mitchjenkins

[mitchjenkins]

CoGo!

Our shoot with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Cocaine Godmother for Lifetime TV has finally gone live, with the film’s premier later this month. The only problem with shooting Key Art for TV and Film is that you have to wait months before you can show any of the work.

Last summer we spent several days in Vancouver or should I say, I spent several days in Vancouver, as Leo sadly wasn’t available. Never the less our local crew lead by Marlin stepped up and worked their socks off in the ridiculously short amount of time we had, seeing as we were working on a live set. You begin to dread the sound of the bell on live sets, as everything has to grind to a halt whilst they are shooting. Its then a mad rush to continue lighting the set as soon as they call “cut”. You also learn to hurry up and wait once the set is lit, hoping that the talent is released to you with enough time to capture the required set ups!

Although time was not on our side, Catherine gave us everything she could and more, during these frenetic windows of opportunity. As usual, big thanks to Ilene and the team from Lifetime, Marlin and the VC crew and of course Jess our uber producer.

Catherine on set.

Pre lighting set one.

Set two the club scene.

Set three the black box.

Key Art.

Set four.

Jess at her favourite broom store on Granville island, VC.

Wrapped!

[mitchjenkins]

HAPPY NEW YEAR! #Infodump2017  #sixmonthscatchup

New Years resolution number #1, update the blog on a more regular basis!

Having been totally crap over the last several months, I thought it wise to start 2018 with the blog being up to date.

Since the last update we have shot two campaigns in Paris, one in Berlin, one in Dublin, one in Barcelona and two in Vancouver, along with two road trips to France and a well deserved family holiday in Majorca. We have also spent months working on our new feature film project, which with any luck gets signed off this week! Thankfully this spills into 2018, so we can leave this for another update. In addition to the above, we also managed to find time to shoot Daddy Deadpool as part of the ongoing Cos Play project and got our Lola images finally retouched.  I have also spent an inordinate about of time standing in a field watching my son play either cricket or rugby #mylifeinafield #dadstaxi.

More to follow once all the Key Art campaigns start to go live. Now all I need to do is stay on top of the blog for 2018!

Lastly, a huge thanks to my producers Sasha and Jess, without their tireless work we wouldn’t be anywhere. The same goes for Leo and all the crews we have shot with, along my agents Tim, Waldo and Lu at Making Pictures and the amazing Nell at Art Department. A big up to my daughter Scarlett who for some reason still wants to work in the industry, even after having to have made god knows how many cups of tea on shoots this year. And of course the biggest thanks to all my clients who still keep giving me amazing assignments and great creative briefs, especially Nicole and Ilene:)

Leo, me and Steve in Paris.

Leo and a banana, Paris, trip 2.

LeFloid, You Tube super star, Berlin.

Berlin

Dublin

Starting to light the set of SIX in Vancouver.

Morning walk in Vancouver.

Shooting the guys from SIX.

Day three of the SIX shoot and thats a wrap!

Leo and our photo crew on the SIX shoot. What a team!

Lighting the set for Cocaine Godmother and our shoot with Catherine Zeta-Jones in Vancouver.

First look Key Art, much more to follow.

Couples tiff observed in Vancouver.

Daddy Deadpool, Cos play continues.

Lola, retouched. Shot in LA.

Road trip to France.

Oh the glamour of Cricket. #mylifeinafield

Majorca, a distant memory.

Alan Moore working on our feature film project The Show!

Siobhan, Alan, Mel and Tom pose for the camera at Alan’s birthday lunch/meet and greet, as we discuss The Show with our two leads:)

[mitchjenkins]

Searching for Neverland!

A few weeks back we we're in LA to shoot Key Art for Lifetime’s new show, Mary Kills People and their TV movie, Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland. The movie stars the worlds number one MJ impersonator Navi, who as it turned out was a fellow Brit. 

We spent the day before trying to finalise the location as our preferred venue had become unavailable at the last minute. This is where serendipity announced itself and a new location in Beverly Hills became available, as it turned out, the mansion we were to shoot in was directly opposite the mansion Michael had lived in for his final days.

The initial brief had been to shoot in daylight but due to scheduling, we had to turn everything upside down and do a night shoot. That said, I think it worked in our favour, although I didn't have to stay around until 2am to break the kit down and load the truck, instead I had to bear the hardship of late night drinks back at the hotel.

As usual, big thanks to Ilene, Jess and the legendary Noah and Leo.

Navi and our late night car scene, all shot with our cast of extras cheering as if it were the real Michael.

A rare picture of mine with someone smiling.

The glam squad do their thing.

Leo at work.

