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In November 2020, in a brief window amid the Covid pandemic lockdowns, I travelled to Oxford to make a very short film. Shadow Box Picture Frames
The film was a teaser for Kosmo Foto’s second black-and-white film, Agent Shadow. My first film, Mono (a repackaged version of a film made by Foma Bohemia in the Czech Republic) was launched in 2017 and was an unexpectedly huge success, being bought by shops and customers all over the world. (I think a lot of it was down to the exceptionally cool box design done by My Mate Does Art.)
As someone who has been borderline obsessed with film photography since 2000, Mono’s success meant I had a fledgling film brand on my hands. And while I might not be creating the films themselves, I could do my bit to help film continue its second wind and build a new business at the same time.
Ah yes, film rebranding; my own take is if you’re going to rebrand someone else’s film (and yes, that’s what Kosmo Foto does), you need to do something fresh and exciting with it than just chuck it in a different box and wait for the orders to roll in.
The idea for the second film arrived in a flash while day while I was packing up from work: a film noir-inspired black-and-white film that would come with a comic. The film (and the comic’s lead character) would be called Agent Shadow. I decided to launch the film via Kickstarter, with the comic and rolls of Agent Shadow film coming in a special box to look like a secret agent’s briefcase.
But there was a lot of hard work to be done before Agent Shadow could be introduced to the world.
I came up with the idea of a teaser film which would encourage people to sign up to a mailing list to get access to the Kickstarter before it officially launched. My mate John, whop shotts all of Kosmo Foto’s YouTube videos, would shoot it. The film would include upon all the classic film noir tropes: nighttime, shadowy street corners and alleyways, a man in a trenchcoat desperately running down cobbled lanes, pursued by… who exactly?
I needed a trenchcoated leading man and my friend Jasper – a fellow film photographer I’d met on London photo walks – seemed just the ticket. Not only did he live in Oxford, but he did repertory theatre in his spare time and had not one but two trenchcoats.
The day of the shot turned out to be not the easiest night to shoot a film; it was cold and mostly pouring wet. But the rain ended up adding to the atmosphere – rain-slicked streets do look so good in black-and-white. No wonder film crews spend so much money trying to recreate them.
I would have obviously missed a giant trick if I hadn’t shot some film between takes, so on the night I had with me a few rolls of Agent Shadow and my Leica R8. The Leica was a relatively new purchase and equipped with a meter that could handle film at ISO 6400 – exactly what I wanted to show how this 400-ISO film could be pushed in low light.
Under the cover of an umbrella inbetween takes in the centre of historic Oxford, I got Jasper to stand underneath a single lamp. There was just enough light to get handheld shots at f/2 pushing the film to ISO 6400. Admittedly, most photographers might only shoot the film at this speed a fraction of the time, but it was good to see so early on just what it was capable of.
And the short film? You can see it below here:
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