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. 

Xander’s “Requiem for a Dream” video featuring Amzo dropped at the start of this week and has already racked up over 13,000 views on youtube. Here’s the link from my Vimeo page.  I shot the video and it really was a fun shoot - Xander has an incredible amount of energy and creativity and brought loads of ideas to the shoot we got to try out, including shooting 50fps for most of the piece on 550D, then time-remapping in Motion’s Optical Flow in post.  I hope you enjoy the video!

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

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! 

Bucket Head - on Virgin Media Shorts. One of my first post-graduation DOP jobs was this cool little project for a Virgin Media Shorts competition entry. It’s a fun film and it’s only 2 minutes, so take a break and enjoy it. 

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)

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! 

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. 

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!