Project Bio 

Gather stories from a variety of cinematographers from all around the world to put together into a longer-form music video for London-based duo, Oh Wonder, exploring the narrative of "what it means to be human". 

With the prompt of "what does it mean to be human?", our job was to find, shoot, and edit a piece that would collaborate with 5-10 other pieces together within a long-form music video. The pieces are meant to be self-directed and without significant guidance from the band or the lead director.

My Role

-Pre-Production

*landed project (connected via social media - cold call).
*coordinated conversations between our team and director (emails, skype-calls, meetings).
*helped procure a RED Dragon for production.

Creative Producer and Development

In order to create the entire video, the director explained that each filmmaker ought to use the prompt "what does it mean to be human?" to shoot their respective contributing piece. After much internal deliberation and several narratives explored, I firmly shifted the creative direction from the story of an NBA-bound young man who ends up fully paralyzed to something "hidden in plain sight".

I explained that with the prompt of "what it means to be human",  the narrative had to be something that most people could associate with, could empathize with, could actually relate to. While the story about the young man was indeed emotionally charged and interesting, most people couldn't relate to nearly any part of the story; being shot, being NBA-bound, being fully paralyzed were experiences too shocking and too foreign to the average human.

Instead, life is compromised of what we do day-in, day-out; The reason we get out of bed, the reason we lace-up our shoes, the reason we brew our morning coffee. With a renewed creative direction, we started searching for the story hidden in plain sight, the story that most of us understand or, if not, want to understand - the bond between a father and his son. 

Additional Details

-RED Dragon
-Zeiss Contax

-Executive Director Mike Lee Thomas' final long-form music video was nominated for a UK cinema award (VOTD), which can be seen here. 

-Executive Director - Mike Lee Thomas
-Director // DoP - Evan Bourcier
-Producer - Mandy Bourcier
-Talent - Harry
-Band - Oh Wonder