CASE STUDY TOMPATON
FOCUSED FILMMAKER
BOOZE CRUISES TO MOVIES! In just over a decade, self-taught filmmaker TomPaton has gone fromholiday videos to award-winning feature films
WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH IMAGES ADAM DUCKWORTH AND ROSS DAY M aking the big leap from shooting events, commercials and corporate films into feature films on show in cinemas is just
of problem-solving on set, Tom quickly made a name for himself and his business flourished. He built a team around him as his reputation grew. “I eventually started working with George Burt, nowmy DOP. We’ve worked together for about ten years. It was just me and him for a while but the team grew as we went from event videos to music videos, to TV commercials and shows.” High-profile pop videos for the likes of Disclosure, Artful Dodger and The Prodigy, as well as corporate clients such as Huawei, USA Pro and Clarks shoes, meant Tomwas getting more ambitious and building up the experience to make the leap into full-length features.
having invested his own money and time in getting to where he really wants to be. “I’m a totally self-taught filmmaker and never went to university,” he says. “I was 20 years old, fromWalsall in the West Midlands but living in Cyprus, and filmmaking was what I wanted to do. I had to take a different route into it. “I came up with this great scheme to film bar crawls and booze cruises for Thomas Cook. So I taught myself how to operate a camera, how to edit and I was doing all my own lighting at first. A real one-man band. I was passionate about being a filmmaker – it was the dream.” With a thirst for filmmaking knowledge, a can-do attitude and a love
a pipe dream for many filmmakers. Just one look at the huge money, big teams, scriptwriting, management of actors and complicated finance and distribution that go into feature films and it’s easy to think it’s the sort of opportunity that only happens to other people. But Tom Paton is not one of those people. He wasn’t going to listen to anyone who told him there was only one way of making movies, so he just went ahead and did it himself. Now aged 32, he’s just finishing his fourth feature film,
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PRO MOVIEMAKER WINTER 2018
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