Michelle Tofi

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! 

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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.

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. 

I made a new film! Here is the rough cut. Obviously it’s yet to be coloured, and I will be looking at adding some Hindi narration courtesy of my lovely co-conspirator and partner in crime, Kim. This was an excellent chance to get out on the streets with my fellow filmmaker Adam and shoot some DSLR footage. I used IndiSystem’s glorious IndiSlider Deluxe (Mini) for the glidetrack shots, and my own Zacuto inspired Viewfinder for body stabilisation on the handheld stuff. All in all, it was great practice for our shoot in February ‘11 for Sacrifice and remember, if you like what you see here you can help us get Sacrifice made with a small donation over at our funding page! This is what I can do alone, but imagine what your funding could do combined with our two HD camera set-up, lighting rig, a whole church set to shoot in and a professional camera crew shipping over just for our shoot!

Anyway, here’s Brick Lane in all it’s dirty sexy glory. East London never looked so Hi Def. Enjoy!

Sacrifice - A Short Film about Hope →

                  

Students eh? What are we like, always on the lookout for something from someone else. Well, today there’s good reason. We’re right in the midst of pre-production for our latest short film, Sacrifice - and we need your help! Yes, for just £2 a month, this month, just one month (or less, we’re cheap like that!) you could help us hire the very best film equipment, period costumes and props a student budgeted film deserves to have.

Ala Rachel from Friends: “Here comes the science, concentrate”: we really do believe in our film. We’ve got a professional crew on board from Brasil flying over to help us shoot. We’ve got a really talented cast together who are amazingly working for just the bus fare to the set and a hot meal. We’ve secured a fantastic period church for the whole shoot, paid for from your donations so far and we are truly humbled for that. But you know what they say on the internet: Moar! Enhance!

We want our film to look amazing leet. Our story is sensitive and serious. Our script is original and fresh. We have the cast and crew to make something special, but we vitally need your meat cash injection to help lift us off the ground. We need set insurance to be able to hire specialist equipment, and we need specialist equipment to get the shots we’ve storyboarded. Help us out with a donation and I’ll send you the storyboards myself! We need financial help to get our film seen too. We don’t have a lot of favors we can call in, or a distribution team to get our short in cinemas. With your help, we can hold a screening at a top London cinema, or hell, we’ll take a small one, and we can (this bit’s important!) enter our film into the festivals we really think it belongs in. Prints and publicist packs and shipping fees and festival entry fees are too much for us to afford alone. Even a little small change goes a long way on a short film budget, and we’d be eternally grateful. Just think, once we’re mega producers in Hollywood we’ll owe you a solid. Yes, I will send you Angelina Jolie’s number. You have my word! Thanks for considering us in your weekly shopping budget this week guys - we love you! Remember, pass this link along [http://indiegogo.com/sacrificefilm] to all your friends and frenemies. Tell people who hate you that you really hate our film and hope it sucks. Hopefully we can get some vengeance support too!

Yours in sickness, health and student film-making, Michelle, Adam, Bruno and the cast and crew of Sacrifice