My name is Jonathan Entwistle. I'm a director who is interested in telling stories; real, simple, everyday stories. I want my films to reflect the people and places that I saw when I was growing up and all of the contrasts I have encountered since.

A collaboration with the fashion photographer John Lindquist and cinematographer Justin Brown.

It was a short film for spanish fashion magazine METAL.

I’ve been really busy recently, mostly working on the promos I mentioned in the last post. How come the busier you are the busier you seem to get. Every new project I do I always meet someone to go on to the next one with.

I have just completed the video for A.Human – the track is called ‘Bring Me The Head Of A Human’ and we did indeed build the majority of the set out of cardboard!! We did it in three days and then shot the whole video on one day using the Canon 5D.

Here are some stills. As soon as the video is available for release I’ll get it up on Vimeo and you can see how this set really comes to life.

We shot the whole thing in a warehouse space in Hackney, East London. They had mountains of cardboard in a back room and we made a deal with them – they let us use the space for a week and we used and threw away all of their cardboard afterwards!! However, the boat was saved :-)

It was a great experience – It was quite mad to work so fast, but in the end it worked really well – The video is weird… It’s not for a single release, but a kind of one of special for the two bands to get together. A.Human and Gaggle (a 23 piece, all girl indie choir!!).

The idea started out as documentation of a live show. A bit like ‘Stop Making Sense’ by Talking Heads. We were going to feature A.Human and Gaggle all inside a little stage that was moving as they played – essentially a theatrical gig! But due to budget and various other restrictions we ended up doing it as a standard promo…. however – this one goes from a standard ‘band playing instruments in a cool space’ to this mad theatre with mechanical sea, sirens on the shore of a dark and craggy island, a Viking Ship (!!) & a group of yellow waterproof clad fishermen!

As soon as I can I will post the film.

I’ve got all sorts of projects on the go at the moment. I’m trying to make as much as I can. The most important thing for me is to keep working in a similar vein, but also be actively expanding my reel.

I am currently looking at doing 2 music videos, one short play, an ad/promo piece, a series of live music events and a Quartet of shorts set around Yorkshire. And it seems, through coincidence, that I’m using the Canon 5D2 for all of them!! Let’s just see how easy that will be!

I’m going to talk about the projects individually and post a few clips and photos. I think some of the projects are more to my tastes than others, but I’m looking forward to using the 5D2 properly now that Canon have fixed the Auto-Expose function. So far I have been very impressed. Going to be trying a bit of handheld and manual focus pulling and getting dirty with After Effects for the music promos and then I’m going to try and treat the 5D like a traditional ‘movie’ camera, if there is such a thing these days, for the drama shorts.

I’m a little worried that I might be spreading myself too thin with such diverse projects. My only hope is that I can maintain a level of artistic consistency throughout that will give all the work the right feel in relation to each other, so that as a reel, they work to show people my style, as I intended it to be.

There is some 5D test footage for the music promo here.