Handmade

Handmade is a simple, digestable, 1-minute video series intended to take the viewer on a visual journey through how a product is made - that’s it. I pitched this series to Esquire initially in response to a lack of well-perfoming videos, in an attempt to better target the audience. It was pitched in 2017, in a time where mezmerizing video was king and was sweeping the internet by storm.

My Roles: Pitching the series, executive producing the series from the start, directing each of the episodes, shooting the episodes post-pilot, maintaining the visual language in the edit, finding new companies and talent for the series’ growth.

Our pilot episode featured Will Lisak, the incredibly talented craftsman behind Etwas bags. I fought for this series to be strong out of the gate, and we shot with an Arri Alexa Mini w/ Leica Summicron-C glass & Macrolux +1 and +2 diopters.

The Leather Bag pilot garnered 2.3M organic views on Facebook.

We shot the below Leather Wallet episode within the same shoot day as a bonus. A smaller piece in itself, but the intricacies, sewing work, and knife work, are still present and eye-catching.

Handmade then took us to Beacon NY where we found Guy Rabut, a world-class violin maker. His workshop, his jovial personality, and spectacular creations made for another impactful episode. I shot, edited, and color graded this episode myself alongside a co-producer. I worked with a Sony FS7 with Zeiss glass.

On our Beacon trip, we also stopped at Niche Modern to see how their handmade glass lighting was created. We dodged heat ovens, saw glass being hand-blown, and beautiful fixtures being finished. Their products are of immaculate quality.

On a combo of luck and thanks to a pre-existing press trip, my co-producer Travis Gorzelsky and I made it to London and shot the below two episodes. Our first stop was at Lockwood Umbrellas, a company I’d heard about from their sheer level of quality and antiquated-mixed-modern style of umbrella making. The maker duo puts an unparalleled amount of work into each product making it truly a piece of luxury and work of art to own.

In London we also made a trip to the Brompton factory, where they make the world’s most popular foldable bikes. This was a new step for the series as these bikes are not entirely made by hand. However, we set out to capture the moments that were in the Brompton factory setting.

Finally, the series was bought by Tod’s, the renouned Italian shoemaker. They came to us for a video that shows the level of craftsmanship that goes into each of their Winter Gommino boots. We shot at their incredibly designed factory in Torre De Palme Italy with some of their top craftsmen and women for three days, creating two different videos for the brand. It was an amazing experience to see a series taken from inception get sold to a company like Tod’s.