Eco Friendly Christmas Dinner

On the 6th of December I went to Acorn House Restaurant in Kings Cross to film a short web video for Npower. The idea of the video was to show how you can save energy when cooking Christmas dinner, as well as a few other energy saving tips to help and cut down your bills and do your "green" bit for Christmas.

It was a very small crew for this job, just two in fact Jon Essex and myself both camera operating and setting up the few lights we needed for this shoot. It was a very relaxed shoot as there was not a million people running around panicking, we just got the shots we needed to as they came up in the cooking process and talked about a few other energy saving tips in between. But the day did get considerably harder as the turkey started to cook and we were working with the beautiful cooking smells around us!

Once the meal was cooked we filmed the final section, the carving, then put our cameras down and ate it! A throughly enjoyable shoot as I'm sure you'd agree.

I appologise for the lateness of this post, as I have been away over the Christmas period but now I have a few photos to put up and a link to the video should you wish to have a look.

Thank you for reading I hope you had a lovely Christmas.

www.npower.com/energyefficientchristmas

"Back in time"

"Back In Time" is the second Kodak film student competition I've worked on as focus puller. This shoot was a little different to the first Kodak short I worked on in that it was a three day shoot and on the two days I was there we used 4 rolls of film, which I thought was against the rules! I was led to believe you were only allowed to use one roll of film per shoot! But hey, not my film, but still a little strange to break the rules of the competition before sending it in!

"Back in Time" is an advert for a Kodak digital picture frame, it was a very simple idea but I think it works well. The first day of shooting we were out on Hampstead Heath in the driving rain and wind, which was pleasant by any means but it was only a short day so bearable. The first days shooting was set in the eighties so there were some interesting outfits worn by our three actors which turned a few dog walkers heads, the scene was supposed to be a memorable family moment in which they take a picture which is later shown on the picture frame.

The second days shooting was shot in studio 1 at the NFTS. The set was fantastic! The attention to detail and the design was great, the lighting was great, I was really impressed. We had a fairly short day planned and it was all supposed to be pretty straight forward, supposed to be being the operative word. On the first shot I had the camera all set up and we had started blocking when the director said, "your not going to have the camera there though when we shoot though are you?" Bad times! Where the director wanted the shot to be from involved some major lighting changes which set us back considerably before we had even shot the first take of the day which was a real shame. But for the best part of the day the shooting went smoothly, our first AD Ben Hopwood was very good and kept us all moving along at a good pace and we wrapped on time. It was a great little shoot that I hope does very well. It was the first time I had worked with the DOP Benoir Soler and I was impressed with his visual style and a little taken aback by his one man camera team attitude to DOP, he was very keen to do most of my jobs himself, which was a little strange but it did give me time to do the 2nd AC jobs I had to do as well as the 1st AC role.

Next up a Christmas commercial for npower!