could hold so much. My Kit: a little bit closer to perfect. But still a little way to go…

Above is the poster for the official UK premiere of my short film, ‘Sacrifice’, written by myself and Adam Grundy and which I directed in early 2011 with the fantastic Bruno Loureiro as DOP, supported by gaffer Sabrina Rivolta and the amazing camera work of operator Marcela Goldberg. It was a real pleasure to work with this team of dedicated and creative professionals, and I would be delighted if any readers joined me at the open screening on the 19th of June.  We will be premiering alongside some truly amazing pieces of graduate filmmaking, including one film that even got Lady Gaga’s seal of approval at this years Cannes! It should be a fantastic afternoon of film, so if anyone wants to come along drop me an email at michelle.tofi@gmail.com

I shot the first half of a fairly complicated music video  with camera assistance from the talented Luke Ibbetson last thursday, with the second half to come in June. I need that month in the middle off - currently my short film Sacrifice is in the final stages of its edit - all of the colour grading was done in-house at Bubble TV in Soho by the extraordinary Steve Gibbs and our score, by Tristram Oaten, was just added to the edit today. Tomorrow we’ll be authoring out our master DVD’s and that’s it - my first completed drama, finished. We got confirmation today that we’ll be in not one but two film festivals in Rio this year, so this is pretty big news for us. I’ve also got an exciting corporate shoot over three days at the end of this week in (hopefully sunny) Cornwall and I’m working on writing a brand new television series that has major interest from a channel with 35 million viewers - exciting times indeed!

So back to the music video. We’re shooting the visuals to Skitzo’s grime track ‘For You’, a narrative about two friends who grow up together and stick together when times get really rough for one of them. It’s a great narrative concept and the young actors we worked with on Thursday playing the two friends as teens were fantastic. One of them, Adam Adebiyi aka Triple A turned out to be one half of the up and coming grime act HGM - seriously skilful guys who spit lightening fast lyrics off the cuff.  With HGM member Krisis along for the shoot it was too good an opportunity to miss and I grabbed my camera at the end of the shooting day to record this impromptu freestyle. Shot in one take and coloured in Looks for Final Cut, I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed filming it!

I’m going to be looking for lots more projects over the next few months so if you have a music video you’d like me to work on or a short film in need of a director/DOP or script polish please get in touch! 

4 Piece Close-Up Lens Kit Review

New toy time! This past weekend over at Vimeo there was a Macro video project. The challenge was to create a video of no more than 3 minutes using only macro shots, with a complete narrative told through the images. A great project and one which inspired me, but unfortunately my only macro-capable lens is a Sigma telephoto that really doesn’t get close enough to anything to be true macro. So, I bought myself a set of 52mm Close-up lenses - including shipping these set me back about £20, a total bargain for what I got. 

The set includes four glass lenses in various strengths (+1,+2+4 & Macro) which screw onto the front of a standard 52mm filter size prime, such as Canon’s EF 50 mm f/1.8 II Lens.  Below is a test of three of the lenses, compared with the standard shot achieved using the Canon 50mm.

As you can tell, the Macro Lens alone is incredible - as soon as this kit arrived (the day after I ordered it!) I’ve been playing with the macro lens all day - my Flickr has a whole new album dedicated to shots taken with this filter, and you can see more examples running along the bottom of this page.  I highly recommend checking them out - For a cheap glass filter you can really achieve some incredibly detailed work, and I can’t wait to put these lens filters to good use at the weekend, taking advantage of the great sunshine we’ve been having to make my macro film. Ok, it’ll be a week to late to get it entered in Vimeo’s project, but it should still be something pretty special! Pick your set up today! If you’re not yet convinced, here’s another snap shot I took using the filter this afternoon:

Pre-review: Prestigio E157 HD LCD monitor

Before I get a chance to properly use it and shoot a little video review I thought I’d drop some first impressions of my new ‘E157’ full HD DSLR monitor. As an advisory caution, I’ve labelled this ‘prestigio’ as that’s the only brand name I could find in any of the packaging, and even that was just in a small picture in the manual. You’ll find it on EBay though, here: HD DSLR Monitor 1080p on EBay

First impressions are pretty basic: I’m thrilled. This beauty normally goes for around £150 on EBay but I managed to bargain mine down to £118 including free express shipping from these guys in Hong Kong - yup, it arrived in the UK two days after I ordered it, and I was able to pay a tiny (£6) customs charge and pick it up the next day. For just over a hundred squid I’ve got a full 1080 HD monitor with a remote control and a ball-rotating hotshoe mount. The thing even came with a sun shade to protect the image from glare!

My only niggle so far is that it came with a non-uk plug. Still, a couple of quid for an adapter from your local Market and you’re sorted. I actually happened to have a 12v adapter that fitted anyway so it’s charging up nicely as I type.

So there you have it- a real bargain full HD monitor for your DSLR. So far, it’s really awesome!

New Toys/New Skills

Last week I was finally able to take a short break from working on the post for my film, Sacrifice and concentrate on other projects. Our film is currently being graded in two different countries; we have managed to get a studio in Soho, London, to grade us their version of the film (for free!) and a freelance colourist in Barcelona is working on his own take for the look of the period.

Of course, free time in this industry is always both a blessing and a curse - I’ve got a busy month next month with two corporate shoots and a music video scheduled within a week of each-other but right now I’d be glad of something to fill my time (and boost my bank balance) a little. 

I love gadgets and anyone who reads this blog regularly will know I can’t go too long without acquiring a new bit of kit for my shooting set-up. Last week that new bit of kit was the ‘Shoot RS-60E3 Remote Cord’ - a shutter release remote for my DSLR that means a) I can finally be in family/group photos and b) I can finally do some sweet timelapses using controlled shutter photography. 

Now timelapse and HDSLR is admittedly becoming something of a cliche but it is still a useful skill to have under your belt and makes a nice addition to various projects - long establishing shots that introduce both a location and scene change in a fiction film, a quick fly-through of the creation of something in a documentary, a stylish effect in a music video that seems to isolate your artist from the fast paced world around them. Me, I just sat my camera on my windowsill and shot the street below it, but that’s guerilla filmmaking for you! So here’s my ‘Bethnal Green Timelapse’. Anyone in the know will recognise that this is the corner of Approach Road - next time you’re down The Approach for a swift pint you can ruefully smile to yourself at the art that might be happening incongruously around you. 

Of course, there’s a lot still to be learned about timelapse from my position, but for something put together a few minutes after I ripped open the remote’s packaging it’s not too bad. There is, however, more to this story than just a tale of new toys. As I mentioned in the title of this post, I’ve also been honing a few new skills this week and as a freelance editor my focus has been on colour grading. As I’ve said, my current film is being graded professionally right now but that doesn’t mean grading isn’t something I enjoy and am able to offer my clients. Here’s a little side by side comparison to show you what I managed to achieve with the colouring on my timelapse stills:

There’s room for improvement, clearly - the reds I think I pushed a little too far into magenta in some cases, but I’m really pleased with the colour and shine I brought back to the car that sits stationary throughout the timelapse footage, and how much the flower bed ‘pops’ off the screen. I clearly also should have set up my camera to take better pictures in the first place! That washed out grey looking ‘before’ picture is frankly terrible, but it’s a great indication of what a talented colourist can do to a film. 

As always, if you’re looking for a freelance camera operator/DOP/Director or Editor/Colourist please do get in touch. Until we meet again, I’ll be refining my colouring skills and finishing the screenplay for my latest short.