Oliver Ojeil
“In the midst of war, I grew up surrounded by art and cinema. My Dad who was a camera operator and videographer, used to take me with him on set where I stood by him and watched in amazement the entire shooting process unfold while he operated the camera. I remember I was wowed by the entire process and how it is all put together piece by piece. I also loved meeting celebrities on set! At home Dad had some equipment but I guess I was too young to be trusted with, so the only tool I had access to was a tripod, whose mounting plate I used as my viewfinder to look through its hole in order to frame shots while moving around the house and imagining scenes in my head. My Mom works in banking and finance, but my Grandma Feirouz whom I was very close to, was a fashion designer and stylist and I remember I used to stare at her designs in awe and try to imitate her drawings albeit with terrible sketching skills. From a very young age and before I knew how to express my emotions, I loved photography and beauty, and I used to spend hours going cover to cover through fashion magazines she had kept in her atelier, admiring the photography and the beauty of colors, dresses, moods, and the models.”
“The first school I went to was Lycée Français, an international French school in Beirut. Then my parents transferred me to Champville, another French school, in the suburbs of Beirut and away from the occasional violence and shelling breakouts. Literally one of my earliest memories as a child comes from when I was 3 years old. It was one usual morning at Lycée and suddenly the shelling started. I still vividly remember in the midst of the mayhem, people’s screams, washed out blue walls, and metal bars, lot of them. I also remember a relative who lived nearby rushing to pick me up from school. Fast forward a few years, when I was 14 I made my first short film at school. It was highly received and the teacher kept showing it the following years for upcoming students as an example to emulate. I also used to shoot using Dad’s equipment our end of year school party on an SVHS camcorder, which I then edited linearly using VCR to VCR and sold to fellow students and friends for $5 each; I used to cover most of my summer expenses that way.”
“My dream, since I can remember, has always been to come to the US, Hollywood specifically, and make movies. It has been my obsession growing up and when I turned 17 I moved to Pennsylvania and enrolled in the TV/Film program at DeSales University. A year later I transferred to Temple university’s filmmaking program in Philadelphia from which I graduated with honors.”
“After graduating I first started in an internship at Blue VFX in Philadelphia doing post production work in commercials and documentaries. I loved walking between various departments, seeing how motion graphics is created, how color grading is done, and how in 3D you can create something from scratch and make it look hyper real. However, my passion was really being on set, directing and telling stories, so soon after I moved to freelance directing, and by the time I had left the states I was starting to work globally directing music videos and commercials wherever the job took me.”
“My first paying gig was a documentary series about the equine industry which I wrote, shot, directed, edited, color graded and sound mixed. Yeah I know what you’re thinking, but hey I was 19 and it was great money going through college. The producer of the series had seen one of my college films at a festival and loved it a lot, so he approached me with the job at the end of the screening.”
“I moved to Lebanon for few years where in 2009 I started ClicheVFX, a post production house and few years after Chiaroscuro Films a production house through which I worked mainly in advertising and film with some of the world’s biggest companies and brands. I then moved back to Italy for few years from where I extended Chiaroscuro Films’ presence and kept traveling all over the world directing Ads. I did this until I decided to chase the dream and literally turn the page on everything I had built up to that point. Crazy I know, but dreams are worth everything; I moved to Los Angeles in the Summer of 2017.”
“Both my parents were totally supportive. I come from a middle class family with very humble means and my parents spent all their savings and burned through their pension money to finance my college education in the US. I don’t think it can get any more supportive than that and I am endlessly grateful to them for who I am and what I have accomplished so far.”
“By far I can categorize my influences by two simple words, Italy and cinema, especially American cinema. Italy has had an immense influence on me growing up and on my artistic growth and aesthetic evolution. Through my connection with it and the many years I lived there, I spent cultivating knowledge about art by going regularly to museums, exhibitions, and churches, observing beauty and learning about every artist I could. I am enchanted by the renaissance period, and the more I studied it and learned about its artists such as Davinci, Titian, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio, the stronger my understanding of light, composition, and color got, and the better my storytelling had become. I have always considered Renaissance painters to be the first real directors, for they told entire stories so graciously in a single frame, a single scene, using light and shadow and a frozen moment in time. I believe my Italian background and the artistic research and studies I cultivated while living there are very essential to the forming of my visual style and maturity of my vision as a director and artist. My other influence is the invisible, and by that I don’t mean the unseen but that which is all around us yet we don’t see it until we thoroughly and critically study it and observe it. As a fine art photographer and colorist I spend hours analyzing light and shadow and the relationship between color, texture, and various tonal and luminance ranges. My whole understanding of light is different now, not that it wasn’t there before, but I didn’t possess the ability to see it the way I do now. I love looking at everything in life with a critical eye, be it an idea or a visual, so my curiosity for knowledge and the unseen is a huge influence I can say.”
“For now I am mainly directing commercials, and fine tuning No Woman’s Land, a screenplay I recently wrote and which we’re currently gearing up to start. I’m also working as a fashion photographer and currently preparing to partake in 2 exhibitions, Image Nation’s Ethereal this May in Paris, and Eve in The Garden, a solo exhibition at Soho House in West Hollywood for which I’m currently finalizing the collection. My love for color and beauty led me throughout the years to become a colorist, which is a passion-turned-career that I pursue with love. It also keeps me creatively engaged and is a great way to meet other filmmakers and creative people in the film and advertising industries. My most recent color projects are The Hard Way, an action feature shot by Liviu Pojoni, starring Michael Jai White and currently on Netflix and The Subject, a compelling drama starring Jason Biggs shot by Darren Joe, and directed by Lanie Zipoy”
“I’d love to keep shooting, shooting and doing more shooting. More specifically I’m looking forward this year to directing my first feature, No Woman’s Land, a feminist war drama produced by Chady Eli Mattar. In parallel I continue to push myself as an insatiable artist and develop my style as a director, photographer and colorist.”
“I also embarked back in 2009 on a very personal project, a landscape photography book with a very specific theme, and which after working on for 8 years I never got to finish it, mainly due to the time and dedication it requires and my move to Los Angeles. The entire book is made of panoramic photos at very remote areas taken at sunset or sunrise with certain type of skies and certain hues of color in those skies. There are certain shots I had to wait from a year to another to hike again and get the perfect shot because only during a certain period of the year I’d get the colors and type of clouds I wanted. I am 80% through with it and I hope I get to finish it at some point this year. I’m really looking forward to it!”