Michelle Tofi

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

Film Directing 101.1

Well it’s 3:10am on a Friday morning and I really should be asleep. Shooting begins on my ‘proper’ directorial debut Sacrifice in 5 and a bit days, which is pretty scary as I’m still breaking down the scenes into shots. Here’s a tip, would-be-filmmakers: do this earlier! 

My excuse for such tardiness? Exhaustion, mostly. Myself, our DOP Bruno Loureiro and writer/co-producer Adam Grundy really worked incredibly hard in the months before Christmas to get this labour of love off the ground. We’ve been doing the jobs some other indie films would have spread across a team of twenty and I couldn’t be more thrilled to begin to see our work pay off. We’ve also been blessed with some wonderful contributions from our art director/costumier Emma Witter and on-set artist Michelle Sabev. So Christmas we allowed ourselves a rest. It was much needed, but if I had the chance to do it all again I’d have postponed Christmas till some time after next week!

In the last couple of days production has really stepped up a gear. We’ve had our first full rehearsal/read-through, first cast visit to the set, booked all of our studio lighting, dolly, glide-track etc, shot some sound tests with the radio mics and Zoom H4N, practiced synching sound in FCP (thank you, PluralEyes!), steadily received a stream of costumes, props, set dressing etc through the mail and held our first costume fitting. This coming Sunday we have our first full dress rehearsal and then it’s no looking back as shooting begins just a couple of days after, ready or not.

So far is it worth it? Of course, I wouldn’t be trying to get into this career if it wasn’t. It’s been magical. The costumes, the period details, seeing our art director begin building a confession booth (!), the little idea I began with that Adam developed into a whole complete story is really starting to come to life. I can’t wait to share it with you.