Last Red Light Creative

To contact Neil please email; neilscottsills@gmail.com

This was a fun shoot but then any time spent with Aaron is guaranteed to be fun. I wrote and directed this and shot it over one afternoon in Canada Water. The trickiest part was matching Aaron’s framing from location to location.

BBC World News handed me a brief to promote a season of programs about the Future Of Work. As I’d just managed to get hold of a Canon C300 I hired a Wally Dolly and with the help of two colleagues filmed the following over one Saturday afternoon in a vacant meeting room in the BBC’s Broadcast Centre. The background bokek was provided by some left over Christmas Tree lights.

In 2018 I was asked to write and direct a BBC News promo for a new BBC News show called Afternoon Live featuring Simon McCoy, Louise Lear, Rachel Horne and Hugh Woozencroft.  All of the steadicam shots were done on a Sony Alpha A7Sii with a Cam TV gimbal. All the locked off shots were on a Canon C300. It was great working with Simon and his team and we managed to get everything we needed in only four hours of filming and running around.

Fast turnaround shoot for a BBC Arts series called The Art of Directing. The production team were about to shoot the amazingly talented Cush Jumbo (The Good Wife and now The Good Fight) doing the links for the first two episodes. I had three days to put a script together, get it past marketing and editorial and make sure the concept could be captured in 30 minutes. We shot in the very quaint and almost Dickensian Sands Films Studios in Rotherhithe. It’s like a miniature old musical hall venue with very nineteenth century exteriors.

Huge thanks to camera operator Justin Evans and his smoke machine, key light and Sony PMW F5 on a Libec Jib Arm. He did an amazing job as did Paul Callaghan in the edit suite.

BBC One marketing wanted to give a little treat to the audience waiting for the new series of Our Girl to begin so they asked BBC Creative Charlotte Humphreys to come up with an iPlayer tease that sees character Georgie Lane, played by Michelle Keegan, chatting to her boyfriend online from an army camp in Kenya.

I went up to Manchester with Charlotte to direct and film Michelle and her onscreen boyfriend Jamie played by Royce Pierreson. Because we knew we would only be allowed ten minutes with the two actors in a very small trailer to get the two shots we needed we rehearsed our camera and lighting set-ups in London to make sure no time was wasted. We needn’t have worried. Once the two Canon EOS C100s were synched up Michelle and Royce gave us an amazing performance on every take we recorded.

In February 2017 I got to direct from a distance as Anne-Marie Tasker and Kofi Smiles from BBC Look North helped me to pull off a fast turnaround trail for BBC News. Briefed on Thursday, scripted on Friday, shot on Saturday and edited and delivered to playout by Tuesday.

In March 2016 the BBC released a new music app called BBC Music and I was asked to script and film the explainer online video with Greg James from Radio 1. I shot this on my C100 with an Atomos Ninja Star and the graphics were done by Sam Humphries, 

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-humphries-1788074b.

Briefed, scripted, shot, edited and music cleared in 10 days.

In 2015 I was lucky enough enough to get the chance to work with the Business Live team at BBC World News to promote their new show Business Live. It features the very talented and funny Sally Bundock and the urbane and sophisticated Ben Thompson. I directed the studio cameras and then shot B Roll on my Canon C100 hooked up to a Ninja 2.

This is a cutdown of the film I put together for the Ericsson stand at IBC to help explain how their content offering had evolved with the acquisition of Red Bee Media. Because it had to appear on a 4K monitor at IBC and work in tandem with the sales team, I came up with a film that was a mixture of animating English language text and 4K footage I shot out in Paris, Amsterdam and London. The animations were carried out in After Effects by Dave Farquharson and Rosa Lykiardopoulos in Red Bee Media Design and the 4K footage was shot on a Blackmagic Cinema camera with my own range of Nikon primes.

A trail highlighting the cultural programming on BBC World News. I wrote, directed and designed the graphics but the really hard work was done by amazing graphic designer Laurence Honderick (https://vimeo.com/142059997).

A short film explaining the raft of programming that was about to be made available on BBC World News. Written in tandem with marketing and shot at JJ Loft Studios in Shoreditch where time constraints meant we had to piggy-back the promotional photographic shoot.

The trail below for BBC World Service was written, directed, filmed and edited by me over four days in the week before the 2011 Champions League Final. As we were not allowed to feature any images from the inside of a stadium or use any previous commentary, I opted for a grass roots approach and went out with a Canon 5D Mk 2 and H4N Zoom to various London locations and persuaded various people to stop playing football and talk or shout at the camera.

Episode 2 in a series which showcases , explores and celebrates the Caribbean heritage of creatives across the diaspora . This episode features Frederique Rapier a freelance photographer and digital marketeer of French, Korean and St Lucian heritage (https://www.behance.net/rapiercmedia).

The interview was filmed at Larache, 32 Calvert Avenue in Shoreditch, a treasure trove of beautiful artifacts sourced throughout Africa and South Pakistan.

A trail for BBC.com where I got to direct the wonderful Mishal Husain, Rico Hizon and Stephanie Flanders, sadly now with JP Morgan. Graphics work was carried out by the talented John O’Hagen at Red Bee Media now part of Ericsson.

The following trail for BBC World News was conceived and released to coincide with the one year anniversary of the launch of Nik Gowing’s programme, The Hub. Camerawork was courtesy of Steve Weiser and I did some of the cutaways on my Canon 5D Mk 2. The white animating lines were built by me in FCP 7 as solid blocks of white, with crops and timed moves.

A trail for the cross platform coverage of the World Cup in South Africa. I pitched an idea that revolved around turning the commentators into collectable football stickers and Red Bee Media graphic designer Luke Tilly turned my Canon 5D Mk2 footage of the presenters into the simple but effective execution below.

In this next trail I directed the Premiership footballer Andy Johnson in a two camera shoot for the Nike Deadly Five online campaign.

A fast turnaround project for Chantal Miller at Chantimedia featuring the graphic artist Jon Daniel. I directed, shot and edited. This became Episode 1 in a series of films for the I AM strand.

This is a trail I made for the Britain’s Best campaign that ran on UKTV History a while ago. I drove to eighteen, yes 18, of the nation’s favourite locations over a three day period and filmed members of the public explaining why they loved each place so much. Because a lot of travel was involved I decided to shoot everything myself. It was a great excuse to see parts of the country I’d always wanted to visit, like Portmeirion in Wales, but never had the time. The voice over artist is Alan Titchmarsh.

This Community Channel trail is one of my earliest. It features 16mm film footage that I shot on my old H16 Reflex Bolex  and brings back a lot of memories of travel in Australia, Brazil, Argentina and America’s west coast.

One of six trails I directed six trails for a BBC World News refresh. This one I made for Nik Gowing.

Here’s the one I made with Mishal Husain

George Alagiah

And Zeinab Badawi

This is one of a series of trails I filmed and directed for the “I Love TV” stings that went out before each seminar at the Media Guardian Edinburgh Television Festival in 2007. Each trail was filmed on the departmental Panasonic AG DVX 100 which meant I could run out of the office and film each contributor at a moment’s notice.

Finally here is a clip from the 2007 film I wrote and directed for the “We are What We Do” Red Bee Media film competition. It was called Switch and was runner-up.