Busy Busy!

Apologies for the delay in getting the new blog entry written up - it's been almost a month since the last one but we've been out shooting video and still nearly every day since then.

On Friday 12th of Feb (the day after the last entry) we filmed a fun little video for Bicester Village at an event at the Farm Shop which was laid on to promote apprenticeships for young people working in retail. The Farm shop is a lovely venue (the coffee and pastries were fab!) and the speakers did very well to engage with the young people there. We took some promotional stills too and we covered the event with just the two crew - David did video and sound while Toni took the stills.

Bicester Village Apprentice Event

Sound can be a challenge for videoing events like this especially with several speakers appearing in fairly quick succession so we used a boom pole with shotgun mic and a hand held Tascam recorded to capture the audio. There wouldn't have been time to fit each speaker with a lavalier mic and the Tascam did a great job.

The video should appear soon on the Bicester Village Youtube channel and I'll paste a link to the blog once it's out.

Jez Rose presenting at the Philips conference

The following week was filled with a mixture of edit days with clients and calls to new contacts in London and a large photo shoot for Philips Lighting and Philips Healthcare. Many of our clients like to come to our edit suite in Milton Keynes for the final edit day so they can leave with the video signed off. This is a great way to work as we can get the edit 85% complete and the final touches and any minor changes can be put in place during the last day. We were very pleased to welcome Castleoak to our office for an attended edit and Jack completed two video's which we had filmed in the previous weeks and which are now signed off.

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The Philips photography was a two day shoot at their joint Lighting and Healthcare conference at the ICC in Birmingham - a venue we work at quite regularly. David and Toni covered the first day together and David stayed on to cover the evening party too and stayed over to photograph the second day too. Conference photography is great fun as the staff are on a high and full of energy and there are usually some great breakout activities going on too. Jez Rose appeared as a guest speaker and it's the second time we've worked with him. He is a fantastic presenter and inspirational speaker and always gets the delegates fired up.

A trip to Edinburgh followed on for David where we were commissioned by Zumtobel Thorn Lighting to photograph an indoor golf school. The entire building was illuminated by Thorn and the lighting levels were superb throughout. As with most new building these days nearly all of the lighting products are LED based so provide a crisp white light and save loads of energy at the same time.

Kirsty Groves Presenting

We had an exciting meeting earlier this week at Kensington Palace regarding a potential documentary video and as an added bonus we were treated to a quick look around the museum there - well worth a visit!. This would be a fabulous short film to make so we are keeping our fingers crossed here and hope to post some good news in the coming week or so once we've heard back.

On Thursday we filmed a three hour presentation for Kinnarps UK and the new WWF HQ in Woking and we had a crew of four for this job covering sound, video and stills photography. We're busy editing the video right now and we're half way through completing the stills edit too although we've popped a picture in here of Kirsty Groves presenting at the conference which is still warm from Lightroom!.

To complete a very busy couple of weeks David Jack and Matt spent yesterday at Feilo Sylvania's London HQ videoing a sales event with several presenters, with the crew split between the main presentation and some informal interviews of the speakers once they were finished in a separate room.

Thanks for reading this and for following the blog and see you next time!.

Pitt Rivers Museum, Portraits and a lot of video!

Hi everyone!. Another busy few days have flown past here at Redshift Media Production - I don't honestly know where the time has gone!.

Last Monday we had a lovely photo shoot in Oxford at the Pitt Rivers Museum where we were commissioned by Soraa to capture the quality of the lighting on the exhibits. Soraa are quite new to the UK market and they manufacture very high quality LED lamps that are designed to replace existing Low Voltage lamps in light fittings. This gives a considerable energy saving to the end user and also reduces the maintenance costs as the lamps last for 10 years or so. The colour rendering is also very good and the clarity of the light is superb.

Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford

We've been busy in the studio too photographing a new lighting fixture for Holophane and also shooting some green screen interviews for an internet TV channel.

Philips Healthcare Portrait

At the weekend we starting shooting a short indie film that we've written in house. It's always great to shoot something for fun and we spent a fun day on Saturday shooting the first couple of scenes for our film. We'll post a link to the finished movie once it's all in the can and edited. We're hoping to have it ready within a couple of months and we'll enter into lots of festivals.

We're photographing the Philips Lighting and Healthcare conference in a couple of weeks and I was called in this week to take some staff portraits on location in the office. These are going to be printed onto banners for the day. It was a really fun shoot - I love working with people and there was lots of energy coming from the people of volunteered to be snapped.

The Ritz and The Post Office Tower

We've just had another action packed week which culminated in a large awards video and photoshoot for the UK Cabinet Office on Thursday and our regular booking at The Ritz hotel in London.

Winner of a TW3 award

The Cabinet Office have an annual awards ceremony for the winners of their TW3 competition which sees the various Government departments entering their best agile working concepts for recognition. The days of people working 9-5 at the same desk day in day out are thankfully on the way out, and the TW3 program is all about helping people to develop a more flexible approach to work. We created a video and some stills to be played on the day before the awards began and we also photographed and video'd the event too. We had a crew of three and we used three Sony cameras to record the actual awards ceremony in the theatre with Jack running the show from the rear camera whilst watching a large monitor feed from the other two Sony's. We had a walkie talkie link up and Chris was operating the camera at the front near the stage. I took the still images and shot some B Roll on my 5d MK2.

Jack and Chris with two Sony's

We also had a Sony A7s MK2 and a set of LED panel lights set up outside to record interviews and again my trusty EOS 5d MK2 captured some B Roll and the stills.

On Friday I photographed the Philips Chairmans Awards at The Ritz which we are lucky to cover twice a year. The six best employees as voted for by their peers are invited to lunch at The Ritz with their partners, are treated to a suite for the night and show tickets too. I take the pictures and provide everyone with a leather bound album which captures their day.

