Nelson, a camera, and four years of not putting it down

I picked up a camera four years ago and haven't really put it down since. What started as filming friends turned into filming businesses, and somewhere in there it stopped being a hobby: 30+ companies, 60+ videos, and a fairly clear sense of what I'm good at and what I'm not.

Almost all of that work has been commercial — ads that had to sell something, for people spending their own money. That's a good school. It teaches you that a beautiful shot nobody watches is worth nothing, and that the idea has to survive being compressed to nine seconds on a phone.

This site is the other half. Brand films, spec ads and passion projects made without a brief, where I get to chase an idea further than a client budget usually allows. Every technique that's ended up in paid work showed up here first.

I work solo by choice. One person writing, shooting and cutting means nothing gets lost being handed between three of them — and it means I turn work down. If a job genuinely needs a full crew and a month of pre-production, I'll say so rather than pretend otherwise.

I'm based in Nelson and work across the top of the South Island. Usually that's a workshop, a warehouse, or someone's front paddock at six in the morning.