New site...new blog.

Hello and welcome to my new website, and blog.

That Camaro in the photo is rolling off the line in Oshawa sometime around 2011. I was up there on a completely different job, but getting access to a working GM assembly line was one of those moments you don't pass up. Watching a car go from a bare chassis to a finished vehicle in real time, on that scale, is something that sticks with you.

It also makes you a better automotive cinematographer. When you understand how a car is built, how the body panels fit together, where the design details are that the engineers actually sweated over, you know where to point the camera. You know that the shot of the rear quarter panel catching afternoon light tells a different story than the shot of the hood ornament. You know when a wide angle makes a vehicle look planted and powerful versus small and awkward. That's not something you learn from a shot list. It comes from actually caring about the subject matter.

After 25 years of automotive commercial production, that's still what separates a great car commercial from a forgettable one. Not the budget, not the location, not even the camera. It's whether the person behind the lens actually gives a damn about what they're filming.

My first car was a '69 Camaro. I've owned a few since then. When a dealership calls me about a new commercial, I show up knowing what I'm looking at, and that shows up on screen.

If you're an automotive dealer in the NY Tri-State area or Long Island looking for a production company that brings more than just equipment to the shoot, let's talk. And if you want to know more about what actually makes dealership commercials work, the Angry Video Guy has some thoughts on that too.