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About Me
At the age of 17 I joined Rushes Post Production as a runner but soon realised I didn't want to be sitting in an edit suite at 3am watching other people's rushes and would much rather be out there filming it instead.
The contacts I made at Rushes allowed me on their shoots as a runner and any other spare time I had was spent at camera rental companies learning about the equipment.
One day a focus puller I met agreed that when I could reload an Arri magazine in under 4 minutes he would get me on a shoot as a loader.
He was true to his word and so in 1984 I had my first paid day as a clapper loader working on the pop promo for Dead Or Alive 'You Spin Me Right Round'
The rest of the the decade was pretty much a blur of famous people, loud music, smoke machines, camera cranes and little sleep.
Towards the end of the 80's a situation arose which due to union restrictions meant I was temporarily upgraded to Focus Puller for a three month feature film in Africa.
It was supposed to be a gentle introduction to the art of focus pulling with plenty of sun and easy days which actually ended up with me filming five weeks of nights with John Hurt and we were rarely off the 300mm.
The upgrade stayed.
The next 17 years were spent mainly focus pulling for some of the best cameramen in the world.
I travelled the globe a number of times working on a mixture of pop promos, pop concerts, commercials feature films, TV dramas and documentaries.
During that time I found myself being used to operate on more and more extreme shots and regularly found myself strapped to the exterior of cars, helicopters, planes, trains and even at one point an Aircraft Carrier en route to New York
During this time I was given the opportunity to work with some incredible directors who trusted my ability enough to ask me to take on the role of Director of Photography in an almost unofficial capacity.
Large advertising agencies would never have entertained the thought of allowing a novice near their million pound commercials, so the opportunity was one I seized and relished.
Mike Portelly crediting me as Lighting Cameraman on the 1996 Cheltenham and Gloucester 'Pearl Diver' commercial was a perfect example of this for which I will always be grateful to him.
It was experiences like this over many years that made me realise I had at last earned the right to call myself a Director of Photography
Since then I have had the privilege to continue traveling the world filming a fantastic variety of things and meeting some amazing people.
There have been so many highlights but none more so than working on the underwater sequence in 'Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire' .
Another of my favourite jobs was a television series called Weird and Wonderful Hotels where I travelled to 21 countries and stayed in some incredible places.
In between the more extreme adventures I've also enjoyed filming hundreds of settees for DFS and Saxon, thousands of tiles for Topps Tiles, bathrooms, kitchens and cars along with countless bottles of wine, pizzas, crisps, shampoo and beers for the likes of Safeway,
Co-Op, GHD and ASDA.
I embrace the challenges and changes in technology and whilst I miss the inherent excitement and discipline of working on film I've certainly enjoyed pushing myself and the current technology to achieve the best possible shots.
In January 2024 I was extremely proud to win an Emmy for my work.
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