Documentary film, fine art photography, brand transformation, advisory. Thirty years, one intelligence, different light. The method: find the true thing, then build the form that tells it — at the scale where belief and money move.
DocumentaryFilms about the people history left out.
Camp X — produced, written, and directed. Narrated by Leslie Nielsen. The feature on Canada’s secret Allied intelligence school — sabotage, assassination, espionage — where Ian Fleming trained before he wrote James Bond. At the start the story was classified: the site bulldozed, the records destroyed, the only witnesses bound by lifelong oaths. Blocked on all fronts, I made the case to the intelligence services of six nations — and was positively vetted by each. Every fact on camera corroborated by a second witness. The highest-rated documentary in History Television Canada’s history, sold to more than twenty countries. It rewrote the accepted record of the secret war. Read the story →
Borradaile’s Century — writer, director, producer, cinematographer. A portrait of Oscar-winning cinematographer Osmond Borradaile, who lived to 101 and whose career spanned 1913 to 1999 — the entire evolution of the medium. Shot on Super 16mm across eleven countries on four continents, past and present joined in match dissolve. Read the story →
Snappers — a short portrait of photographer Douglas Kirkland: six decades of iconic images, filmed in natural light in his Hollywood Hills home. On craft, curiosity, and staying creatively alive across a lifetime.
A new feature documentary is in research with international partners.
Olympians — twenty-four of Canada’s most accomplished Olympic athletes, photographed as sport-art across two years and a continent. A 160-page fine art book with Bruce Mau Design. View the series →
Campaigns — portrait and campaign photography. I build the moment, then make it permanent. View the work →
Work held in private collections internationally. New work is underway in the studio.
How I see
The observer is inside the observed. Physics, the biology of perception, and the neuroscience of the body have each, independently, retired the four-hundred-year picture of a detached mind reading a dead machine. We know the world from within it — made of the same matter, answering with the body. The photograph is that answer.
— Jeremy McCormack, Hellerup, DK, June 2026
WritingBooks about how we become who we are.
A father’s handbook for the first year — in final manuscript.
Brand & AdvisoryTransformation that shows up in the pipeline.
LogPoint · Milestone · Irisity. Earlier, in Canada: the L Tower’s Olympic Legacy campaign, the Sobeys national private-label strategy, national commercials for Molson, Coors, and Hershey.
Canada’s secret Allied intelligence school — and the only filmed testimony of the agents who trained there.
Recreating the .45 Thompson on set — every fact reconstructed, then corroborated.Commander John Ainsworth-Davies during the war.On the trail of a story the records had buried.
When I began, Camp X was a void. The site had been bulldozed. The records were destroyed during the war or classified after it. The story survived only in the memory of aging operatives bound by lifelong oaths.
I secured a bestselling intelligence author to write the film. The British government invoked the Official Secrets Act and forced him to cut all contact. I brought on a historical advisor and three PhDs to comb the newest archival releases across three countries; they returned redactions and wartime falsifications planted to deceive the enemy. Conventional research had reached its limit.
So I went to the people. Across six countries I met agents, earned their trust, and widened the circle until they spoke on camera. Over three years I was positively vetted by intelligence services in six countries, and agencies that had stonewalled me opened their material. Among the sources: the real men Ian Fleming turned into James Bond — including a lifelong assassin Fleming himself ran during the war, verified over a further year before he appeared on camera.
Because every claim faced official denial, I built the film like a proof. No narrator speaks over classified content: every secret is told on camera by the person who lived it — and confirmed by a second who lived it too. It had to work three ways at once — as thriller, as evidence, as emotional story — visually rich and unimpeachable in the same frame.
The result revealed where Allied agents learned sabotage, assassination, and espionage, and where the secret war in the western hemisphere was run. It became the highest-rated documentary in History Television Canada’s history — a success that grew the channel’s own subscriber base — sold to more than twenty countries, and spawned books, further documentaries, and a scripted drama series. History Television’s VP of Programming called it “the first and definitive history.”
The British Foreign Office prevented the film from being screened in Britain, ruling that nearly every moment remained classified.
I told the story I came to tell: appreciation and absolution for secret agents who received none.
