My Debut Feature as a Writer/Director Wins Best Feature Film at Barnes Film Festival

In 2021, I shot my debut feature film, Mother Midnight (서까래) in the tiny rural town of Buyeo, South Korea. The film’s total budget was less than most shorts, but what our team lacked in finances we more than made up for in passion and determination.

The film was an incredible experience from start to finish and I will write more in-depth posts about the whole shooting process and the movie itself in future blogs but this is just a short post to announce that Mother Midnight has just won Best Feature Film at Barnes Film Festival 2023 in London.

A still frame from a scene in the film

It was a huge honour just to be selected in a prestigious festival like Barnes, but winning Best Feature really was special and a huge achievement for the whole team behind the film. Particular credit should be heaped upon the film’s two leads Jiwon Lee and Jongho Lee, and the film’s cinematographer Thomas Maitland.

As a freelance filmmaker in Korea, working in independent film can sometimes leave you wondering if you are completely mad and if what you are creating won’t resonate with anyone but yourself. So getting recognition such as this is a great encouragement for me to keep following my artistic vision and goals with passion and enthusiasm.

The film has had a great festival run with it so far being an official selection at five other major international film festivals.

Click here to see the poster and the trailer for the film.

Directing A Large-Scale Commercial for Volkswagen

Back in 2018, I was hired by Volkswagen to be the director on an upcoming global commercial starring supermodel Winnie Harlow. 

At the time they approached me, I was actually on holiday with my family on Jeju-do, an island off the south coast of Korea and was staying in a beautiful but wifi-challenged guesthouse in the middle of the countryside. This made the initial Zoom calls with producers challenging and I wasn’t really in the headspace to dig into work and put together a treatment for the project.

However, once I heard what they were looking to do with the film, I got inspired and I knew that this was a great opportunity to work with a massive brand and a talent whose career I admired so I put down my holiday read and got to work. After being confirmed as the director on the job and returning to Seoul, we had an official PPM over Zoom and started to plan out the logistics needed to realise my vision for the film.

One of the projects of mine that had caught the attention of Volkswagen was my work with the fashion brand IISE and the producers wanted to bring elements from one film in particular that I had produced for them (see that film here).

Essentially, the concept behind this Volkswagen film would be to visually represent the two different (but complimentary) styles of the new T-Roc car. This meant bringing forward two clearly differentiated sides of our star, Winnie Harlow; her professional work side and her relaxed personal side. Additionally, we extended this concept further into the contrasting worlds of the film - an austere and sparse fashion shoot set on the one hand, and the rich and warm world of Lisbon’s old city. This contrast was paired with a voice over from Harlow and a small narrative arc that reflected her ability to seamlessly move between the two worlds that she inhabits in the film.

For the production, I flew out to Portugal and was paired with the fantastic director of photography, Jan Prahl who was great to work with, as were the rest of the crew. From a director’s standpoint, it is always so nice to have a really skilled team working with you so that you can fully focus on the creative elements knowing that the rest is being taken care of.

Having never been to film school and coming from a DIY, guerrilla filmmaking background in which you are so often doing everything yourself and performing all HOD roles, it was wonderful to be able to basically stand in one place and, just through verbal directions, have a talented team of professionals spring into action to deliver the results I was looking for, so I am extremely grateful for that experience.

Despite the tight schedule and big budget, everything remained calm and in-sync on set and we were blessed with perfect weather to showcase the gorgeous, rustic backstreets of Lisbon. Following this, I flew to Berlin for a week of editing at the lovely FilmDeluxe offices.

I am really grateful to have the opportunity and privilege of working at this level with such a great team!

Thanks to the fantastic crew - it really was a team effort to make the shoot a success and I am grateful to everyone

Struggling Up A Mountain As A DoP For Meta Korea Shoot

An image from our shoot day in the studio

One of the great things about being a freelance filmmaker in Korea (or anywhere for that matter) is the wide variety of challenges you face from shoot to shoot. In spring 2022, I was brought on as a DoP on a commercial shoot for Meta to help introduce their new suite of business tools to the Korean market.

The project involved working with the fantastic director, Nils Clauss, and Moktan Productions’ exceptional producer Keith Park and was shot over several days following a team of business mentors and young entrepreneur mentees in their homes, at a studio, and, mostly challengingly, on a steep hike up a mountain path in Seoul dense with forest!

We wanted to capture natural and genuine interactions between our talent along with smooth camera work to reflect the comfortable relationship between the business owners as they discussed the way that they use Meta in their daily work lives. As a cinematographer, I always want to push myself to capture the best images that I can so I had a conversation with the fantastic 1st AC, Thomas Maitland, as to how we could best rig the camera to achieve what we wanted.

