TfL Promo Behind The Scenes Video

Here's a sweet little 'Making Of' documentary that Gemma Hogg put together for the Transport for London team whilst we were working on their 'Start Your Own Journey' promo film. The above video features interviews with TANDEM producer Emma Burch, and the two Directors, Tobias Fouracre and some other guy...

TfL Film update 'Start Your Journey'

The short promotional film I made last year (co-directed with Tobias Fouracre at TANDEM) for Transport for London has been re-released today on the TfL YouTube channel. I've recently been asked by TfL to make a few updates to the film to reflect their continuing development of the tfl.gov.uk website.

Start Your Own Journey depicts a journey into London using the TfL website along the way to provide travel information whilst on the move. The film shows how the tfl.gov.uk website now offers improved functionality to mobile users including location-based information and real-time travel status updates.

The film was made using stop-motion animation to depict a symbolic journey through the city, but simultaneously through the virtual environment of travel information and real-time data. We also think that this treatment helps introduce the TfL Journey Planner as an appealing and user-friendly aid to negotiating the city.

I'm looking to make more informational and promotional web films directly for clients this year. Whether using live action film or graphical animation techniques, such films can help to convey ideas to customers and bring clarity to complex or hard-to-describe conceptual messages.

Please do get in touch if you have a commercial project in mind which might benefit from a promotional film. I've made many TV commercials and promotional films using a variety of techniques and can certainly bring an appropriate and unique treatment to your project too. More of my work in this field can be found at http://www.chrisgavin.com/p/corporates.html

Transport for London Film Released

I mostly use this blog to document my personal film-making endeavours, so there is normally much to read here about cameras, tests, super 8 and generally experimental film-making stuff.

I don't usually write quite so much here about my 'day job', working on commercials and promo films etc. For reasons of commercial and client confidentiality it isn't always possible to write about the things I've been working on. However, a short promotional film I co-directed with Tobias Fouracre a couple of months ago at TANDEM films has just been put online by the client, so I feel happy to embed a YouTube link to it here.

'Start Your Own Journey' is a short minute and a half film commissioned by Transport for London to introduce and promote the latest version of the tfl.gov.uk website. The TfL site is well-known to Londoners who use the site to plan their journeys around the capital. The team at TfL have been working hard to release an updated and improved version of the site so asked us to come up with an entertaining short film to highlight some of the main features on offer.

This film was shot in TANDEM's basement studio using A Canon DSLR camera and DragonFrame stop-motion software running on an iMac. Almost all of the 'travelling' shots you see in this film were realised by moving models towards a stationary camera to create the illusion of a continual journey. Tobias came up with the main concept of shooting the film from the first-person perspective of a traveller undertaking a journey through London. I helped out a bit on some model preparation and shooting, but my job was mainly integrating the client's website functionality throughout the film and compositing the piece to make a seamless film.

We fortunately had the services of Gordon Allen for the model-making and the very versatile help of Nicola Viargiu who greatly assisted us at all stages of the production. The music and effects for the film were created by Russell Pay of Shrooty. The producer for TANDEM was Emma Burch.