Tobias Zaldua is an English filmmaker and musician. His particular interests are with music documentary and drama, and in finding the emotional resonance in a variety of material from hand-held concert footage to high-end studio work.
Brought up in a strictly no television household his reference points were BBC Radio 4 which was pretty much all speech and drama, and occasionally borrowing the only radio in the house to listen to the chart on Radio 1. When the Electro Street Sounds LP was released in the UK he and his friends would create mix tapes out of speech samples and electro beats using twin tape decks with a third deck for overdubs. Successful sections of these cassettes would be compiled using a razor blade and sellotape. Tobias developed his love of cinema at an early age since the only films he could see were at the cinema, with the occasional exception of a glimpse of television at friend's houses. Every thing he saw was a big event, never the background to daily living.
Following a Foundation course in Art he went on to take a degree in Graphic Design, where he graduated with first class honours after deciding to specialize in film and animation. Having grown up understanding the importance of sound to paint pictures David Lynch became his favourite director. Tobias' first chance to cut a film and compose a score came when he was approached by writer/director Mark Cairns who was working on a live action/model animation graduation piece and needed an editor and a composer for his degree film "Upon The Land".
After graduating Tobias went to London where he edited and co-wrote the award-winning 'The Take Out' (1994) with Jamie Thraves as part of the BFI new Directors scheme before moving into music promo work. He quickly built up a reputation for getting the best from the material, leaving nothing wasted. Equally at home with the frantic energy of Spiritualized 'Electricity' promo built from 20 hours of hypnotic tour material or with the mixture of heightened realism and artifice used in 'Torn' for Natalie Imbruglia, he soon built up around 200 music video credits for artists including Tom Jones, Asian Dub Foundation, Manic Street Preachers, Natalie Imbruglia, Stereophonics, Diana Ross, Shy FX & UK Apache, Five, Jamelia, Boyzone, Atomic Kitten, Mis-Teeq, Lightning Seeds, Mansun, Ronan Keating, Neneh Cherry.
At the end of 2004 Tobias started work on a major documentary film with Julien Temple, having previously worked with the director on a Greenpeace commercial. The film was Glastonbury (2006) and involved editing a staggering 1500 hours of material both from festival goers private collections on a variety of archaic video and film formats as well as original footage specifically shot for the production.
This was quickly followed by 'Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten' (2007) a film in which he was both involved in designing and editing the film's many music based sequences and then brought in again to work on the full re-cut of the documentary after an editor left. The next long form documentary was the highly acclaimed "Made of Stone" for renowned director Shane Meadows. More recently he worked with director/photographer Phil Griffin on the original “Half Of Me” for Rihanna which was is now known as the official Director's Cut. He has edited commercials and promos for Giorgio Armani, Emporio Armani, F1, Hogan, Rieker, Morgan pour Toi,
During the 2020 lockdown Tobias has been returning to his roots writing for on-line art magazines and composing soundscapes for the multimedia art project “Imaginary Friends In Isolation”. The project is ongoing with an album and exhibitions to follow.