Privacy

Ruse Pictures is two people: Adrian Van de Velde and G.J. Bleechmore. It isn’t a registered company yet, so for now the two of us are personally responsible for the information described here. When that changes, this page will say so.

To ask about anything on this page, including having your details removed, send us a privacy request through our contact form. It comes straight to both of us. We’re based in Sydney, Australia, with a studio in Bangkok and a presence in Shanghai.

This notice covers three different situations. Most people only need one of them.

• You visited this website — there is very little to tell, but it’s there.
• You wrote to us — through the contact form, or by email.
• We contacted you about our work — if you arrived here from one of our emails, this is the one you want.

Cookies. We don’t set any, and nothing on this site tracks you for advertising. Two services we rely on can set their own security cookies, which exist to keep bots out rather than to follow you: Cloudflare, when our spam check runs on the contact form, and Vimeo, when you open a film. There is no cookie banner because none of this is used to track you.

Analytics. We use Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights. They count page views and measure how quickly pages load, without cookies. They tell us which pages get read, which films get opened, whether an enquiry was sent and what kind it was (never what it said), roughly which country a visit came from, and what kind of browser or device was used. Vercel can tell a returning visit apart for 24 hours at most, then discards that. None of it can follow you across other websites, and we can’t use it to identify you.

Films. Our films are hosted on Vimeo. Nothing is loaded from Vimeo until you open a film, and then the player loads with Vimeo’s do-not-track setting on, which stops it setting its tracking cookies.

Who handles it. The site is hosted by Vercel Inc. in the United States, which processes this on our behalf, under its own terms.

What the form collects. Your name, your email address, your message and, if you choose to add it, your company. If you came from a director’s page or the AutoGen page, the enquiry is labelled that way so we know what it’s about. That is all. We don’t ask for a phone number.

AutoGen enquiries. AutoGen is the production tool Adrian developed, and it runs on our automotive work. An enquiry sent through “Talk to us about AutoGen” is handled exactly like any other: it comes to the two of us, and it doesn’t go onto a separate list or to anyone else.

The spam check. Before a message can be sent, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that it’s coming from a person rather than a bot. To do that, Cloudflare sees your IP address and some technical details about your browser. It uses them to detect bots, and to improve how it detects them, and for nothing else. Our own server uses your IP address only to stop the same person sending dozens of messages in an hour. We don’t save it, and it isn’t included in the email we receive.

Where your message goes. It’s delivered by Resend, an email service in the United States, to both of our inboxes, which run on Google Workspace (Google LLC, also in the United States). Resend keeps a copy for 30 days as a delivery record, then deletes it. If you email us directly instead, only Google Workspace is involved.

What we do with it. We read it and reply. We keep your message and your address so we have a record of the conversation. If you’re asking about one of our directors, we share your enquiry with that director so they can respond. We don’t add you to a mailing list, and we don’t pass your enquiry to anyone else.

How long we keep it. If it doesn’t turn into a conversation or a job, we delete it within 12 months.

If you’ve had an email or a message from one of us about Ruse, our directors, or AutoGen, this section explains how we have your details.

What we hold. Your name, the organisation you work for, your job title, and business contact details — usually a work email address or a LinkedIn profile. Sometimes a short note about why your work is relevant to ours, for example that your agency makes automotive campaigns. We don’t hold personal phone numbers, home addresses, or anything about your private life.

Where we got it. One of these, and we’ll normally tell you which one in the message itself:

• Publicly available business information — your company’s own website, its leadership page, or trade press coverage naming you in your professional role.
• LinkedIn — in many cases we’re already connected there.
• Previous professional contact — we’ve worked together, or corresponded, on a production.

We don’t buy contact lists, and we don’t use tools that guess email addresses.

Why we’re using it. We have a legitimate interest in reaching the people who commission or produce commercial advertising, to tell them about our directors, our productions and AutoGen. That means contacting the person whose role makes that decision. We’ve weighed this against your interests: contacting a named professional once, about their own field of work, at their business address, is what we’d consider reasonable — and repeatedly contacting someone who hasn’t replied is not. We work to that.

Who else sees it. Only the two of us. We run this ourselves from our own files. We don’t use a CRM, a mailing platform, or a lead-generation service, and we don’t share, sell or pass on your details. The one exception is technical rather than human: our email sits on Google Workspace, so Google handles it as our email provider in the same way it handles everything else in our inboxes.

How long we keep it. If we don’t end up working together or in conversation, we delete your details within 12 months. If you ask us to delete them sooner, we do it straight away.

Reply to our email with a no, or send us a privacy request. You don’t need to give a reason and you don’t need to be polite about it.

A no to either of us counts for both of us. We’ll stop permanently and delete what we hold about you. The only thing we keep is the minimum record needed to make sure we don’t contact you again by accident.

You can ask us to:

• show you what we hold about you
• correct anything that’s wrong
• delete it
• stop or limit what we’re doing with it
• send you a copy in a portable format

Just send us a privacy request. We’ll respond within a month, and there’s no charge.

If you think we’ve handled your information badly, please tell us first — we’d rather fix it. You also have the right to complain to the data protection authority in your own country. In Australia that is the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. In the European Union or the United Kingdom, it is the supervisory authority where you live or work.

We work from Sydney, Bangkok and Shanghai, with people across Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Asia, so information is handled across borders. In practice that means your details sit in our own files and in Google Workspace, an enquiry passes through Cloudflare and Resend on its way to us, and this website is served by Vercel — all United States companies operating global infrastructure.

If we change how any of this works, including when Ruse becomes a registered company, we’ll update this page and change the date at the top.