FormFrameFriction

Décadre means shifting the frame. Stepping out of the one someone else has set, because what matters isn't in it.

I'm Elias Noah Nies. Producer.

I'm interested in what lies beneath the surface, and in who is missing from it. People nobody asks. Animals and places without a lobby. Conditions everyone knows and nobody writes down. That means researching what can be proven. Talking to the people it's about. Going there and looking.

Sport is part of it. Few things are watched so closely and understood so little. On the pitch, everyone sees everything; around it, money, power and favours change hands where no camera points. I'm interested in both: the competition, and what gets negotiated around it.

I want to get to the bottom of these things, record them and make them accessible enough to reach people. Not because attention fixes anything, but because nothing changes that nobody has seen.

I don't speak for anyone. I build the conditions in which people can speak for themselves, and I make sure they stay in control.

What matters can't be ordered. The moment someone opens up isn't on any shooting schedule. You can only make it more likely: with time, with access that has grown, with the willingness to lose a shoot day. That is my work.

In practice: budget, schedule, crew. Filming permits, contracts, personality rights, licences. On set, available to everyone, above all to the people being filmed. Afterwards, organising the edit, rights clearance and sign-off.

In small teams it rarely ends there. I develop concepts, co-write, help shape the visual language and styling, work behind the camera, take photographs. Where it makes the work better, I do it myself.

I trained as an industrial engineer, led AI and software projects, and built an EdTech company before a placement brought me into video production; I currently work as a producer in-house. Structural thinking on one side, visual instinct on the other. I can read the engineering and I can shoot the film, and I don't think those are separate fields.

For me, the medium follows from the subject: a film, a photo series, a text, an exhibition, an evening with an audience.

Alongside the investigative work I like working with people who built something real. Founders and teams who can talk about their product without needing a slide. Emerging fashion labels. Performance and sport brands treating movement as a cultural field rather than lifestyle content. Artists and cultural operators building something that doesn't fit an existing category.

The subject is secondary. The question is whether it should reach people it currently doesn't.

producing · photo · video · styling