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. 

Cold Inside is the first of a series of music videos I’m producing for Jelluzz’s new mixtape ‘Navy Blue Days’. Featuring Nathan Hector and Tessa Hart, Cold Inside was shot on 5D MK II in and around Acton and Ealing. I edited the video in FCPX.

To get the whole mixtape you can download for FREE here http://hulkshare.com/wl4zq8obgubm and here http://www.downloadamixtape.com

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I’ve been collaborating with Jelluzz on a series of videos for his upcoming mixtape Catch Me if I Fall. It’s been a great opportunity to get more familiar with FCPX, which has become my go-to edit suite for music videos (I’m still using FCP7 for narrative film & corporate work, and probably will for the foreseeable future). Here’s a screenshot of the edit suite in action, cutting a split-screen based video that I hope you’ll all enjoy. Watch out for it soon…

I recently started working on a series of video projects to coincide with the launch of Xander’s debut EP “Royal Blood”.  This first one is a sneak preview of what to expect, layered with the intro to new track “Thesaurus”. I can’t take credit for anything other than a quick re-edit here as the stunning collage-based visuals themselves were created by graff artists David S. We do, however, have an awesome video on its way to launch the brilliant track “Requiem For a Dream”. Watch this space!

The Jude - ‘Les Filles Francaises’

I hope you guys will enjoy this black and white music video for today’s single release of The Jude’s ‘Les Filles Francaises’. I directed the photography of this video under the supervision of incredibly creative director/editor Jon Walton last weekend and any French cinema fans amongst my readership will hopefully appreciate the nods to certain classic films of the Nouvelle Vague period. Look out for homages to A Bout de Souffle, Les Mistons, Bande à Part, Jules et Jim, Amelie and (500) Days of Summer!  The band were great fun to work with and the single is available from today on iTunes here: Download Les Filles Francaises

A quick update…

So above is the awesome video for Cypher16’s ‘Lonely Road’, featuring crane work and camera work by me and some excellent other camera guys who gathered last month at Battersea Power Station, 5:45am, to get this video shot in one long and frenetic day. The band were a pleasure to work with and really tore it up, playing live to the backing track without losing any of the intensity you see in the video, despite us making them do take after take to get what the director wanted.  

It’s the first of two music videos I’ll be posting here in the coming week or so, having just wrapped shooting on the debut single for The Jude over the weekend - that shoot was absolutely a delight, we had two brilliant actors on set with terrific energy, plus the band bringing a huge amount of creative input to director Jon Walton’s vision.  I was DOP on that one and got to borrow the signature visual style of some of my favourite filmmakers to bring the piece to life. I don’t want to reveal too much before it’s released, but it’s definitely going to be one worth waiting for. The single is released next Monday so keep checking the blog to stay posted!

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I shot some footage for a music video on a rooftop in East London yesterday, as always shooting my raw footage using Technicolor’s excellent Cinestyle picture style for Canon DSLR’s.  I love the heck out of that little plug-in.  Above you can see what it does - drains your raw footage of its contrast and colour saturation enabling the editor/colorist to get the best out of the footage in post.  I hope you can appreciate which of the above is the raw footage and which has been coloured! 

Keep an eye out for the full track soon :)

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!