Case Study

Building the Visual World of the James Malcolm Band

One cinematic music video became multiple productions, live concerts, and an ongoing creative partnership as the James Malcolm Band found its audience.

Client: Settle Down Productions / James Malcolm Band
Industry: Music & Entertainment
Year: 2025 to 2026

In 2025 Jason Milgram of Settle Down Productions called me about a music video for an artist he was developing, the James Malcolm Band. The song was "Knock on Marble."

From the start I did not want to treat it as a performance video. The song had a story and an emotional world behind it, and the goal was something cinematic that worked like a short film built around the music.

Jason and I connected quickly, and we started developing the production.

The location

Finding the world

The biggest piece was the location. We landed on 1000 Palms Hideout in North Miami.

The property was once a tree nursery, so it is full of strange palms, unusual textures, open-air spaces and a vintage Airstream trailer. Rather than manufacture a world from scratch, we found one that already existed.

Videographer filming with a cinema camera rig in a forest setting

The film

Knock on Marble

I shot it on the Z CAM E2-F6 with a new set of Blazar Mantis anamorphic lenses. The anamorphic look gave the project the texture and character I wanted, rather than something clean and commercial.

I brought Arie Forma onto the production for behind the scenes coverage and assistance. The location gave us an enormous range to build around, the Airstream especially.

Dov Gurewicz filming with a cinema camera rig inside an Airstream trailer

Watch the film

The VFX

Making someone disappear

One of the storytelling moments involved Malcolm's girlfriend disappearing from the scene. We used VFX to make it feel integrated into the visual language of the film rather than announcing itself as an effect.

The visual effects moment from Knock on Marble, a man reaching toward a woman seated on a sofa as she fades out of the frame

It is a detail where production and post had to work together to sell the story, and it is the difference between a set of performance shots and a small cinematic narrative. The full breakdown is on the Knock on Marble project page.

What came next

One video became another

After Knock on Marble, Jason and the team came back. And then came back again.

We produced more music video work together, including a production where we rented a studio and built the visual environment from scratch. I brought my own piano into the studio as part of the set for that one.

The relationship had stopped being about delivering one video. We were building a visual body of work around an artist.

Dov Gurewicz filming inside an RV with a camera rig

Live

From music videos to the stage

As the band grew, the productions grew with them. They began performing at Savor Cinema in Fort Lauderdale, and we were brought in to film the concerts.

Their debut show there on December 18, 2025 sold out and ended with an extended standing ovation. Settle Down Productions later reported the band had passed 250,000 Spotify streams.

Watch the film

James Malcolm Band at Savor Cinema

The live cut of "Some Got Up" came out of the same run, built as a cinematic music video from the performance itself rather than a staged shoot.

The full concert film is on the Savor Cinema concert page.

The relationship

The relationship behind the work

Some of my favorite client relationships stop feeling like client relationships after a while. Over these productions I have built a genuinely warm relationship with Jason, his wife Shelly, Malcolm and the rest of the team.

We have made music videos, built sets, filmed concerts, experimented, and solved production problems together. And I have watched the James Malcolm Band gain momentum along the way.

That is one of the most rewarding parts of doing this for a living. You are not always simply delivering a video. Sometimes you get to become part of somebody else's creative journey.

What I take from it

Building something over time

When Jason first called about Knock on Marble, none of us knew one music video would lead to everything that followed.

That is what I like about long-term creative relationships. The first project establishes trust. Then the conversations get easier, the ideas get bigger, the shorthand develops, and eventually you are not starting from zero every time. You are building something together.

The James Malcolm Band is a Fort Lauderdale project working in country, Americana and country-rock storytelling. Malcolm Philip Flavell, the lead singer and co-founder, named it in tribute to his late father. Their debut album Never Too Late came out through Settle Down Productions on November 26, 2025. You can find them at jamesmalcolmband.com.