From Commercials to Narrative: Trying to Find My Way Into Longer Stories

2026 has been one of the most bizarre, rewarding, and frustrating years in recent memory. I’ve shot advertisements for some huge companies that have been on my radar for years, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. However, the advertising industry is going through a difficult period. With the rise of AI and a general slowdown in advertising, work has become noticeably quieter.

There’s another layer to this: for the past two years, I haven’t really been advertising myself or pushing commercially in the same way I used to. I’ve deliberately been trying to shift my career towards narrative.

For a long time, commercial work was a continuous flow, while narrative was something I was interested in on the side. Now, I’m trying to make narrative my full-time focus because I want to shoot feature films, documentaries, and fiction in general. It is much, much harder to get into that world. It can feel almost safeguarded.

After ten years of shooting advertisements, I feel like I’ve scratched that itch. I’ve done a lot of the cool things I wanted to do. Plus I was running G6 MoCo in England, where we were pioneering new techniques and doing things that genuinely felt like world firsts.

But somewhere along the way, advertising stopped feeling magical to me. Perhaps part of that comes from the reason I fell in love with advertising in the first place. I grew up watching television in the 90s, when commercials could feel genuinely creative, strange, ambitious, and memorable. There was a sense that brands were willing to communicate in bold ways.

These days, much of advertising can feel like the same thing over and over again. It feels like fewer people are willing to take the kind of risks that made me fall in love with the medium. Narrative feels different.

The strange thing about trying to move from commercial cinematography into narrative is that it feels like a completely different world.

Despite the craft being fundamentally the same, you can quickly get pigeonholed into a box: the guy who shoots advertisements. The cinematography skills, lighting knowledge, camera experience, ability to work with directors, crews, actors, schedules, pressure, and changing circumstances all transfer. However, somehow, the environments can feel completely different.

I wouldn’t call the narrative industry hostile, but it can definitely feel gatekept and safeguarded. Another complication for me personally is that I never went to university. I started working very young, in lighting, and gradually worked my way through the industry, learning, failing, improving, and eventually becoming a director of photography. That route has given me a huge amount of practical experience, but I’ve also realised that university is about more than education. It can be a place where people build relationships that can become professional collaborations ten years before they eventually become so. It isn’t a magic key to getting hired, but those friendships and networks can become incredibly valuable when everyone eventually finds their place in the industry. I don’t have that network.

Now I’m living in Italy while still wanting to work with British productions, which adds another layer of complexity. So, yes, it’s a slightly messed-up situation. But I’m also excited about it because I know what it feels like to grind towards something I genuinely want. The last time I had that feeling, I was pushing myself towards advertising. I worked incredibly hard, took risks, and eventually built a career that I’m proud of. Now I’m doing it again. Only this time, I know much more about myself, about cinematography, and about the kind of stories I want to be part of. I want to shoot feature films, documentaries, and work in fiction and narrative environments where I can go deeper into a story and explore what I’m capable of as a cinematographer.

There’s something more mature about that ambition. Commercials are often only thirty seconds long, requiring you to create an idea, make it beautiful, communicate it instantly, and ultimately tell someone to buy something. Narrative gives you the opportunity to breathe, spend time with characters, let images develop, build an atmosphere, and tell a story through cinematography rather than simply creating a beautiful thirty-second burst. That’s what I’m hungry for now.

So, with certainty, the next chapter is narrative. That’s the environment I want to work in, the environment I want to grow in, and ultimately, the environment where I want to offer my vision. The transition might be difficult, take longer than I want, and there will probably be plenty of closed doors. But I’m excited about the grind because I’ve done this before, and this time, I know exactly why I’m doing it.