En route to the tech scout.

[mitchjenkins]

UnReal, Hunter Killer and a road trip.

Add to this a game of Cricket and a mad dash road trip to Holland and that was our last two weeks.

We headed to Vancouver to shoot Lifetime’s show UnReal for season 3, having shot season one previously. It was great to work with the new team from the Network and continue the new photographic style they have adopted. Their new captured moment approach, helped us create a wonderful set of images that shared a passing resemblance to that of a Fellini movie! What with an amazing and collaborative cast, great extras and a crew that were incredibly helpful, me and my team couldn’t have asked for more. 

A huge thanks to Ilene, Cathy, Ian and Tracy from Lifetime, Jess our wonderful producer, the VC photo team and of course Leo.

After spending two days shooting and god knows how many days in Vancouver, it was time to head home. It was then a straight to Norfolk the next day to watch my son play Cricket, with a road trip to Holland the following day.

We are thankfully now back in the studio for a few days before heading to Barcelona in a week or so.

In addition to this, it seems that our Hunter Killer key art we shot last summer has gone live. What a good looking chap that Gerard Butler is!

UnReal’s control room set.

Sadly not the view from my hotel.

The view from my hotel.

Yeah, and my son thinks all I do is click a button for a living. Look Jed, i get to lay down as well!

Pretty view of Vancouver.

Me, Constance Zimmer and gang from Lifetime!

Leo finds time to relax.

Leo finds time to pursue his passion of photographing blossom.

Norfolk and Sunday afternoon Cricket. 

Beer found in Joure after an eight hour drive through Europe.

Last but not least our Gerard Butler shot and Hunter Killer poster.

[mitchjenkins]

Love Actually or more like hurry up and wait!

Comic Relief’s remake of Love Actually,  started for me with a last minute phone call from my agent Waldo at Making Pictures and ended up being shot over three weeks and various locations (with a bit of help from Olly Burn who had to cover Rowan Atkinson for me whilst i was on another shoot).

It was one of those jobs that you take and then think is this a good move considering all the uncertainty that was foreseen. That said, by the end of it we were having a blast. A big thanks to Lucille at CR and the team at Entertainment Weekly in New York.

We shot the whole cast on three separate occasions. Leading the first shoot was Liam Neeson shot at London Weekend TV studios, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant at BBC Centre, ending with Keira Knightly, Andrew Lincoln and Kate Moss, along with the rest of the gang in some grubby old office space in West London. Oh the glamour!

More images from the EW part of the shoot to come once we reach the May 1st embargo end and once Paul Norman has had time to create the group shot I want and retouch al the portraits.

Created as a thank you for the cast by CR

Screen shot from the last of the three sessions

London Weekend studios, the start!

The team Hurry up and wait!

Piers was there to watch over us

And make sure we didn’t use his mug

2nd shoot at BBC Centre

More Tea vicar. Steve plays mum whilst we hurry up and wait!

More waiting. Steve and Leo are ready to pounce at a moments notice, maybe

3rd shoot day’s studio or should I say an old office in West london

[mitchjenkins]

LA part 2! Mary Kills People....

On returning to LA we hit the ground running with two new campaigns to shoot back to back. First it was Finding Neverland, Lifetime’s new Michael Jackson biopic but seeing as this is a long way off, we will return to this when we have approved imagery. The next day we were straight into location scouting for Mary Kills People and what a location we found! Los Altos Hotel and apartments was a real find. Completely untouched and retaining the faded decadent charm of old Hollywood. I had driven past the building for many years never knowing of its secrets. The day started with the obligatory breakfast burrito served in the adjacent car park that was base camp. What followed was the craziest of days, trying to manoeuvre lighting up and downstairs as the antiquated lift struggled with one or two people, let alone 20 C stands!

Our talent Caroline Dhavernas moved from set to set without a grumble, even delaying what was supposed to be tail lights at 7pm, for us to finish the day, all with a smile!

Breakfast of champions

Old Hollywood charm

The bathroom scene

The bedroom scene

The garage scene

The Shining look a like hallway

Leo and the team attempt to light the hallway in about two minutes

Last set up of the day

Key art 1. I still get a huge kick out of seeing our work in situ. In this case, Sunset Blvd

Key art 2

Tail lights

Leo on set with Finding Neverland......

[mitchjenkins]

Info dump 387

January was the last time we posted, how crap is that! Since then our Cos Play film SNAP has had in excess of 350,000 views and some 11,000 likes. We have been to LA twice, shot in Dublin, created three key art campaigns, produced both the UK and US imagery for the Comic Relief remake of Love Actually, finished editing La Fausse Morte short film and shot a new personal project but failed miserably to update the blog!

