CIOS LEP Filming at Eden Project

We were proud to be the selected filmmakers to produce a launch film for the CIOS LEP’s strategic economic plan for 2030. The project, entitled ‘Vision 2030′, led directly on from the young peoples’ consultation we filmed last year at Eden Project. The brief was to follow on from the story in the last film and catch up with some of the students from Callington Community College involved to talk about the newly developed plan.

We decided to rig up an overhead camera looking down on a table at a specially made 3d chart representing pieces of the Vision 2030 plan.  The students were then instructed to talk freely about what they through each piece meant.  We ended up with about 45 mins of discussion recorded on 4 cameras which we then managed to condense into a 5 minutes film with intro and outro sequences.

The film was screened at Newquay Cinema for an event organised by Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LEP as part of Cornwall Business Week.

 

Warrior League

 

https://vimeo.com/204335285After producing the official event film for the One and All Games last year I was asked by the creators to make a series of teasers for their upcoming Warrior League.  Of course I said Yes!  It was a great chance to put the Sony A7SII through it’s paces filming athletes at 100FPS.  The shoot went well with a whistle stop tour of gyms in Exeter, Plymouth & Newquay to film pairs undertaking exercises for us to use as promotional clips in the lead up to the event.

Here are the teasers and main promo film…

Eau De Titan Filming

When Eden Project contacted me to see if I was interested in directing a video for them I could hardly contain my excitement. The pitch they gave me was a spoof fragrance commercial advertising a fake perfume created from the stench of the Titan Arum or ‘Corpse Flower’ which smells of rotting flesh.

Eau De Titan

Immediately I had ideas and visions of how it might look whirring around my brain and I managed to convince them that I was the man for the job.

Tropical Biome

Roll forward about 3 weeks and today the campaign (and film) was launched to the public and press. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind getting this project completed with some tight timescales and deadlines.

Filming the Titan Arum

Corpse Flower

Firstly the 2 actors were flown down from London for 1 day only to do the filming and PR photos which gave us a bit of a headache – obviously we couldn’t film whilst the biomes were open to the public as we wanted a closed set to create a jungle-like environment. This meant that we had to film after closing time which would have been fine on a sunny, clear day in June but unfortunately it was dull and cloudy, meaning that we only had a limited time of about 3 hours to complete the filming before it was too dark to shoot. We also had to fit in the recording of the voice-over with Ella, which we ended up doing in my car in a corner of one of Eden’s furtherest carparks which must have been a sight for any passers by!

Ella & Joe

We also had to contend with the humidity inside the biomes which meant arriving well early to get my lenses used to the conditions so they wouldn’t steam up during the filming.

Preparing lenses

The shoot itself was fairly low-budget with just myself, the 2 actors and Tom Trinkle, the Digital Content Manager at Eden on hand to co-direct, but luckily we had developed a rough storyboard beforehand to work from. It was a real pleasure to work on this and although I was knackered and sweaty from running around a tropical rain forest with a Glidecam strapped to me I think we’ve created a nice little video.

Jack Clemo Film Recce

We’re currently planning for a new project in conjunction with Exeter University.  It’s a 30 minute film to examine the works of famous Cornish Poet, Jack Clemo, who lived in the clay area of St Austell.  Jack lived an interesting life and is certainly a controversial character from the research we’ve done thus far.  The documentary will feature as part of a larger project that is being put together for a conference on May 31st-1st June, which will pull together some of the country’s top scholars & academics.

   

The film itself will feature readings of Clemo’s poems themselves by some Cornish celebrities as well as interviews with living people who knew him.  We’ll also visit his home village of Goonamarris and look at the Trethosa Chapel, that he frequently visited, which is still in beautiful pristine condition.

Clemo’s work is considered to be visionary and inspired by the rugged Cornish landscape even though he become deaf at the age of 19 and went blind 20 years later.  He died in 1994 aged 78. There is a small museum located in a dedicated Memorial Room at Trethosa Chapel, where he was both christened and married, featuring his life and works and which is run by volunteers. His literary papers, including manuscripts of prose and poetry works, are held by the University of Exeter.

Kernow King’s Cornwall – 40,000 views in 1 week

I’ve been following Kernow King since I saw his Pasty Diet video over a year ago. He’s a Cornish comedian hailing from Roche but now lives in Falmouth. He has over 30 videos on his Youtube channel and most of them are pretty funny, especially if you’re Cornish, however, there haven’t been any new videos for over a year…until now.  A mutual acquaintance kindly agreed to put us in touch with each-other, as I heard he was looking for a new video producer.  Two weeks later we have released our first collaboration and it’s been a roaring success with 2 more on the way.

 

We batted a few ideas back and forth via email and came up with a couple good ones for videos.  The first meeting I had with him we chatted in his van for about 10 minutes in a pub car park in Roche, then jumped out into the miserable Cornish weather (perfect for the subject of the film) and proceeded to film as much content as we could before he had to be home to pick his kids up from school.  There was no planning, writing, scripts or even assistants, just me, The King and a camera.  Two days later I had a 9minute edit uploaded to his Youtube which was released during ITV’s ‘Cornwall With Caroline Quentin’ was on air.  The reaction was immense with 16,000 views on Youtube in the first 24hrs!  Pirate FM, The Cornish Guardian & ITV news were already showing interest and comments we’re getting on Facebook are all positive.  A week later the video has had 40,000 views with many users demanding the second episode.

Roll on another week and we turn up to another location with no plans or script, just a basic idea of what we want to show.  Kernow King has fond memories about the secret 2nd location, so it was great fun filming him perform, even though the sideways rain off the Atlantic made keeping everything dry impossible!

We have one more episode in the series planned and mark my words – this one is going to be special! Stay tuned…