Michael Leblanc – Cinematographer
This is a portfolio website that I made for Michael Leblanc, an amazing cinematographer working out of Toronto, who has worked on many music videos for prominent Canadian bands, and is currently getting attention for the video for “Our Hell” by Emily Haines.

After wanting to get a portfolio on the web for a long time, Mike was finally driven to do something about it after being nominated for a best music video award at the Plus Camerimage Film Festival in Lodz, Poland, a festival geared toward the art of cinematography, for the “Our Hell” video. It’s a super cool video you can see on his new site that he shot using infrared film and some military camera from the States.

Mike wanted a very simple site, nothing too distracting and made a layout in Photoshop for me as a template for the site. I coded it up based on the template, adding interactivity and giving suggestions to make it more usable and appealing. The overall result is a simple, clean, one page site that focuses viewer attention on his body of work with very little clutter.

Considering it only took about a full day’s work in total to get it together (aside from encoding the videos, which took Mike a really long time because of an underpowered computer and a quest for perfection), I’m quite pleased with the outcome. Hopefully he’ll go out there and meet Roger Deakins, Christopher Doyle and/or Janusz Kaminski and get them to check out the site, where they will fall in love with the simple aesthetic and seek me out for their online presences.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Mike was the cinematographer on my last film Regret, and did a fantastic job, above and beyond what should really be expected of him on set. He kept things positive and moving along, and I don’t remember him ever doubting the feasibility of anything I would ask him for, which was very reassuring for me at the time. A great guy to work with, to be sure.