For more information on any of our freelancers, please email us at enquiries@thecrewingcompany.com or call the office on 0208 525 4844.

Tom is one of our original members having joined The Crewing Company in 2006 and a highly talented and enthusiastic Lighting Cameraman with experience in most genres from features to documentaries. 

After completing nine years as sole Cameraman on the hit BBC show "Ground Force" he concentrated for a short time on Steadicam operating until finding his true calling with the High Definition version of the acclaimed Polecam camera crane. Based in the North of England, with easy access to Manchester and Scotland, he has recently worked on "Coronation Street" and the new Simon Cowell game show "Red or Black" as well as a major open water swimming series for Channel 4.

 

Good Lighting Cameramen are a tradition in British Broadcasting and Tom is no exception. He has a history of shooting some of the best known television series for the past two decades. Someone who can combine the Lighting Camera skills with a highly developed sense of three dimensional movement is bound to make a good Camera Crane Operator. But Polecam demands particular skills beyond all those. The delicacy of joystick control combined with the broad sweeping moves of the boom pole demand a considerable degree of practice and refinement as well as an awareness of composition from angles that are unavailable to the traditional cameraman.
 

 

The Polecam, in its relatively new HD form, is increasingly becoming the natural camera crane to work alongside the new generation of High Def cameras such as the Canon XF305 and Sony's PMW-500.  Recording to a variety of file types the Flash XDR Recorder caters for all editing systems in a wide spectrum of HD picture quality from 35 to 220 MBps which means the old resolution issues of the SD Polecam are very much worries of the past. The Toshiba 1/3rd inch 3 CCD camera head is low profile and unobtrusive so welcome in smaller music venues where Jimmy Jib's block views and create lighting issues. But where it scores best is portability. From boats to mountains and from flatbed trucks to quads the innovative places to explore the capacity of the Polecam seem to expand yearly. It can be rigged and de-rigged in less than 15 minutes by an experienced operator and needs only one man to work it.