We also had several client meetings last week which resulted in a few new booking for both stills and video, and we have just been commissioned to shoot for three days in Germany at the upcoming Light and Build show in Frankfurt.

One of the winners of the NHBC Supreme Award

We may well be off the Adu Dhabi too in April to the Lux Live show which will be a great experience. It will boost  the Airmiles a bit too!.


The previous Friday we had great fun shooting the Grand Finale of the NHBC Pride in the Job awards at the Intercontinental Hotel at Westminster Bridge in London. That was another long but rewarding day and the event went off really well. We are so lucky to have so many large clients and we do get spoiled on these super events!.

Happy New Year!

Well that's Christmas out of the way and we all feel refreshed here at Redshift Media Production after a good break. We started back last Tuesday and it was a really fantastic week back. We had a large project for the Cabinet Office signed off where we are videoing and photographing an upcoming event in London at the Post Office Tower. For this project we're using our Canon 5d MK2's and our Sony A7S2 for the roving footage and to capture interviews and we'll be using three Sony EX3 cameras to video the actual awards ceremony. We have a set of LED panel lights which can run off V lock batteries and these are perfect for lighting interviewees without having cables trailing everywhere.

We also had a smaller conference job confirmed where we'll use the 5d's to capture some interview and presentation footage for Havells Sylvania in London.

Two stills jobs were booked last week too including one at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford for Soraa lighting and another for corporate headshots in two office locations near Reading for a brand new client. All in all a pretty good week back at work.

Today I've taken a booking for a shoot at John Lewis in Birmingham so a good start to this week too.

Here's to a Happy New Year to all our friends and we hope you'll keep following our blog in 2016.

Christmas!

Well it's nearly Christmas and today we're finishing off some editing here in the edit suite with our clients from The Cabinet Office and we've also got some final retouching to do on some product photographs for a lighting company called Ceravision. Once that's all done we're breaking up for Christmas and we all feel ready for the break.

It's been a very busy year once again and we've moved the business along a great deal from where we were a year ago. Our turnover has been about the same but we've reduced our overhead substantially and we've also moved to a more modern office here in Milton Keynes.

We now have two websites to reflect the different sides to the business - one to showcase our video production work (www.redshift-media.co.uk) and one to highlight our architectural photography (www.redshift-photography.co.uk). We are also about to launch a new print sales website featuring our photographer David Thrower's personal work and the prints on sale will be ideal for boardrooms and meeting rooms etc. The site is still being built and the web address is www.davidthrowerphotography.co.uk so please check back in a couple of weeks and let us know how it looks.

Last week we took some pictures in our pop up studio of an up and coming model and actress called Georiga and here's a few of our favorite pictures from the shoot.

Considering this was her first time in front of the camera we think she did really well and shows some great promise.

For the technically minded reader we used three Bowens 500 heads to light Georgia and a Canon EOS 5d MK2 with Voigtlander 90mm f3.5 manual focus lens to capture the images. The workflow is then Lightroom for Raw conversion, Photoshop CS6 for additional retouching and the final colour profiling was done with DXO Filmpack.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our clients for their support again this year and to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!.

See you in 2016!.

Greenhouse Photography on the Isle of Wight

Following on from a Christmas party shoot at Woburn Abbey last week I set off for the Isle of Wight yesterday to photograph a tomato growing greenhouse owned by Wight Salads - variation is the spice of life after all! . We do a lot of work for the various groups with Philips and this shoot was for their Horticulture division based in Holland as the LED lighting in the greenhouse was supplied by Philips.

I've only recently started working with the agriculture guys and they are great fun to work with as the brief includes lots of people shots which is great to do. The tricky thing is balancing the light. The LED lighting supplied is a very deep pink in colour which encourages the plants to grow more quickly and healthily. This makes taking pictures in the greenhouses very tricky indeed and I use some fill flash to help maintain a natural skin tone to the people in shot. 

Here's a quick test shot from the shoot of Monica the supervisor in the greenhouse I was working in.

Monica

The trip down was good and the Isle of Wight ferry was great!. It ran on time both yesterday and on today's return and the cafe and lounge areas were really clean and tidy. I stayed in a very nice hotel overlooking the sea too last night although I couldn't see the sea due to the heavy rain when I arrived - I just believed them when they said the view was good!.

It will take me a good day or so to properly edit these as I really need the colour balance to work so I'll be in the office tomorrow working through them in Lightroom and Photoshop.

I've recently been working with some Photoshop plug in's made by a company called Topaz Labs and I really recommend them. I use the Clarity, Adjust and De Noise filters and they to add to the final look of my pictures and they are very easy to use. Here's a link to their website https://www.topazlabs.com/ which is well worth a look.

Party Season

We shot our first Christmas Party last night for the lovely people at New Era Caps. This is our third year covering the event and they are a really cool client to work for and their staff are all really energetic and bubbly which comes across in the pictures. The event was held at The Sculpture Gallery at Woburn  which is a venue we work at fairly often.
The AV and sound was managed by Chameleon Events who did a great job as usual and we work with those guys too on many high end events and awards.

It was a late finish last night and it's off to the office now to process all the pictures and deliver them by lunchtime.
We love photographing and videoing awards ceremonies and parties as the atmosphere is always electric and it's great to be working as part of a team. We work closely with the client, event team and venue to make sure everything goes to plan.



Back at the office we had one our of regular video clients in yesterday morning to run through a series of podcasts which we have filmed and edited. Kate Russell of HR specialists Russell Consulting visited us for a couple of hours and went away with 11 30-40 second clips for their social media channels. This a great way promote your business and we highly recommend giving it a try.

Here's a link to a recent video podcast created for Kate - get in touch if you'd like us to create some great online content for your business - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-CVUXEyX_w