Capturing the team taking a tea break

This meant setting up the (already heavy) Red camera on a full-size Ronin in order to keep the shots steady and smooth throughout. Many operators would probably opt for a monitor on top of the Ronin for an easier view of the image and a follow focus for pulling focus between characters. Thankfully, our great director Nils allowed me to strip down the camera to only the absolute essentials to keep it as light as possible. We kept a Teradek onboard so Nils could monitor what we were capturing but otherwise we stayed minimal. Finally I had the v-mounts in a small shoulder bag outputing power to the camera to again lighten the load.

The team building a 돌탑 (Doltap) = Stone tower near the peak

With the Red stripped down, I was able to get away with operating via only the Red LCD touchscreen display and, rather than add weight with the follow focus, I set the distance from the talent and maintained that while we walked. By gently adjusting my distance from the subjects, I was also able to ‘pull’ focus between speakers. As the trek was so steep I even decided to forego an Easyrig for a number of reasons. Firstly, I new that we would be doing a lot of stopping and starting along the way and constantly attaching and releasing the camera from the Easyrig slows everything down. With the Ronin-only set-up we were able to move really fast and jump straight into a shot as soon as the talent was ready to speak or move. Secondly the Easyrig is not only hot and uncomfortable for an uphill hike but I have noticed that often, on uneven terrain, the support rope can actually end up accentuating the up and down movement caused by walking, which rarely looks good.

Stealing a medium shot on the handheld Blackmagic while one of our talent takes a pause from the trek

I also had my trusty Blackmagic 6k in a small cage rig set-up that allowed me to grab steady handheld footage at a variety of focal lengths whenever there was a pause in the hike

This set up was a bit harder on the back and arms but thankfully we were able to take a lot of breaks along the way and our amazing crew meant that all went super smoothly on the day and we got some great shots. This shoot was a good reminder to me as a videographer to always think about the practicalities of the shoot as opposed to just throwing as much tech as possible at a project.

See the full film here.

Shooting A One-Man Documentary In The Atlas Mountains

Working as a professional director and cinematographer over the past eight years has allowed me the opportunity to shoot in more than 25 countries and I am so grateful for the many wonderful experiences this career as a videographer has given me. One of the highlights was a short documentary I shot in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco about a small community of Berber rug weavers.

Setting up a timelapse on the road to Tazenakht, Morocco

Still from the final timelapse footage

The people, the landscape, the textures and the light are all so beautiful in the region that one can pretty much point a camera anywhere and get something decent. This was good news for me as I was operating as a one-man film crew on this project and we had limited time in the locations so we had to make the most of every minute to make sure we got what we needed. That said, I always want to try to be the best cinematographer I can so it was a case of finding the right balance between meeting the schedule demands but also being happy with the images we were getting.

Berber women at work

Weaving Studio

As you can see from the phone shots above, there was very little pre-production or set design required as the locations already had so much character.

My main focus was on controlling the light as the rooms often had white walls and the light had little shape to it, so the challenge was to find ways to create contrast in the image while keeping the equipment out of the frame. We used a lot of flags, spare black cloth and doors to cut and shape the light where possible as well as adding to it at times to supplement the light that was coming in through the windows. Below are some images from the final film that were shot in the above locations.

The women at the rug cooperative where we were shooting were amazingly hospitable and really natural on camera. They seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the time it takes to do filmmaking well and perhaps this patience is, in part, derived from their meticulous weaving practices that take so much time and care.

Above: we often jammed the slider into whatever support we could find to avoid the obstruction of cumbersome tripods. Below: Some of the resulting stills from the above set-up that ended up in the final documentary.

We also shot some drone footage to give another aspect to the film and give a sense of the true power of the awe-inspiring landscape. It was a bit hairy at times when the wind picked up but thankfully we were able to get the drone to safety in time and the footage added a lot of production value to the final film.

One of the things I love about being an independent videographer is the variety of work you find yourself doing, one day you are working as a cameraman in Seoul and another you will be flying a drone through the peaks of the Atlas mountains.

I would love to return to Morocco at some point and shoot more there as it really is a wonderful place. The weather plus the architecture even had me thinking about trying to buy some real estate there as it could be a great place to live.

Scouting locations on a rooftop in Essaouira. Everywhere we went, as soon as people heard we were making a film about rugs they would kindly invite us into their places and encourage us to shoot and/or buy one of their products.

