Adrian Emerton
“Our school district had a huge catchment that also included the towns on the coastline, where there are amazing surf breaks. All of my mates were into bodyboarding and I thought it looked like a ton of fun! It was not long after I started high school that I developed my life-long enduring passion for the ocean.”
“Mom and dad met at university where they were both studying health sciences. Dad is an optometrist and mom is a physiotherapist so having a good education was important to them and so I studied industrial design at university. As dad would often say, ’you just need to get a degree under your belt, mate!’ But industrial design didn’t really appeal to me long term.”
“Creativity has always flowed through my family on both my mom and dad’s side. Mom’s dad was a famous women’s hairdresser in the 1960s, and in his spare time he would paint. Interestingly, my dad’s father was a Royal Marine in the British armed services, and he also took to painting in retirement. So the artistic DNA was certainly there for me to tap into. The big question was how?”
“Although I did all of my majors in industrial design subjects, I found my real passion in electives such as photography. As a kid I had always had in the back of my mind, that one day I wanted to make short films. Whenever my folks ask me what I wanted to do as a kid, I always answer that I want to make ads.”
“Unknown to me at the time, there was another interest that was helping to shape my future. Growing up in the country surrounded by forests and wildlife, meant our family loved wildlife documentaries. Given that mom and dad both came from the sciences, we all received a very healthy dose of David Attenborough. Even today, I still love nerding out on science podcasts and watching wildlife docos.”
“After uni, my career kicked-off like many aspiring filmmakers by ’pulling beers in a bar over summer’! My big break finally came through a mate, who was PA to Robert Dupear, an international Director based out of Sydney. My mate was leaving Rob to study commercial photography, which meant Rob was looking for a new PA, and in a hurry!”
“I had an interview with Rob over a Sunday lunch. The next day I got a call back to say the interview had gone really well! And, could I be at the airport that to fly out to China for a car shoot that evening. They had my airline tickets waiting for me at the airport, so all I needed to do was find my passport, resign my from my job, dump all of my belongings at my folk’s house on the coast, pack my bags and get ready to fly to China. And all in under five hours!”
“I have found that life is always this way. When something big is supposed to happen in your life, it requires you to make equally big decisions to embrace what’s coming your way. Working as Rob’s assistant was a big moment in my life. Between jobs I would look after his house on the Pittwater in Sydney, where he had a secluded beach front property that was only accessible by boat. And then at a moments notice, organize our commercials shoots all across the world. The whole experience, was next level.”
“Rob’s speciality was shooting commercials that were VFX heavy, so my experiences also extended across to VFX and post production. So it seemed natural to make my next career opportunity working with VFX post house PostModern, which is now part of the Film.UA Group internationally.”
“When I first started, there was another producer who was under an incredible workload, which is why I was brought into help. However, three weeks after starting she became so overloaded that she left, leaving me to ’fill her shoes’. So here I was now, producing VFX productions on a Hollywood feature film and a ton of big TV commercials, first time into this sort of gig. It was a ’baptismal of fire’.”
“Fortunately, I knew my way around 3D modelling and retouching, having learnt these skills at university. Obviously my time with Rob also added to my understanding of post workflows, so it wasn’t as if I was totally green. But I have to admit, my early days with PostModern was all about learning to swim.”
“I was enjoying life until my girlfriend at the time, was going through a terrible experience with her mom’s health. And so I quit my job in Sydney to be near her, during this period. And so I fell out of advertising for the next three years. But when one door closes another door opens. And I soon found myself working in marketing and sales with an Apple reseller, selling tech into the education sector.”
“However, my destiny was never to be a business sales manager. So at 27 years of age, I made a spur of the moment decision to fly to Los Angeles to get back into advertising. Working with Rob, we were in the US shooting TVCs all of the time, so I had a ton of contacts and friends in that part of the world. As soon as I landed in the California, I bought myself a car and drove to a bunch of interviews with all of the production companies I knew.”
“Rather naively, I thought the right job would find me, just by throwing myself into the ’universe of opportunity’. But the realities of not knowing what I wanted to specialize in, severely limited my opportunities to get a job.”
“After three months of trying to catch a break, I sold my car and decided to travel the world for a while. A bit like my interview with Rob and flying to China, I got a job interview with a ski chalet in the French Alps. I soon found myself flying from LA to London, and then driving across France to my next job!”