Behind the Film
Narration. Leslie Nielsen, returning to his Shakespearean roots — a personal tribute to his brother Erik Nielsen, Canada’s former Deputy Prime Minister, and to the camp’s part in defeating fascism.
Music. A theme by John Ainsworth, a jazz pianist who trained at Camp X himself, reworked for solo cello; score by Jamie Catto, founder of Faithless.
The people who made it
Leslie NielsenNarratorJohn AinsworthComposer, Camp X themeJamie CattoSoundtrack
Advisors. William Stevenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid, originally contracted to write the film; Milton Shulman; Naval Commander Ainsworth-Davies, military; Brian Loring Villa, historical.
Press. Covered across all three Canadian national newspapers, national radio and television, and the Sunday Times of London. “Camp X spy school gave Fleming licence to kill” — The Sunday Times. “Remarkable” — Toronto Star. “One of the great Canadian secrets of the Second World War” — National Post. “Where Allied soldiers were turned into James Bonds” — The Globe and Mail.
Broadcaster. “Superb… an entertaining, credible, and powerful story.” — Sydney Suissa, History Television.
Festivals. Official selection, Palm Springs International Film Festival — invited to introduce screenings, take Q&As, and give an hour-long talk to two thousand people. Official selection, Atlantic Film Festival and Whistler Film Festival.
A cinematographer who lived a hundred and one years and saw the entire life of film — answered, frame for frame, on his own format.
Shooting from the helicopter.At the camera — Carlingford, Ireland.With the guardian of the temple, India.
Osmond Borradaile shot for the camera from 1913 to 1999: hand-cranked silents, talkies, Technicolor, the mobile 16mm revolution he helped lead. He won acclaim for the natural light and on-location authenticity he brought to classics like Elephant Boy and The Four Feathers, and he helped shape the visual language of early cinema itself.
I made the film the way he made his — on film, on location, in the real light of real places. The whole picture was shot on Super 16mm, his format, across eleven countries on four continents, returning, nearly a century later, to the exact locations and focal lengths of his classic work: the Hollywood Hills, the forests of India, the mountains of Ethiopia, the streets of London, the Irish countryside. Past and present meet in match dissolve, his image flowing into mine. CanWest called the result “a gem.”
One sequence captures a rare ceremony around a replica Ark of the Covenant — echoing the moment Borradaile filmed when the true Ark was brought into the light to honour Haile Selassie’s return from exile.
Keeping undeveloped film cold through humid jungles and clear of every airport X-ray was its own campaign. The reward is the thing only film gives: layered, luminous, alive.
On location — four continents
Above Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.The Guardian — one monk, appointed for life to keep the Ark of the Covenant.The Sopwith, California.Formation overhead, shot from the open cockpit.Mysore, India.First light, on the water.
Behind the Film
Narration & performance. Golden Globe-nominee Tom Cavanagh narrates; stage and screen legend Sir John Neville (CBE, CM) performs Borradaile.
Music. Soundtrack by acclaimed Canadian pianist Peter Allen, who recorded a new reading of Chopin’s Nocturne for the film.
Cinematography. Shot entirely on Super 16mm under Kodak’s sponsorship for cinematographic excellence.
The people who made it
Sir John NevillePerforming BorradaileTom CavanaghNarratorPeter AllenMusic
Festivals. Official selection, Atlantic Film Festival and Whistler Film Festival.
Press. “A gem, that rare example of a documentary that works both as a historical document and as an hour of marvelous entertainment” — CanWest. “Visually stunning” — History Television. “Lovingly crafted” — The Gazette.
Twenty-four of Canada’s most accomplished Olympic athletes, photographed as sport-art across two years and a continent.
From the series — alpine racing, Beaver Creek.
I conceived Olympians to do two things at once: celebrate athletic excellence as fine art, and raise the national profile of twenty-four Olympians who had given the country its proudest moments. The athletic body has been a subject of art since the first Greek sculptors cut it in marble — discipline, motion, and grace made visible. I returned it to that lineage, at scale, in photographs.
