Josh Cole won the music video category as well as the coveted audience vote at the YDA Awards in Cannes this year with his film for Rudimental’s Not Giving In. Now his follow-up video has just been released, this time with tigers, flying martial fights, and aerial shots on location in Thailand.

We know the cliché about working with animals and children but what about tigers?!  

I have always been fascinated with tigers. It started as an idea for a stills project – a shot of this gangster character in a slum somewhere walking with two tigers on leads. A bit like Pieter Hugo’s shots in Nigeria with hyenas. I then started writing tigers into various ideas. This video was based on a friend of mine’s idea to have a circus that gets hi-jacked by some gangsters and it was going to be shot in Rio.

I then developed the idea so that the gangsters steal their tiger and the strong-man of the circus goes into the favela to rescue the tiger from the gangsters. I was all set to shoot this idea for the last Rudimental track but at the last minute I got a bad feeling about the shoot and pulled out.

Then recently I was writing a treatment on a big commercial to shoot in Manila – my friend was out there at the time and told me about the Tiger Temple. I wrote an idea revolving around the temple with martial arts fighting etc. Then I didn’t get the commercial and I kind of blended the two ideas together for this.

Do you write your narratives with a clear idea where they are set – are the characters born out of worlds you already know – or do you write and then go location scouting? What was behind your decision to use this location and how did you find it?

I write the ideas with a good sense of the place then go searching for the perfect location. Much of the time it revolves around the talent and access we have so there’s a lot of adapting the script to the circumstances. In this case we found out just before we left that we couldn’t take the tigers out of the property where they are kept. My producer came up with the idea of changing the gangsters to poachers that run a zoo illegally. I didn’t like the idea at first but think it makes sense now and the zoo location was very cool.

What equipment are you using to get those fabulous pull-back aerial shots?

I use an octocopter to fly the camera which has two operators – one to fly the drone and the other operates the camera movement.

How does the creative process work between yourself and your DP. Is he involved with storyboarding the film or is his influence primarily felt on the shoot? Are there certain creative conversations you tend to have at the start of each project?

I generally visualise the entire video in my head, shot for shot. It doesn’t really deviate too much but quite often we need to improvise on set. Luke my DoP is fantastic at finding pick-ups and realising when we have missed something for the edit like a second angle for a cutaway. We have worked so much together now he has a really good feeling of the kind of compositions and camera movements I like. Luke started out working with 5D and other small camera equipment and comes up with amazing ideas of simple ways to do incredible things.

What were the main challenges of the shoot, how did you resolve them, and how long was it?

We prepared for the shoot for a week then shot for three days – one day at the Tiger Temple and two days at the zoo location. It was pretty intense. The biggest challenges without a doubt were the tigers. Firstly just getting access to them was hard enough – then getting the handlers to agree to what we wanted to do and then to get them to do those things were all incredibly difficult.

There were several times during the process when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen – we owe the success of this to E.D. (Pacific Basin) and her production team who were quite simply incredible in pulling this together. I don’t think anyone else could have done it especially with the time and budget restraints.

The second biggest challenge was shooting all the fight scenes in one day with no fight coordinator when most of the people had no acting or fighting experience and I had no experience directing fight scenes. There was also the continued challenge of getting believable performances from non actors with limited time. Was pretty tricky but I enjoyed every minute.

 Choppers, tigers, exotic location… Was Right Here shot on a mega budget?

 No we had an incredibly small budget when you consider what we did. I was just so lucky to have the team I had on this job. I think everyone just really believed in the project and all just pulled together despite the lack of money.