“It was the most amazing place to live and I was having a ton of fun working in Europe. But at the back of my mind, I had this nagging feeling that I was just putting my life on hold. I knew that I needed to find someway of starting my creative career. Then I hit upon this idea of combining my love of photography with my love of the ocean.”
“So while I was working in France, I started to invest in camera equipment and an underwater camera housing. I then resigned and flew out to Ericeira on the coast of Portugal, which is now world famous for its amazing surf breaks.”
“I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Ericeira was becoming well known in the surfing world, which is why I decided to go there and see it for myself. My first day in the water, I took a bunch of shots which I then submitted to one of the international Bodyboarding magazines. To my shock, I got a call at 5am in Lisbon to say my photo was going to be on the front cover.”
“So the very first time I had taken my camera into the water, I managed to get a paying job. And that’s pretty much how I got started as a bodyboarding photographer, which is amazing really. With a modest amount of exposure, but still no fortune, I decided to return back to Sydney and try my luck as an ocean photographer.”
“I set myself up at Cronulla, near Sydney, shooting the waves at Shark Island. These days, I am mostly known for those particular waves; which is interesting that you can become known for a set of waves. It’s not that surprising though, given that the surf breaks around Cronulla are world famous.”
“I spent a lot of time in the water there, practicing and practicing, and pretty much hating everything I shot. I then started to upgrade my gear as the technology got better, and really started to enjoy what I was shooting.”
“And then out of the blue, one of the companies I had worked for in marketing, before leaving Australia, asked me if I could do content production. Given I had already worked in marketing for them, this role suddenly opened doors to me as a professional shooter.”
“This is where all of my experiences came together, from my days with Rob, to working in VFX, and later in marketing and sales. This was right about the time that cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket Camera, became available and you could now easily shoot in RAW. So my earlier career had been a long slow burn towards cinematography, but finally I had arrived.”
“Back then I was mainly doing corporate content with my ocean cinematography being more of a passion than a career. But after a period of time, my reputation for lifestyle shooting and ocean work became more commercially popular, and so all of my interests suddenly came together.”
“It didn’t take long before I had a core group of regular clients. And then a whole bunch of international gigs came flooding in for big brands like Google and Netflix. And before I knew it, I was back to flying around the world shooting commercial content in Singapore, India, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, Texas and a bunch of other countries. Just like old times!”
“My thing is lifestyle and adventure, and I am now getting more natural history doco style work which is awesome. I love combining the natural history cinematography with the human element, which is more the style of work I am getting these days. It is essentially running gun, but with cinematic kit for documentary style content. You’re discovering your content’s story through a cinematic approach, which is so liberating and creative.”
“There was one job I did for Netflix, where they wanted this style for a promo. There are a lot of moving parts to these sorts of gigs, where you are shooting in places like Taiwan for an international brand. You have to be really focussed on the task at hand, because they are expect nothing less than world quality production values.”
“I find my producing and post production experiences are critical to shooting content for these types of clients. I also do work for Microsoft who send me off on documentary assignments to some truely spectacular places, such as Kakadu in the Outback. For this sort type of project I often bring together the crew, including; Director, sound department, AC’s, Photographers as well as other Camera operators and lighting Department, while still being the lead DOP. So it’s not your usual type of agency/production company relationship I have with large corporations. It is something far more creative and fun.”
“Covid 2019 was a crazy time for everyone I know. I was super busy shooting all over the world before the lock downs. And then Australia went into hard lockdown. The Government closed all of the borders, so we all had to settle with living on an isolated island for the next two years. Fortunately, I was able to go back to my first love spending most of that time in the ocean shooting, while the pandemic passed over us all.”
“Now Australia is open to the world again and the demand for my shooting style has come back. So life now looks something like it did before 2019, with me travelling shooting projects for global corporations again. In fact ,I’ve just returned from an incredible documentary shoot in Northern Vietnam, around the Ha Giang region. This was a special one for me and excited to be releasing the film in the coming months!”
“Everyday I am working, I am just so grateful that my life’s journey has turned out to be so challenging and fun. One of the greatest aspects of this are the people who work closest to me, who I’m lucky to call some of my best friends. I truly wouldn’t be where I am without them and consider myself very fortunate to share with them one of the best jobs in the world.”