Above is the trailer for my only short film this year and probably my last for the foreseeable. Thankfully, I think it will be one of the strongest and certainly all of the elements have come together nicely. The film is called Ness and is an adaptation of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s upcoming short collaboration, detailing a strange, folkloric vision of the Orford Ness testing facility on the Suffolk coast.

I won’t say too much at this stage as the book itself isn’t due out until early November but some things are worth mentioning. The first is that it has been in the works since 2016, with various reels of super-8 filmed over the past few years that includes footage of laboratories there that have since been permanently closed to the public. The other is that this will, I think, conclude the series of ongoing filmic collaborations with Macfarlane, one that started all the way back in 2013 with Holloway, followed by the Edward Thomas-inspired short, The Attempt, and lightly continued in the video for the collaborative track with Colin Riley, Weather Words.

Those three films are also below and may be a good gauge of where this film may conclude. Hopefully (and at least to my eyes), it will show the gradual “weirding” of the landscape, one that is not passive but increasingly reactive to the growing momentum of calamity of our current age and will be the last of a series of films that mark such a stark shift in politics and ecology through which to look back on this bizarre, unnerving and dangerous decade.