AI × Analog Cinema Narratives distorted, rebuilt with purpose
Orange Attic Films is a Manchester based, director led cinematic studio creating fiction, experimental cinema, and hybrid forms of storytelling.
Founded in 2012 by Iranian born filmmaker and director Shahrokh Nael, the studio develops work around an ongoing exploration of perception, memory, power, identity, and narrative form. Its films often exist somewhere between psychological drama, experimental cinema, and contemporary visual art, using cinematic language to explore what happens beneath the surface of a story.
At the centre of Orange Attic's practice is an approach the studio defines as AI × Analog Cinema a meeting point between emerging technologies and traditional filmmaking. Digital and AI-driven processes are used alongside human performance, physical environments, practical production, analogue techniques, and conventional cinematography. The technology is not the subject in itself; it is another instrument within the filmmaking process, used to distort, reconstruct, extend, or challenge the cinematic image.
The result is a filmmaking practice concerned as much with how a story is experienced as what the story is about. Image, sound, performance, production design, editing, movement, and atmosphere are developed as interconnected elements, allowing each film to establish its own visual and psychological logic.
Orange Attic does not operate as a conventional production company built around isolated projects. Instead, the studio is developing an ongoing body of interconnected work, allowing ideas, visual languages, performers, and collaborators to evolve from one project to the next. Each production becomes part of a larger creative conversation.
The studio operates through a lean, director led model, bringing together a recurring network of filmmakers, performers, artists, cinematographers, designers, technicians, and producers. At the heart of this is The Ensemble a returning group of collaborators whose relationships, shared language, and accumulated experience form an important part of Orange Attic's identity.
Based in Manchester, Orange Attic works across film, experimental cinema, music video, commercial filmmaking, and interdisciplinary projects, while developing its own original narrative work alongside commissioned productions.
The studio's aim is not simply to make films, but to build cinematic worlds with their own atmosphere, rules, tensions, and visual language work that can move between the personal and political, the physical and psychological, the analogue and the artificial.
Orange Attic Films — narratives distorted, rebuilt with purpose.
Filmmaker & Creative Director
Orange Attic Films is led by filmmaker and creative director Shahrokh Nael, whose practice has developed across narrative film, experimental cinema, music video, commercial filmmaking, and visual storytelling.
His work is driven by a fascination with the relationship between character, image, atmosphere, and meaning, often exploring stories through psychological and political perspectives. He is drawn to narratives that leave space for ambiguity and interpretation, where what is left unsaid can be as important as what appears on screen.
As a director, Shahrokh is involved in shaping a project from its earliest conceptual stages through to the finished film. He works closely with performers and creative collaborators to establish the tone, rhythm, visual language, and emotional architecture of each piece, while maintaining a clear sense of authorship across the production.
His approach to directing is highly visual, with a particular interest in composition, performance, movement, light, texture, and the relationship between image and sound. Rather than using these elements simply to illustrate a story, he treats them as active components of the storytelling itself.
Across different forms and scales of production, Shahrokh is interested in creating work with a distinct point of view. His films can move between realism and abstraction, controlled cinematic construction and experimentation, often using form to reflect the psychological state of the characters or the ideas at the centre of the work.
As creative director of Orange Attic Films, he also oversees the wider creative direction of the studio, developing original projects and building long term relationships with a recurring network of filmmakers, performers, artists, and production collaborators.
His role is ultimately both filmmaker and creative architect developing individual films while contributing to the wider cinematic language and evolving body of work that defines Orange Attic Films.
Cinematic Director of Photography
Manchester based Director of Cinematography Chris Forshaw brings a cinematic approach to narrative film, commercials, branded content, and music videos.
With a strong instinct for visual storytelling, Chris creates images built around atmosphere, light, composition, and movement. His work combines a refined cinematic aesthetic with a practical understanding of story creating visuals that feel authentic, immersive, and memorable.
His commercial portfolio includes work for global brands including Amazon, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Intel, TK Maxx, eBay, and New Balance, while his work in music video has received multiple awards.
Whether shaping a dramatic narrative, a highend commercial, or a performance driven film, Chris brings a distinctive visual language and a cinematic eye to every project.
Senior Production Specialist
Janine Bardsley brings extensive experience across theatre, international touring, festivals, and live events, having taken productions to venues and festivals around the world, including the Venice Biennale, Under the Radar in New York, Sydney Festival, and New Vision Arts Festival in Singapore.
She has worked as a Company Tour Manager and Stage Manager for Aviva Studios / Factory International, delivering ambitious multidisciplinary productions with internationally acclaimed artists including Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Benji Reid, Wayne McGregor, and Laurie Anderson. Her theatre career has seen her work with leading directors including Edward Hall, Blanche McIntyre, Robert Wilson, Terry Hands, Maria Aberg, Paul Miller, Timothy Sheader, Neil Bartlett, and Braham Murray, across venues including The Royal Exchange, The Orange Tree, Hampstead Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, Chichester Festival Theatre, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, HOME Manchester, and Wales Millennium Centre.
Janine has also worked alongside an impressive range of acclaimed actors and performers, including Willem Dafoe, Andy Serkis, Paterson Joseph, Douglas Henshall, Oliver Ford Davies, Brenda Blethyn, Niall Buggy, Warwick Davis, Rupert Everett, Johnny Vegas, and Tom Courtenay.
Alongside her theatre and touring work, Janine has extensive experience as a Stage Manager and Show Caller across major music festivals, live events, awards ceremonies, screenings, and cultural productions. Her credits include Glastonbury Festival, Manchester Folk Festival, Northern Music Awards, SCENE Film & Television Festival, Folk Album of the Year Award, and Manchester International Festival, as well as Channel 4's An Altogether Different Comedy Night and the It's a Sin screening and panel featuring Russell T Davies.
Her broad experience across theatre, film and television events, festivals, and large scale live productions gives Janine a unique understanding of the demands of complex productions, from international touring and multidisciplinary performance to high profile live events and broadcast led projects.
Exposures
Selected works have been recognised across independent film platforms and festivals, reflecting the studio’s ongoing commitment to experimental and narrative driven cinema.
These acknowledgements mark points within a larger, continuous body of work rather than endpoints.
