About

I co-founded independent production company ‘Crash Productions’ in 2020 and ‘Bling Kings’ was our first commission for Channel 4. Bling Kings is a 5 part digital series following Hatton Garden jewelers IceJewlz. The hip-hop jewelers create custom £100k+ jewelry for some of the biggest rappers, footballers & entertainers. As part of only a 2 person team across the series I had to ensure many aspects of production were covered:

– Series Producer

– Self Shooting PD (Fx9 / Fx3 / A7siii)

– DOP developing the visual style for the series

– Shooting obs doc sequences off the shoulder (single & multi-cam)

– Lighting, shooting & conducting interviews

– Shooting and developing a style for the macro jewelry sequences & using specialist macro tools (slider / turntable / laowa probe lens / light box)

– Sound / Boom audio on interviews & shooting with up to 6 radio mics running at the same time on obs doc sequences.

– Editor & motion graphics artist across all episodes

For this production we wanted to emphasise the  luxury world the IceJewlz clients live in. In order to communicate that visually I decided upon a few visual styles. Firstly we decided to shoot and deliver the project in 4K UHD, perhaps a straight forward choice, but an obvious one to covey high end / quality. Secondly,  I decided to overexpose by one stop and bring down the levels back down in post (where possible & as long I was not losing any highlight details).  With the FX9 there is no real need to overexpose like there was on the FS7 in order to avoid noisy shadows, however I wanted to deliver a ‘ultra clean’ image, again to convey this high end world. I also ran some tests on a selection of SLOG3 film stock LUTs and decided on Fuji Superior 200 for the production. I like how it rendered darker skin tones along with the fact that there is a lot of gold/yellows in the shop and with the FUJI stock the yellows appear neutral and accurately reflect the real color, not becoming overly vibrant. The film stock helped set the style for the series and definitely made the visuals stand out from the standard SLOG3 > REC709 image you see on so many productions with tight budgets and tight time constraints.

I am proud of the series and I believe that we pushed things as far as we could with a small digital budget and a 2 person team. I’m very much at home producing & shooting at the same time and relish the opportunity to have the creative control and see the vision through.