Shooting a timelapse of shadows moving across the architecture.

This documentary was kindly made possible by Revival. The final film can be seen below:

Choosing The Actual Best Camera For The Job

Early this year I was approached by Al Jazeera to work as a DoP on a documentary shoot about a scandal surrounding a so-called children’s home in which multiple cases of extreme abuse took place more than three decades ago. The subject matter was very disturbing and shocking and I deeply admired the contributors for coming forward and telling their painful stories.

I felt honoured to be a part of this project and wanted to show the greatest respect I could to the people opening up to us. This lead me in an interesting direction in terms of the camera choice for the film.

Usually on projects I use my own Red camera or will look to rent an equivalent machine that can deliver higher-end imagery. However, I think in the past I may have over-emphasised this requirement for the best imaging in detriment to the overall piece. At least that is what quickly became apparent on the first day of this particular project.

As you can see on the left, we shot the first day on my Red. This was during the height of the Korean summer in a tiny room with no aircon. The image looked decent but the camera fans were so loud. As the conversation went on, the room got hotter and hotter and the camera fans began to encroach on the audio quality.

Additionally, the run time of the Red batteries and mags, while not bad, are not ideal for long, emotionally intense discussions. Asking people to pause between questions when things are this personal for the subjects is really difficult and you feel like a complete bastard doing it.

That night I spoke with the producers and we decided a rethink was in order. I knew we needed the ability to shoot for extended periods and that, considering many of the locations were going to be very small, very hot spaces, we were going to need a camera that was basically silent.

Prior to my Red I had owned (and loved) the Canon C100 mark 1 and had shot many projects with the C300 mark 1 and 2 and started to reminisce about all the cool features of those cameras.

The C300 was the best of this line that could be rented within our budget and so we opted for that for the remainder of the shoot.

It turned out to be a very good decision - the camera is basically silent at ungodly temperatures and seems to never run out of batteries or card space. The interesting thing for me was how much returning to a 1080p camera changed the way I shot stuff.

Suddenly I had to be super careful about my highlights in a way that I hadn’t for years as the image would blow out any hot spots so much quicker than more modern cameras. I started framing things differently in order to compensate and I noticed how my images were starting to look like stuff I shot 5 years ago when I still had my trusty C100. I had sometimes looked back at that work and thought “I’d never shoot it like that now.” but this process gave me a little bit more sympathy for past me and helped me understand the choices I made.

Away from the impact on directing or cinematography style that lower budgets or location restraints can have, one of my favourite things about smaller projects is the workarounds you can come up with in order to get what you need. I was operating sound as well as shooting for this film and recruited a wide variety of household objects and gaffer tape to capture decent boom sound. Some examples below.

Ensuring booms are cat proof is key.

A vacuum cleaner turns out to be just the right height to boom mic an old man sitting on the floor.

I learned a lot on this project both about cinematography and about life. Speaking with the contributors was a very humbling experience and I am deeply grateful to all of them for giving us their time and the warm welcomes they extended to our team.

Medium Format Portraits of Refugees at Leicester City of Sanctuary

Back in early 2019 I had the great privilege of shooting a short documentary for the charity Leicester City of Sanctuary. In case you are unaware of the incredible work they are doing, their organisation aims to welcome local asylum seekers and refugees and support them to rebuild their lives, develop their skills and feel part of the community.

My parents have been involved with the charity for some years and it was a great pleasure to meet the people there and to be able to contribute something to their valuable mission. I really admire the welcoming atmosphere and strong community feel that the organisation has created and it is a testament to the good-hearted nature and open-mindedness of the people of Leicester.

They offer a range of vital services and wider enrichment opportunities to asylum seekers and refugees: a central Hub with welcome, support services and a hot meal; ESOL classes; a football session; sewing & IT classes.

Their services run five days a week, supporting around 150 people each week. Services are delivered by a team of volunteers. Their service users are the lifeblood of the charity and they could not run it without their help. More than half the volunteer team running the drop-in at the Hub are asylum seekers themselves.

During Covid their services have obviously had to be more restricted but they are still providing valuable support to the community.

Although I have been able to continue my cinematography work here in Korea during the pandemic I do miss shooting medium format a lot (my camera is currently sitting idle on the shelves of a repair shop that has closed its doors for the duration of the lockdown in the UK). It has, however, been very nice to revisit some of these older shots that I had not put out anywhere.

If you’d like to learn more about volunteering with and/or donating to Leicester City of Sanctuary, please check out their website here.

Shot on CineStill 800T and Ilford HP5 with the Bronica S2.