Michelle Tofi

Very happy to finally release this video for Amzo’s “Spotlight” (apparently it dropped without me noticing a little while ago - too busy on the feature shoot for The Watcher Self I think). 

I’m very happy with how the video turned out - especially due to the limitations of crew.  We shot the entire thing as a collaboration between myself and gaffer Simon Olney, with some production assistance from the multi-talented Kim Verma. Big thanks to dancer Shannon Tella for her incredible contribution to the shoot. Enjoy - and please watch at 1080 for full HD effect!

The edit for Amzo’s ‘Spotlight’ video is almost done, so here’s a few frame grabs to give you an idea of the highly stylised look we went for. Very much looking forward to sharing the final cut.

On Directing

For the past five days I worked on a feature film, “The Chancery Lot” for an independent producer who had much of the final piece in the can, but needed to do some pick-ups.  With the original director in the States I was drafted in as the shoot director, and an interesting experience it was. Here’s me directing, with the excellent focus puller Jon Pugh behind the camera. 

As someone who generally works in a camera operator/DOP capacity it was great to be directing actors again. We had a lovely cast who put huge enthusiasm into the roles, and brought a lot of freshness and improv to the script.  

For the technically minded out there it may interest you to know we shot on GH1, hacked to record data at speeds of up to 50mps, which meant we were capturing super high definition images for what is really a consumer camera. The lenses were certainly not consumer grade, though. PL mount super speed glass was used throughout the shoot; the GH1 certainly looks bizarre with such big pro level lenses mounted on the front of a tiny DSLR body.  I’ll let you know if there’s a trailer online anytime soon! 

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

If you like jazz or Annie Lennox you might like this, which is not really jazz and definitely not Annie Lennox.  It’s a clip of a live event I filmed for The Evening Standard newspaper, in which British jazz singer Clare Teal performs ‘Why’, quite brilliantly I might add.  I co-ordinated this shoot on 2 5D MK II’s (one of them mine) and my 550D, using a 50mm lens, a 24-70 Sigma and a 24-70 Canon L lens (a beast, which belongs to my good friend Mahdi from http://mtnproductions.co.uk/.  There’s plenty more footage from the night that I’m slowly uploading to Vimeo.  But if you’re after a live event camera op/director or editor, let me know! I’m getting pretty adept at all this :)

- Michelle (michelle.tofi@gmail.com)

Work, Work, Work

Thought’d I’d post a little update about the projects I’m currently working on/starting, as it’s shaping up to be a busy couple of months for me so I’m not sure how many posts I’ll be writing in the next few weeks. 

Firstly, after next friday I hand in my final research paper as a graduate student at London Met to hopefully never return to adult education again. This is no discredit to higher learning, but more to the fact that we only get so many years on this earth to genuinely create and I’m anxious to get on with it!  After that as some visitors may know I’ll be involved with the creation and production of an original series for Iranian television. It’s a long story, but the company behind it it also has a whole host of equipment for wet and dry hire if anyone’s looking for a brilliant young DOP or a load of camera equipment :)

on the 28th of May I begin principle photography on just the trailer for a new and very exciting feature called ‘The Fifth Horseman’, from Sirius Pictures, and two days later have the first production meeting for a short about infamous exotic dancer/spy Mata Hari called ‘Birth of a Spy’. In July/August I’ll be shooting a short for promising young director Claudiu Pavel called ‘Above The Board’. It’s a film that’s being crowd-funded with some really excellent incentives for investors and I’ll be releasing more info about that as soon as I have it.  

Finally I’m hoping to be directing a short of my own that I’m co-producing with the excellent writer and actor Robert Feldman, who co-starred in my debut as a director, Sacrifice, which we’ve just submitted to Raindance and the Cornish International Film Festival. Fingers crossed!  I had hoped this short would be shot and wrapped by the 30th of June but with my schedule as it currently is we’ll have to see.  The film should be a fairly easy shoot, as it mostly centers around one character and will be told through a blend of photography/stop motion and video. I’m psyched for it. 

As always, if you have a project you’re looking to crew feel free to get in touch. In the mean time, wish me luck! I can’t wait to be able to post from these sets and let you know how the shoots go.

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! 

Here’s the teaser for my directorial debut, ‘Sacrifice’. I’m pretty pleased with it, though obviously I’m looking forward to having a more thorough cut available as an official ‘trailer’. Sit back, crank up your headphones to enjoy the soundtrack scored for us by the fantastic Dave Connolly and enjoy! 

View high resolution

Full dress rehearsal today with the cast of ‘Sacrifice’. Today was a long tough slog but the scenes are really coming together well and there’s a genuine sense of chemistry between the cast members. As exhausting as this week has been, I’m excited to start filming next Wednesday. Our crew deserves our hard work, let’s hope we’re able to fulfil this film’s potential.