Gareth Warland and Noelle Rodrigues met at film school in London. Now they’re building up their reel with some cracking commercials for charity and are on the look out for a production company to mentor their first music video.
How did you two meet and decide you wanted to make films together? Great title, allmyfriends, how did that come about?
We met on the Film & Video course at London College of Communication and started working together around three years ago. After collaborating on our graduation film Sidney, we decided to team up as a duo and start a company called allmyfriends.
The name originated from the idea of running a small collective of filmmakers with whom we regularly collaborated, mainly fellow students who we had built good working relationships with. We believe in the group approach to filmmaking and enjoy what other members of the crew can bring to an idea.
After graduating, we soon realised the financial implications of running a company were too great (insurance is a nuisance!) and thus decided to put the goal of becoming quick fire entrepreneurs on hold until the future! We kept the name allmyfriends as a pseudonym for us as a directing duo and went out looking for work.
What were your first projects out of college?
Our first two projects came through companies in Brazil. The first, was a commercial for a Microsoft affiliated company based in Sao Paulo. The second was a commercial for the city council of Fortaleza. Both projects were direct to client and therefore we worked on all creative ourselves and then hired full production crews each time we arrived in the country. We were always keen to continue building on relationships in the UK so decided to complete all offline, sound and online back in London.
And did these projects lead onto shooting for the Helen Bamber charity?
Yes, both projects were a good starting point for us and allowed us to take a step forward with Shoebox. Our friend Leila Bartlam put us in touch with creative team Steph & Rory from Adam&EveDDB to make a two-minute piece for the organisation’s website.
The Foundation wanted a film that not only communicated the brutality of human trafficking, both physically and mentally, but also aimed to convey the extensive support that the Helen Bamber Foundation offers. The film received great feedback from both client and public, clocking up over 600 views in the first few hours of being online and gained good coverage from media sites.
What were the key lessons from the production?
This was the first project that we worked alongside a creative team and it made the process much more productive for us as directors. Shoebox really allowed us to develop our own creative style. Being huge fans of world cinema, with the desire of shooting features one day, we wanted to give the film a strong cinematic feel, and therefore spent weeks developing the performance, lighting design/camerawork and sound design. We were very fortunate to attract DOP Yves Cape to shoot the film as well as work closely with Gary Walker at 750mph who did a brilliant job on the sound design! Everyone’s commitment to the project felt great and we intend to develop these relationships further in the future.
Have you been back to Brazil to work?
We recently completed three commercials for the same client who we shot our first work, Gier, for. We teamed up with creatives David & Ollie from W+K London to develop an idea for a system that manages public healthcare. As before we took on a lot of production duty and hired crews in Brazil including the brilliant Uruguayan DOP Cesar Charlone, whose work we really admire.
On SISS, as with our previous work, we pushed to work with a mix of both professional and non-professional actors. We take great pleasure in working with actors and a strong performance is always something we are looking for within our work. We like to approach commercial and music videos just as we would a short film, developing the characters, story and textures.
How do you collaborate together, do you have specific roles or do you work things out together as you go?
We work very closely together in all capacities of the job from the very beginning to the very end and we will only make decisions knowing that both of us will agree. We bonded over a shared taste in cinema and soon realised that our views and approach to the work was remarkably similar so we find that we rarely disagree. If we do, then we will take a moment to discuss it between ourselves in private.
It’s a seamless working relationship that doesn’t feel the need to be about defining specific roles for each other. For example, we’d never have one of us continually behind the monitor while the other stood on set. We both enjoy all aspects of directing and have trust in each other’s ability to be able to tackle any area of the job without worry.
What’s next?
We have just finished putting together the treatment for our first music video for East London artist Paco Sala. We have long been after a music video as we know it will allow us to push our style in to more extreme territories. We are currently looking for a production company to help produce it with us.
