Pretend Lovers

01/09/2026

Making Waves - CalMac Ferries

Captured during the 40 minute ferry crossing over to Arran with Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch for CalMac Ferries. This is the first in a series of short doc films about people whose creativity has been inspired by Scotland’s west coast islands.

We shot a lot of this on a vintage 75mm that, in hindsight, didn’t have the best colour rendering, and when shooting wide open the character really took over. Once converted to Rec.709 shots were flatter than I’d expected, I worked on getting colour back into the image first and, 165368 nodes later… ta da!

Agency & morning roll providers: Jamhot

Full film is available to watch now on YouTube.

26/07/2026

Loch birthdays

22/07/2026

08/07/2026

Some outtakes, unseen footage and BTS from our shoot with the boys at Jamhot for CalMac Ferries back in March.

Gearrannan Blackhouse Village. Moments after packing the camera away these birds took flight over the houses, Ross managed to run and capture this right before they settled.

BTS snippets.

We’d kept our kit as light as possible for the shoot as we were island hopping and jumping to and from locations. Very quickly discovered it was far too windy for a matte box and reflector/diffusion (on both the ferry and the islands!)

Thanks for running around with the handycam, until the sea sickness got us all.

Quite moments with on the ferry from Oban to South Uist.

Thankfully we were scheduled to film indoors for most of the second day, it was gale force winds and the worst sideways rain I’d ever seen outside. The islanders seemed unfazed.

Filming in North Uist Distillery Co. with an actual ceilidh band, followed by the best gin and tonics from the distillery bar.

There were lots of unplanned locations spotted as we drove past, like this beautiful pier in Harris and the road that led to it.

Thanks to Ross Baynham for taking one for the team and lifting everyone’s spirits, we were all absolutely frozen at the end of a long day.

And to the coach-load of Italian men who cheered us on.

Calanais Standing Stones.

Sunset over Harris.

03/07/2026

We got the kids a VHS TV this year, which led us to getting a DV camera for documenting family holidays and then reinstalling a cassette player in the camper led us to getting a tape deck in the flat and now we are basically in the 1990s except we still have Bluetooth.

08/04/2026

Five day dream shoot on the islands with Jamhot. Some rare moments without any rain, hail or gale force winds!