How to make a feature with a commercials mindset
When director Lawrence Jacomelli needed to shoot his feature Blood Star in 10 days, he realised that moviemaking magic can happen when you apply lessons learned in ad production.
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So you want to make a feature film, but you have no contacts in the film industry, no investment money, and no support. This is my story — as someone who did it anyway.
I’m a British director, based in the UK, and I come from commercials. That’s where I learned to direct: how to make decisions quickly, how to commit early, and how to keep things moving under pressure. You prepare obsessively, you move fast, and once a decision is made, you live with it.
Commercials are sprints. Features are marathons.
Like many commercial directors, I’d talked about making a feature for years — but the script for Blood Star came from an unlikely source. It was written by my wife, Victoria Taylor. We run Beast Films together, and until that point our work had lived almost entirely in commercials and branded content.
Then suddenly we had a feature-length script on our hands — a desert road-movie thriller. There was no one to approve it or make it safer. It came down to a single question: did we trust the script — and ourselves — enough to take the risk and make it?
We were attempting something deliberately ambitious: a road movie set in the American desert, shot on a micro-budget. There was no version of this film that could be made cheaply or comfortably.
Something had to give. What we chose to give up was time. The question became brutally simple: could you shoot a desert road movie in ten days?
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Commercials are sprints. Features are marathons. The only way this was possible was by applying the discipline of commercial filmmaking to a feature — committing early, planning obsessively, and designing every decision around speed, pressure, and execution.
In advertising, you don’t discover the film on the shoot. You decide what the film is before you arrive.
We put the call out on Staff Me Up and hired the entire crew remotely. The first four first ADs who read the script all said the same thing: there was no way to do it in ten days. The fifth said “maybe” — if we cut scenes, kept locations close, and planned the film with absolute precision.
So myself, Nick Ryan (1st AD), and Pascal Combes-Knoke (DP) pulled the script apart — moving scenes, testing variations, and rebuilding the schedule until it finally locked into ten days. From that point on, everything was about engineering the film to survive inside that constraint.
Then we did something that changed everything: we collapsed geography.
I storyboarded the entire feature then built a full animatic with dialogue, sound, music, pacing, and tone… I watched the film end-to-end before we shot a single frame.
Every location sat within roughly a one-mile radius of base camp. Once the locations were locked, the film stopped behaving like a road movie and started behaving like a backlot. The diner, gas station, house, and road all sat close enough that we could pivot constantly — switching from exteriors to interiors when weather hit, or moving to desert scenes if a set wasn’t ready.
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In advertising, you don’t discover the film on the shoot. You decide what the film is before you arrive. That discipline carried over directly. I storyboarded the entire feature — which took three months — then built a full animatic with dialogue, sound, music, pacing, and tone. I watched the film end-to-end before we shot a single frame. Scenes that didn’t work structurally were cut early. Not rewritten. Cut.
We were forty minutes from the nearest town, with no running water, no fuel, and no power. Heat by day, below zero at night, sandstorms, heavy rain, flooding, constant wind that played havoc with sound.
When we arrived in the desert, the goal wasn’t exploration — it was execution. We were forty minutes from the nearest town, with no running water, no fuel, and no power. Heat by day, below zero at night, sandstorms that arrived without warning, heavy rain, flooding, constant wind that played havoc with sound — and after sunset, total black.
The Mojave at night is hostile to cameras. You point a lens at it and nothing comes back. Rather than fight that, we accepted it. Darkness wasn’t a flaw; it was part of the film’s language. If something disappeared into black, we let it.
Problems arrived fast. Two days before shooting, our hero car blew its transmission and wiped out the contingency budget before day one.
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Camera choice, lighting strategy, and lensing were dictated by speed. The RED Gemini became the backbone of the shoot for its low-light performance and the freedom it gave us to move quickly without sacrificing image quality. Night exteriors were built around a single consistent source on an 80ft condor, with setups kept minimal and mobile. Momentum mattered more than refinement.
Problems arrived fast. Two days before shooting, our hero car blew its transmission and wiped out the contingency budget before day one. What replaced it — a 1977 Mustang II — wasn’t planned, but it ended up defining the film visually. Its geometry, patina, and interior styling worked in our favour. Resistance, I’ve learned, is often what turns problems into disasters.
Day one set the tone. No matter how much you prepare, things still go wrong. Our primary road location was locked down by another production. Police told us to pack up and leave. We still had a major blood gag to shoot.
The performances had to arrive fully formed.... Blocking, performance, and emotional continuity were locked before cameras rolled.
We cheated geography, rolled the car onto sand, shot it once, and moved on. That take is in the final film — rough, imperfect, and exactly right.
The performances had to arrive fully formed. Britni Camacho, in her first lead role, carried the film under extreme physical and emotional pressure, often out of sequence. Preparation made that possible. Blocking, performance, and emotional continuity were locked before cameras rolled. The camera didn’t manufacture tension. It observed it.
Opposite her, John Schwab’s sheriff was framed with restraint. Authority wasn’t emphasised — it was assumed. The camera rarely challenged him, allowing menace to live in stillness rather than exaggeration.
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We ran three cameras on almost every setup — not as a luxury, but as insurance. Two takes per scene, multiple angles at once, meant speed without losing editorial flexibility. Editor Ross Evison later described the footage as “controlled chaos,” which is probably the most accurate description of how it felt to make it.
Editor Ross Evison later described the footage as “controlled chaos.”
All blood and practical effects moments were one-takers; there was no time to clean up and reset. The priority was coverage - performance, geography, reaction, pressure - captured simultaneously. The tension isn’t built through accumulation; it’s generated by compression.
That approach came directly from commercials. When time is limited, you don’t chase perfection — you design for editorial freedom. You protect the scene, not the shot.
Blood Star is not the story of overcoming limitations. It is the story of being shaped by them. The heat, the dust, the darkness, the fear - none of it was conquered. It was accepted, absorbed, and allowed to leave its mark.
What began with a leap of faith has now moved beyond the conditions it was made under. A script written in a day. A crew built online. Ten days in the desert.
What began with a leap of faith has now moved beyond the conditions it was made under. A script written in a day. A crew built online. Ten days in the desert. A landscape that resisted the film until it began to define it. On screen, a woman fighting to reclaim her voice. Behind the camera, a crew doing the same — holding momentum under pressure. We finished the film.
Blood Star has now been released in the UK, across Europe, and in the US. It’s beginning to find its audience — responding to it, and recognising themselves in its tension, pressure, and silence. That moment — when the film is no longer yours, when it exists independently and meets strangers on its own terms — is the quiet payoff. The confirmation that the risk was real, the commitment mattered, and the work now has a life beyond the people who made it.
This wasn’t a film made despite the conditions. It was carved out of them.
