Summer kicked off in suitably British style, shooting stills and motion of national treasures Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash for the Lawn Tennis Associations ‘Fancy a Knockabout’ campaign alongside the team at BMB.
We started by taking over the function room at Brentwood Golf Club for the morning, turning it into a fully fledged studio to capture all of the static content needed for the campaign.
We then headed down the road to Pickle Cottage, where we were greeted by the crew and production team behind the BBC’s fly-on-the-wall documentary ‘Stacey & Joe’. They were there to film the day of us filming Stacey and Joe for the LTA… it was like some sort of Inception-style shoot, with more cameras than you should reasonably be able to fit into one kitchen!
It all came together without a fault — we were just missing the strawberries and cream!
LTA - Fancy a Knockabout
When your brief for a job is to recreate the ‘No Fucking Fighting’ scene from Peaky Blinders, you know you’re onto a winner.
It was all a pretty last-minute request, with production only really kicking off around two weeks before the film needed to supply for the weekend of the Joshua vs Prenga fight.
There was a huge amount to pull together in pre-production, from finding the right 1920s-style kitchen location through sourcing wardrobe and styling that felt true to the period.
Then came the slight curveball of KSI being one of the talent… while he was in New York. So, rather than letting a small thing like the Atlantic get in the way, we set up a remote green screen shoot with a crew in the States, I then directed everything from the UK so we could later bring him seamlessly into the main film.
On the key shoot day, the biggest task was blocking the scene so the performances, movement and camera all worked together, while getting the lighting just right. Finished with a lovely grade, the aim was to create that rich, moody, cinematic feel that makes Peaky Blinders so instantly recognisable.
I really fu**ing loved this one.
DAZN - No Fucking Fighting
CATS PROTECTION - Cat for Everyone
After DAZN and LTA, there was a complete about-turn with the next campaign, this time for the wonderful charity Cats Protection.
Alongside the team at Come the Glorious Day, we set out to create five separate films, each capturing the personality of a different cat and showing how there really is a ‘Cat for Everyone’.
I have to be honest, as great as the cats were, they didn’t quite take direction as well as Stacey and Joe! Perseverance and treats were very much the order of the day.
I also happened to take a bit of a shine to one of the cats, Bluebell, and within a week after the shoot she was back at the Humphreys household as a fully fledged member of the family.
To finish up, there was Tesco Whoosh.
The concept was beautifully simple: everyday Tesco products ‘Whooshing’ their way to your front door in record time, through a variety of British landscapes.
BBH supplied us with the stock imagery they wanted the products to sit within, and then came the slightly geeky but incredibly important part, figuring out exactly how each product needed to be shot so that, once retouched into the scene, it felt completely seamless.
That meant matching everything as closely as possible from the outset, choosing the right lens, getting the scale and camera distance spot on, matching the angle and perspective of the product, and, perhaps most importantly, recreating the environmental lighting of each image.
Then there was the all-important Whoosh blur. I captured the motion in camera, the simplest and most effective way of doing that was actually to move the camera rather than the product, giving us a really natural streak and sense of movement.
Add all of those elements together, throw in a top-rate retoucher, and you end up with some seriously fast groceries!!
TESCO - Whoosh
