House of Gents was a passion project in the truest sense. No budget, no client, no brief. Just a great haircut, a treatment I wrote in one sitting, and a handful of talented friends who said yes.

The treatment came first, and it drove everything. I wanted to frame a barber not as a service provider but as an artist, his shop a studio, his tools the instruments of a craftsman. Black leather chairs as blank canvases. Clippers as precision instruments. The space itself, steel and wood, crisp and warm at the same time, as the setting for something that deserved to be seen differently.

From that treatment, we built a black and white short with extreme macros, slow motion, and light catching chrome scissors and tools in ways that felt more cinematic than commercial. My director of photography and I shot the whole thing in half a day. An editor friend brought it together, and a composer friend blessed us with an original score. Nobody got paid, though I did negotiate a couple of free haircuts.

The result is moody, precise, and genuinely cinematic. A decade later it still holds up, which is the best thing you can say about any passion project. It also happens to be the piece I return to most often when I want to remember why I got into this in the first place.