The series became the cultural centrepiece of a landmark Toronto development designed by Daniel Libeskind — a real-estate campaign turned into a national tribute, and a building that became Toronto’s highest-value residential property per square foot. I raised the financing, produced every element, and photographed each athlete across North America over two years — from World Cup skiing at Beaver Creek to show jumping at Spruce Meadows — in portrait and in action.
To bring the work to print, I partnered with Bruce Mau Design on a 160-page fine art book — 140 colour and black-and-white photographs, sequenced visually across sports by form, motion, and tone, so that every athlete holds equal presence. The book sits in bold red slipcases flanking a central white volume: red, white, red, the proportions of the flag — a tribute built into the object itself.
The fine art book
The series
Creative direction. Emile Molin, now Senior Design Manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Design. Alex Viault. Printing. Flash Reproductions, Toronto.
Portrait and campaign photography. I build the moment, then make it permanent.
Directing a campaign shoot — building the light, the moment, the frame.
I work as a director. Before the camera matters, the room does. I build calm, safety, trust, a shared intention between me and whoever stands in front of the lens. That is where the image begins.
I shape the light, set the camera close, and direct the engagement until the expression I am after arrives by design. The pictures read like stills from a film: intimate, cinematic, exact. In motion, in stillness, in shadow, what looks effortless is the product of direction.
A portrait is a collaboration the sitter never sees being made. Everyone sits for me — athletes and authors, executives and elders, children — and the work begins before the camera does: I meet each person fully, build calm and trust, and create the conditions where their real presence comes forward. Then I build the light — found or made, whatever the face deserves — and direct from intimate range until what is essential arrives. Character and depth, made visible.
About
I make true things visible — across documentary film, fine art photography, brand transformation, and advisory. Thirty years of the same intelligence in different light. Brand strategist by trade; filmmaker, photographer, and writer by practice.
I produced, wrote, and directed Camp X, a feature documentary on the secret Allied intelligence operations that helped shape the outcome of the Second World War. Coverage spanned all three of Canada’s national newspapers, national radio and television, and the Sunday Times of London — major features in Maclean’s, the Toronto Star, and the Ottawa Citizen. Camp X became History Television Canada’s highest-rated documentary, sold to more than twenty countries, and rewrote the historical record on clandestine warfare in the western hemisphere. My films have drawn a $100,000 Rogers production prize, a CTV producing fellowship, and Kodak’s sponsorship for cinematographic excellence.
As a national broadcast journalist at CBC Television, I wrote and edited interviews with figures from John Bolton to Richard Dawkins to Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the daily international-affairs program On The Map — the counter-narrative discipline that has shaped every film since.
My fine art photography is held in private collections internationally, with new work underway in the studio. My fatherhood book — a handbook for the first year — is in final manuscript. A new feature documentary is in research with international partners.
I have worked from Denmark since 2016, and every engagement has delivered measurable results. At LogPoint I led a global brand transformation producing 500% traffic growth and five consecutive record pipeline quarters. At Milestone I reshaped positioning from technical-led to benefits-led, created EMEA’s most successful webinar series, and earned the Superhero Award. At Irisity I led post-merger brand transformation and investor communications — messaging that moved the stock. I have moderated filmmaker conversations at IDFA Amsterdam and helped relaunch Doc Lounge at the Aarhus Film School.
Before Denmark, I founded three companies in Canada. I conceived the Olympic Legacy campaign, photographed twenty-four Olympians across North America, and worked with Bruce Mau on the resulting fine art book and exhibition — transforming Daniel Libeskind’s $200M L Tower into Toronto’s highest-value property per square foot. I wrote the national private-label strategy for Sobeys, now moving more than five billion dollars of product annually. I produced national television commercials for Molson, Coors, and Hershey.
I rebuilt a senior career from zero in a foreign market, without local language or network. Now taking advisory engagements where brand, narrative, and creative direction are the same job — and developing new ventures of my own.
At work — three decades
Grouse Mountain — timelapse.At sea — Super 16mm.India — with the elephants.Los Angeles — pulling focus.
Now
New photographic work is underway in the studio.
A father’s handbook for the first year is in final manuscript.
A new feature documentary is in research.
I take selected advisory engagements.
Contact
For advisory engagements, commissions, and project conversations.
