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!

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!

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!