History before filming
I'm Ben! 34-year-old northern lad living in London. I spent my late teenage years and early '20s serving in the British Army in the finest regiment the UK has to offer; The 1st Bn Worcestershire & Sherwood Foresters Regiment 29th/45th foot who have amalgamated into the 2nd Bn Mercian in September 2007.
I left the army and always had a creative itch that needed scratching, so I created a band when I moved to London called "The Frayed Laces" and we had some moderate success.
In 2016 we split though and all of a sudden I had no more creative outlet which kind of messed things up a bit.
Why filmmaking/photography?
I was scrambling for a quite a while after losing my creative outlet in drumming and didn't really know what to do.
All of a sudden it was a year later and I found myself with a Canon Eos 200d, a kit lens, a nifty 50 f/1.8 and a MacBook pro that I had to get a loan for. I was on Youtube almost every minute of every day researching how to get along with my camera, lighting, grading, angles, shooting in low light, shooting in bright light, editing and all sorts more.
I decided to make my first video for a client called Rapid Results Gourmet who are a meal prep company for people that don't have the time to make nutritious, delicious meals within their schedules in order to stop people eating shit basically.
The video was horrendous, everything shot on automatic mode, no creativity, Slow-mo shot on my iPhone because the camera only shot 50fps and it was just a bog-standard promo video...IT WAS TERRIBLE! But the client was happy with it.
I have a huge passion and love for Mixed Martial Arts. So I started reaching out to other fighters and offered to do promo videos for them. I started playing around with angles more, finally started shooting in Manual mode so I had full reign on creativity and just went nuts! I filmed everything from every angle, nothing was left out and from post-production, I learned more on sound design/production and finally, things started coming together.
I am at a great place now to carry on learning because videography/photography is very much like MMA...you will never ever stop learning and that's why I love it so much!