ABOUT
Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, Disney+, Apple TV+, Netflix, Amazon Studios, and the BBC have all trusted Graham Bartholomew on set. He has been doing this for over a decade, based in Cape Town, working across Southern Africa and internationally on major film and television productions.
The images that carry the most commercial weight on any production are the ones that sell it: the poster, the press kit, the thumbnail a viewer pauses on while scrolling a streaming platform, the key art a studio’s marketing department builds an entire campaign around. These images are shot during live takes, in continuity, while the cameras are rolling. Graham understands this before he arrives on set, and he shoots accordingly, with the final marketing asset already in mind.
What takes longer to explain is everything else.
Access, on a major production, is earned rather than given. Graham works quietly. He understands set hierarchy, reads the room, and stays out of the way of the creative process. Directors and DOPs frequently do not register that he is there. That is not an accident; it is the whole point. The images that result carry the integrity of real moments, not staged ones, and that difference is visible on screen and on a poster.
A film set is a temporary world. The relationships, the small moments between takes, the look on a director’s face when something works; none of it makes the final cut. Graham’s job is to make sure the best of it endures, both in the marketing campaign the world sees, and in the record of how the film was actually made.
SERVICES
Unit Stills: shooting during live takes, in continuity, capturing the images that serve the marketing campaign, poster, press kit, and streaming thumbnail.
Key Art and Gallery Shoots: dedicated sessions with principal cast, on set or on location, producing the hero images that anchor a film’s visual identity.
Publicity Stills: portraits and editorial images for press, interviews, and distribution.
Behind the Scenes Coverage: a documentary record of the production, for the studios, the heads of department, and the people who were there.
Available for features, television series, and limited series. Based in Cape Town, available internationally.
“It is always an effortless and stress-free experience; a request is never repeated, nothing falls between the cracks, all deadlines are met, and one feels safe — a rare word in this business. World-class is another.”
Dezi Rorich. Unit Publicist on Motion Picture & Television Productions.