A little history

I was born in Perth, Western Australia, and while I'd always had an attraction to films of all kinds, my first love was music. So my first profession after school was playing in ensembles around Perth, mainly as a guitarist (though I also play piano and other keyboards). Alongside this though I had a fascination for cinema, and remember in high school telling my guidance counsellor that my dream profession would be composing and arranging music for film.

I decided to shift into the media world by studying film production, media and screenwriting at university. It was here that I discovered I had an instant affinity for the medium, whether shooting or editing. Of course it was all basic stuff - editing was tape to tape video or 8 and 16mm film splicing, and photography was a very non-digital affair, with money scrimped and saved for film stock.

After university I entered into the professional media world, working as a director of TV commercials, a documentary cameraman, editor and a multimedia producer for theatre productions. I then started getting interested in the internet as a distribution medium for video. This was in the pre-youtube era - and there was very little interest on either side of the industry. Video producers had little interest in the medium, and for the web development industry it was technically troublesome and marginal.

But I toiled on with online video. Part of it was the immediacy of it as a distribution channel. Once a project had been edited, it would be uploaded and viewable by a global audience in a matter of minutes. And distribution seemed like the major bugbear of local independent media producers, so it suprised me that so many of them seem to have no faith in the internet in this way. Regardless, I continued producing content for the web alongside my other professional work, and of course as bandwidth improved and youTube was born, demand for this content slowly grew.

In this time I studied other aspects of web design and basic coding, and took the plunge to go back to university to study computer science, where I engaged in various forms of programming, including Actionscript, PHP, mySQL, html & CSS.

About this time, a local web design company (Titan interactive) offered me a position as an in-house video producer to produce online video commercials for their clients, as a way of differentiating themselves from their competition. Though mid-study, I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to work within the web development industry, rather than simply as an independent video producer offering services.

I've been working at Titan for about 4 years, as a"one-man band" producing literally hundreds of online video commercials for clients in every imagineable industry (you can take a quick look at some recent ones in my portfolio section). As well as video commercials, I also keep up with producing documentary material, working as a still photographer and designing the odd website here and there.

 

My approach

In terms of my approach to producing video commercials, it's always preferable to keep it simple. Producing material for the internet (as opposed to TV, DVD or film) has actually been an interesting exercise. Because of the technical limitations of the internet (i.e. a high level of video compression due to limitations of bandwidth) shooting and editing for the internet requires a far more classical approach. Ultimately, well lit and crafted photography will beat anything in the "haphazard handheld" mode, editing needs a much stronger emphasis on straight cutting rather than flashy transitions, and colour-grading also becomes critical. And given the economics, shooting frequently is very time-constrained.

For a typical online video commercial, shooting is limited to about 4 hours. This is usually on-location, though it can include green screen studio filming. While I've shot on traditional HD broadcast cameras, I've recently taken up the new developments in DSLR cameras, and I now shoot video in that format. The advantage being the great selection of lenses you can use with these cameras, the film-like look of their images, and of course the ability to seamlessly flick between using them as film cameras and high-quality still shots. Of course, they're still a bit tempremental, and all the old lighting techniques are still entirely relevant, despite their often amazing low-light performance.

Editing platforms have come a long way, and from a process where it would take a week to cut together a 30 second spot, now we have a situation where it's feasible to produce something of reasonable complexity that can be shot and edited in a single day.

For editing I tend to use the Adobe suite (the latest is CS5), because of it's excellent level of integration between Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. I've used Final cut pro a fair bit in the past, including some long-form documentary projects, and it's also an excellent platform. Most of the time I produce commercials I tend to favour good looking location cinematography over too much of an emphasis on motion graphics, which I tend to find a bit overused. However I have done projects where motion graphics has constituted the entire content (usually where location filming has been an impossibility), and the 3D stuff is pretty fun at times.

My interests

I'd hate to be one of those people who are just passionate about the one thing, to the point where they have no other interests in life. So here's a short list of interests I have, and maybe a few things you might like to take a look at yourself.

• Literature: forever the bookworm, my favourite authors are David Foster Wallace and Franz Kafka within the world of fiction, with Oliver Sacks, Louis Borges, Paulene Kael and Lauren Slater amongst my favourite non-fiction writers. Currently reading the Pale King (by David Foster Wallace).

 

• Music: I have quite an electitic taste, but recently been listening to Feist, Radiohead, Mahler, the Sabri Brothers and Bruce Springsteen(!). Of course I also like to play music myself, either on piano or guitar.