Michelle Tofi

I’ve been meaning to update my showreel for quite a while and yesterday I finally found the time to do it, ahead of a busy week shooting a short in collaboration with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda).

Showreels are difficult things to compile for a number of reasons. There will always be clips you reuse, reel to reel, because they’re particular favourites or special to you. That said, each new one cut means dropping older shots to make way for newer work - a showreel can’t run too long because who has time to watch five minute reels when sifting through potential hires?  There always have to be sacrifices in how you present yourself, and for this one the longest chunk in my reel comes from the first feature I shot as DP - ‘In Two Weeks’ directed by Andy Amadi.  That means I’ve had to lose a little of the corporate and live event jobs I’ve done, so the reel is essentially film and music video work, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

The final frustration you’ll hear most often from crew cutting showreels is the inability to use footage that hasn’t been released, or approved, or that you signed your rights to away. I would love to be able to show some of my work on a couple of other projects from this year - not least from my second feature as DP, ‘The Watcher Self’, but I also don’t want to spoil those projects ahead of release.  When the time comes, I hope the wait is worth it! So for now, please enjoy my current reel for 2012!

Very happy to finally release this video for Amzo’s “Spotlight” (apparently it dropped without me noticing a little while ago - too busy on the feature shoot for The Watcher Self I think). 

I’m very happy with how the video turned out - especially due to the limitations of crew.  We shot the entire thing as a collaboration between myself and gaffer Simon Olney, with some production assistance from the multi-talented Kim Verma. Big thanks to dancer Shannon Tella for her incredible contribution to the shoot. Enjoy - and please watch at 1080 for full HD effect!

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.

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This weekend I shot the video for Hip-Hop & RnB artist Amzo’s lead single ‘Spot Light’ at a warehouse in Dalston.  I was lucky enough to have the hugely talented Simon Olney along as gaffer for the video, and professional dancer Shannon Tella (above) provided her skills on the rooftop as the sun set.  Looking forward to the release so I can share the video with you.

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!