So starting with the first of the two trips to LA. We arrived to cheering and clapping at LAX. Initially I thought the crowds were there for some major celeb, although this wasn’t the case. It seems the crowds were out demonstrating about President Trump’s first Muslim ban! Sometime later we managed to get through the crowds and head to the rental car pick up. It was then straight to my pal Kevin’s place in Laurel Canyon for a quick spruce up before heading to Mr C’s for the first of many meetings my agent had arranged for me that week.

And what a week this was, not only did I spend a lot of time with my great friends Kevin and Pamela, I also got to shoot a whole new personal project, meet some great creatives at the major Studios and Networks, along with getting time with my family down near San Diego. Had i known i would have been back there the following week to shoot two new campaigns, I could have saved myself twenty plus hours flying back and forth:)

The Demonstrators at LAX

LA dawn

Small town USA

Small town with dog walker

Pamela backstage at The Mint, LA

Pee Wee doll

Me a lifetime ago in Amsterdam. A surprise from Kevin’s scrapbook

The horror of the Beverley Centre

Small town USA

Lola, us en route to our first shoot of the day

Meeting number 8

The Mint

Tabatha at the Mint

Well deserved

Pioneer Town

Stop light in the High Desert

My view each morning.  I fell in love with this view some twenty years ago, I never get tired of it!

Dinner with the gang at Soho House

Pioneer Town dumpster

Super Bowl Sunday

[mitchjenkins]

The Movies!

After spending some time sorting the stills from our Cos Play project we have finally had time finish the first two films. A big thanks to Candy, Ashleigh and Olivia for making this project come to life! 

With any luck we head to LA and Vegas in search of more Cos Players next month. In the meantime, Deadpool is in our sights!

Above is SNAP! Our two Harley Quinns enjoy a quiet game of cards.

Captain America drowns her sorrows in #WTF after hearing some dreadful news!

[mitchjenkins]

Web site update!

We have just got the Cos Play images back from being graded and retouched and as usual, Paul Norman has done a great job! They are now live in the Projects section of the web site www.mitchjenkins.com

It’s now just a case of grading the two accompanying shorts films and part one of the project will be completed.

The Christmas break sees us stuck in the edit suite sorting the showreel for January and getting ready to start again. That and organising more Cos Play shoots.

[mitchjenkins]

Superheroes!

We spent last weekend shooting Captain America and Harley Quinn, well thats not quite true. We spent the weekend shooting Ashleigh, Candy and Olivia and in true Superhero determination, Candy struggled through the shoot with a serious dose of Man Flu, that would have hospitalised me, Nigel and Leo.

This was the start of a new integrated stills and film project on Cos Play. Below is the first look at some of the images from the un retouched early edit. The Captain America film has been edited and the Harley Quinn film is nearly finished but we are waiting for Nigel to get back from an ill timed holiday to Dubai. Sometimes I wonder where people’s priorities lie:)

Much more on this to follow, along with new Superheroes, the films and the final retouched work, that is once I have managed to persuade Paul Norman to cast his experienced eye over the retouch.

A big thanks to Tim, Steve, Jim, Chris and Stephen for popping along to St James Working Mens Club to drink free beer all afternoon. And of course to our Superheroes!

[mitchjenkins]

New work!

The Faux Death has now gone live in the project section on my web site mitchjenkins.com. A big thanks to Siobhan and the team but especially Paul Norman for sorting the grade and subtle retouch...Thanks Buddy

The story of the shoot can been read in a previous post below. We now start shooting our new Super hero project on Saturday. To make matters even better we just got confirmation of our first choice location.

[mitchjenkins]

#fornootherreason

We shot this last moth for a client but it seems that they went with the print version rather than the gif version, that said, Leo boshed this together earlier today in that Blue Peter way of his.

We are now waiting for the Paul to sort the final images from our French Chateau shoot and then we are good to go with new folio spreads. The film inches its way forward with a new cut. We now just need time to finesse before handing over to the composer for the soundtrack.

Next up is our Super Hero shoot that we start next weekend!

[mitchjenkins]

Bauhaus Undead!

My very dear and old friend Kevin Haskins has just released his coffee table book of the Bauhaus years. Kevin was the drummer with the late great band. 

My first big break came when i got to photograph Bauhaus for the local paper i had just started working for at the very young age of 17. Me and senior photographer Graham Trott (still a good friend after all these years) headed down to the The Roadmender club to shoot the band. They subsequently used my image as a DPS on their Mask LP.

