2013

A new year, new beginnings and new projects.

We finished 2012 on a high filming the acclaimed Spitalfields Music Winter Festival and we're now close to our second year as a business. It's interesting having a glance back at our achievements over the past 12 months,  here are a few milestones as a little reminder:

• Finished the graduate recruitment video for Mintel (which was later nominated for 'Best Company Video' at the In-House Recruitment Awards 2012.

• Started the monthly project of filming Mintel's Beauty & Personal Care newsletter.

•  Filmed the Melvyn Tan and Hullabaloo music video projects. 

•  Entered the London Sci-Fi 48 film Challenge.

• Shot The Cardinall's Music promo at 3 churches.

• Filmed the Future Baker Competition at 7 University and Colleges around The British Isles.

• Shot 3 different promos for The City of London Sinfonia between February and September.

• Filmed 15 days of the Spitalfields Music Festivals.

In total, we produced 164 videos over the year so we're looking forward to seeing what this year will bring!

Today we embarked on a brand new project, our first ever documentary film. We went down to Beachy Head in Eastbourne to begin Principal Photography in a cold day in the sun.

Our documentary is investigating into the area which has the third highest suicide rate in the world and we're speaking to a variety of people and professionals about it's historical context and theories and stories behind the suicides. We can't reveal much more than that as a great deal is still in the works but keep an eye out as the stories have developed incredibly over the past few weeks.

Our promotional and corporate work is still on the go, but it's definitely nice to have another return to film. We'll have more information about the progress over the next couple of weeks.

7 Months onwards...

...From our previous post, and it's a little odd thinking of where we are now to there.

The 5D has been successfully implemented into many of our recent productions which you can see on our website including the California Raisins Future Baker competition 2012, Spitalfields Summer Festival 2012 and The Lady Golfer Club promo. Our clients have been incredibly impressed with the results and it was a wise investment for us.

Speaking of Spitalfields Music, we've worked on a couple more projects with the charity since May including the Summer Festival, Musical Rumpus promo and as of last week, the Winter Festival 2012. As you may know, the Winter Festival last year was one of our first projects and it's warming to look at where we are now a year on and how far we have progressed.

Our graduate recruitment video for Mintel at the start of this year was nominated for the 'Best Company Video' award at the In-House Recruitment awards last year, and whilst we didn't unfortunately win the award, we are pleased to announce that Mintel did win an award for 'Best Graduate Recruitment Strategy' which our videos were a part of so it's good to see some recognition for all of our work. We're always heading into East London for Mintel with nearly a year of producing their monthly newsletter videos and we've recently started doing more work for their 'Inspire' section.

Next year, we've got a potential short documentary in the pipelines and some big ambitions for new projects. Fingers crossed we can top what has been an incredibly successful year!

New Workload + the 5D

The next couple of weeks are looking pretty optimistic with some of the new projects we've been signed on for.

We shall be producing video & photography content for the California Raisins' Future Baker competition 2012 starting from next week which takes place around the country. We will be heading to London, Blackpool, Derby, Tameside, Darlington, Port Talbot, Birmingham and Belfast so keep an eye out! The project gives students around the country the opportunity to bake a variety of products incorporating California Raisins in the hope of winning an opportunity to bake at the Richmond Bakery School in Switzerland.

After that, we'll be heading back to Shoreditch to film this year's Spitalfields Music Summer Festival. The festival spans over 2 weeks including artists that we've been filming and interviewing up to the event including Melvyn Tan, Matthew Barley and The Gabrieli Consort. You can also see the Winter Festival that we filmed a few months back on our website.

Also, we've been waiting for this moment for ages but finally we ordered a Canon 5D Mark II! For those who aren't technically savvy, this is one of the most popular DSLR cameras at the moment within the photography and videography industries. We currently have a Canon 550D which whilst is a fantastic camera, doesn't quite have the low-light capabilities that the 5D boasts. The 5D has been popular in the film and TV industries, being used for various scenes in House, The Avengers, Captain America, Black Swan, Drive... The list goes on.

So yes, check back for the next blog where we can show some results of the new beast!

Back to Film

Whilst we've had a camera in our hand nearly every day, it's been 10 months since we shot our last short, Ferals. This weekend, we joined a team who were entering the London Sci-Fi 48 Hour film Competition. 48 hours is an insignifcant amount of time for a short, Ferals last year had a turnaround time of around 6 months from concept to screen, so 48 hours is a real challenge.

The project was an interesting experience, with nearly every aspect on the fly including scripting, producing, shooting, editing, sound mixing and colour grading. After completing this project in such a short amount of time, it is definitely safe to say we have been inspired to see what we can achieve back with short film in a longer timeframe!

Our first music video production was great fun, the official music video for Hullabaloo's 'Landslide' is looking great and should be up for the band's EP launch next week on the 25th April. Also, stay tuned for a documentary that we did on the band - Hullabaloo Behind The Landslide which includes making of the video, live peformance footage and a chat with the band about their unique sound.

