It’s so easy to get stuck in a rut. So easy to do the same work, day in day out, earn good money and repeat the process, again and again and again.
It’s not so easy to follow your dreams or do the things that you love because you spend all your time earning money.
On the face of it (or if you follow my instagram page!) it looked like I was living the dream. I was a filmmaker, earning a great living, doing what I loved – right?
Wrong. I was a filmmaker at the top of the wedding film game, but 20 years in, every wedding film I made was leading me further down a road I simply didn’t want to go down any more.
My company, Kissing Gate Films had become one of the UK’s best known, and well respected Wedding film companies. The company was constantly (and still is) in demand, had won multiple awards, had sponsorship deals with some of the world’s biggest cinematography kit suppliers, ran expert training workshops and had become the go-to film company for some of the biggest and best /iconic hotels in the UK and abroad.
But I was not happy.
I’d left college in the late 90s with a btec national diploma in photography and film. In truth, I learnt the basics and spent the rest of the three years partying.
But it wasn’t long before when one of my parent’s friends asked me if I would make a wedding film for them. I did it, made a good job and other requests followed. As well as working a number of other jobs, I shot these too until it got to the point where my only real option was to pack those ‘other jobs’ in and start a cinematography company.
It still fills me with pride when I reflect on how far Kissing Gate Films has come. I’d started in my bedroom, with a laptop and a Canon XM1 SD camera.