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Whimsical, beautiful, and distinctive, you can pick a Natasha Foster film out of a line up purely from the vibrancy of imagination in every frame.
After starting out in fashion photography, Foster forged her signature cinematic experimental aesthetic with brands including Samsung & Google, creating films that feel like falling down a rabbit hole into a fairytale wonderland. Here, Foster speaks about her influences, her favourite commercials, and the best part of the filmmaking process.
Foster’s films are bold, colourful and beautiful, and draw inspiration from her childhood all the way up to the art she saw on her honeymoon. “I’m inspired by everything,” she says. “My grandmother, 90’s suburbia, colour, Lewis Carroll, fashion…” The list continues. “Frida Kahlo,fairies, Martin Parr, Tracey Emin, The Secret Garden… and an exhibition I saw on my honeymoon in Naoshima by James Turrell called Backside of the Moon. I love installation art.”
Her love of installation leaks into her own filmmaking process and approach to building unconventional sets and working in studios. “I love pushing the boundaries,” says Foster. “Blending technologies with traditional filmmaking techniques, dreaming up fantastic costumes and sets, taking a mixed media approach… if it feels impossible, I want to do it.” Her work and worlds can feel like a visual puzzle and she loves constructing a story alongside practical pieces.
When it comes to finding fun in scripts and briefs, she describes what she’s always looking out for. “Quirky characters, fun and bold colour. Aesthetics that are stylised and heightened and stories that aren’t bound by reality.” Foster speaks of loving Nadia Lee Cohen’s Dinner’s Ready with Sophia Loren as a commercial she can’t stop thinking about. “The colour, the set, the characters, the blocking… Heaven.”
Looking forward into the future, Natasha sees herself continuously pushing the boundaries of non-traditional narrative. “I want to create work that combines fashion, constructed spaces, BIG characters, colour and technology such as LED walls and robots,” she explains. “All of this to tell bold and striking visual stories.”
Her self-described key ingredients in her work are “colour, fun, and MORE!”.