We had our first set of flyers arrive in the post this week, so keep an eye out for the purple dinosaur!

The First Month

Been nearly a month since our last blog post... Why such a gap? Because we've been busy!

Since we made things official last month, we've been swamped with a ton projects. Mostly music orientated which has been great as we've had some great shoots with famous artists including Melvyn Tan, Matthew Barley, Cardinall's Musick and the City of London Sinfonia. We've also been preparing for our first music video shoot for Cardiff based rockers, Hullabaloo.

Pre-production has been a little tricky given the distance issues but it's all coming together with a shoot around Cardiff this weekend including a climatic staged paint fight at a gig. We're hoping to use this video as a showcase for future music video projects so fingers crossed this goes to plan!

We're coming close to a complete shooting kit for the next few months. We shelled out on three new lenses: a 28mm f/1.8, 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.8 primes which has really made a difference. Low light shooting has been far simpler - keep an eye out for the City of London Sinfonia (CLoSer) video in the next few weeks, shot in a very dark venue but came out looking fantastic.

Good times ahead!

It's official.

As of today (15th February 2012), Lightwind Productions is now registered as a business! For those of you who have followed our work (and blog posts from about 4 years ago) you'll hopefully appreciate all the time and effort it has taken to get to this position. It's great for us to now be officially trading and to continue producing the work that we love to create!

Since our last post about a month ago, we've had a complete re-branding of logo and design. The new website (which is something we've needed for years - www.lightwindproductions.co.uk) has been highly praised and we hope represents the professional approach we take to our work. If you head over, you can also see our new commercial work show reel which will give you a quick glance at what we've been up to over the past few months.

Moving from the past to the future - we have many new and exciting projects lined up. A large amount is music work (which is fantastic) ranging from the new music video for the Hullabaloo single for landslide to more classical and concert filming - speaking of which, the Spitalfields Winter Music Festival edit was finally finished off this week and should be up on their site next week. Stay tuned for more on that.

We've also continued the investment in equipment - most recently into a Glidetrack shooter which not only acts as portable dolly for those filmic tracking shots but also doubles up as a shoulder rig. Handy! We also bit the bullet and ordered 3 new Canon prime lenses which were pretty costly but will be vital for some of the productions coming up over the next couple of months.

Lastly, I was approached about producing some work which will be broadcast on Sky in a few weeks. Details are vague, but there'll be more on that soon!

New Year. New Projects.

So we've already started 2012 with a swarm of projects which have been thrown at us! Here's an overview on all the stuff that's happened recently...

Firstly, we would like to welcome Matthew Steel as the Creative Director at Lightwind Productions. Now that we're starting to get Lightwind off the ground as an official business Matt, one of my best friends and long time filmmaking associates, has decided to join me and we're working together to make Lightwind Productions one of the best production companies in Sussex! We have possibly the most competitive rate for film and video projects and since we started doing official projects in November, we've spawned across many corporate video and event projects. We're booked for a music video for the band Hullabaloo (which you'll hear more about in the coming weeks) in Cardiff in March and we're looking to do some locally in and around Brighton.

We've had a lot of collaboration with the market research company Mintel - we started off doing two videos to appeal to graduates. One was an office shots video of the appealing interior and exterior scenes of the building (the place looks amazing, there's a caravan with catering equipment slap bang in one of the middle of the offices!) and then a 5 minute (ish) vox pops video interviewing employees about the benefits of working for Mintel.

Both videos should be complete and up on Lightwind by the end of the week but they're looking great. We managed to get a great deal of content, over 2 hours for a 5 minute video so we didn't struggle at all to get the edit looking great. Since that, I shot a pilot for the beauty time at the same company as they're looking to do a video blog about the trends in beauty products each month. If they like the pilot, we could be comissioned for monthly video blogs which would be great! The edit was pretty much complete so more on that soon...

Lastly, we've been called in for another video next week so it looks like Mintel could be one of our best clients over the next few months which is great news as they're a very friendly and open company to work for.

A rough cut for the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival video has been complete and we're just waiting for some more material on that before we can get it signed off. Most of the profit we've made has been invested back into equipment. We've got a light kit, a clip on DSLR light, a pistol grip and mic stand for the Rode videomic and we're hopefully going to be getting the Glidetrack shooter next week or so which will make tracking and handheld shots very much achievable.

Future purchases that I think we need would include an 85mm or slighter higher prime lens (I've read that you can get second hand Zeiss lenses which can fit the 550 with an adapater for pretty decent prices), I'd like a zoom lens with a constant aperture so that we can do in-video zooms without the brightness dropping. I've spotted one that would be ideal but it's just below £1k so will have to hold off that for a while. Additionally, a set of radio mics would make a lot of the interviews sound a lot cleaner, but apart from that we should be all set. Obviously, I'm still dying to get a 5D Mark II at some point but I'm just waiting for the Mark III announcement which hopefully will happen this year sometime...

So all in all, we've been pretty constant since we got things up and running. Let's hope things stay that way...