A few months ago whilst i was in LA, kevin asked me to shoot his PR portrait for the book release. For those of you who like a bit of Goth culture, check out the link below.

http://www.bauhausbook.com/product-page/cadca054-ab99-5330-8d36-c2efb806ab46

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bauhaus-drummer-recalls-raucous-iggy-pop-encounter-w440664

The bloody handsome devil just hasn’t aged enough for my liking!

A more serious expression from Mr Kevin Haskins.

[mitchjenkins]

#Dan and Phil

It seems I now have Cool Dad credentials with my middle daughter Lola. Last month I had location scouted the new You Tube studios in Kings Cross for our forthcoming shoot with two of You Tube’s biggest stars. I mentioned to Lola that I was shooting Phil and Dan for their new YT movie poster. She immediately pointed out that it was Dan and Phil, definitely not the other way round. After correcting me, she then went on to get me up to speed with this whole new YT revolution that is taking place. With this information and my brief from our pals at the LA agency Cold Open, it seemed I was up to speed and ready for the shoot.

Dan and Phil were exactly as they are on screen, funny, smart and young, also bloody tall. Below are some of the insane executions Andy and the team at Cold Open have created.

As you can see in this obligatory shot of me and the talent, they are bloody tall.

[mitchjenkins]

La Fausse Morte!

or in English, The Faux Death.

This Paul Valery poem was kind of the narrative link we were looking for to tie together our recent shoot in the Loire Valley. A old pal of mine had invited me to the Chateau he is the guardian of, to shoot some new web site images for the place and to chill for a few days in 5* luxury. This all sounded rather splendid but not too productive. However, add Nigel Steer my film making buddy and Leo Williams my trusted assistant and super DP into the mix, along with my great friend, actor and muse Siobhan Hewlett and Luke Anthony Sippel the make up artist and we had a team to make a film and shoot a new personal project.

The talent and glam squad (Luke) opted for the quick Ryan Air flight, us chaps deciding to fill a Land Rover with everything we needed and take to the high seas, well the Ferry from Portsmouth to Caen. We of course chose right, as there was a bloody good Pub Quiz on board, which we of course took very seriously, only just getting pipped to the post by a Saga based team who we reckoned were using their buddy Google.

On arrival at the rather beautiful multi million pound Chateau we hit the ground running and had the web site material shot in the first nine hours. After a few pick up shots the following day and a trip to the super market for essential supplies, well beer and wine, we set about shooting the film and creating a damn good set of images as well. My great pal Paul Chessell is already editing and designing a magazine style DM piece, whilst my good friend and retoucher Paul Norman is playing with first look grade ideas. Me and Nigel are a few days into the editing process and so far so good. That said, I have already contacted my great editor buddy Colin Goudie (who is on week 103 of editing the new Star wars movie) for some guidance!

Much more to come on this, along with Gerrard Butler for Hunter Killer and Dan and Phil and their new You Tube Movie.

[mitchjenkins]

Art Department!

I am going to have to do a major info dump in the coming days, as so much has happened over the summer and I have been so tied up watching my son play bloody cricket, some 42 matches, that I haven’t updated the blog!

Anyway, for the moment, the main news is that I have joined Art Department! Super excited to being joining such as stellar agency for my US representation.

And for no other reason, I have attached  a couple of frames straight out of the camera from my recent stills and film project I shot in France last week. Much more on this to come but a big thanks to Nigel for co-directing and Leo for doing most of the camera work on the film.

[mitchjenkins]

The Screenplay with added sparkle!

Earlier in the week Dan from lex Records trudged up the M1 with a van full of Kickstarter reward Screenplays for me and Alan to sign. I have to say they are a sight to behold. Not only are they beautifully finished but some lucky recipients will have a dash of sparkle with their copy. It seems that my youngest daughter’s fascination with creating art using glitter at the kitchen table has rubbed off onto some of the books. Alan thought the lucky few would welcome the addition, seeing as he had a fair bit over him and revelled in the new glamorous look.

But seriously the books are a delight, not only do they have the unseen storyboard for Jimmy’s End, which Alan illustrated over several days all those years ago. I remember us sitting there whilst he did the drawing and we discussed each frame. By the end of the process he had decided that I would be doing the storyboards in future, not realising how bloody long they take to do. The book also includes all of Alan’s screenplays with mine and his scene directions.

I hope they will be well received, as they show the workings of our collaboration, something I feel privileged to be part of.

The book and outer case.

Some of the exclusive shots by John Angerson, Lou Boileau and me.

Hand drawn by Alan.

Tallulah’s glitter.

Me and Alan hard at work.