Above is Greenteeth, my film adaptation of the short story by Gary Budden which can be read in his upcoming volume of short stories. It is currently up for a fantasy award and follows the pressures on a young woman in a struggling part of north London whose social worries begin manifest in more folkloric ways through the legend of Jenny Greenteeth. The film came … Continue reading Short Film – Greenteeth
I remember before I first watched Ben Rivers’ Two Years At Sea (2011) that a certain review quote about the film caught my eye. It was suggested by a Time Out reviewer that Rivers’ film was “A rare thing in cinema: a vision of true happiness”. At the time, this idea framed my viewing of Rivers’ film as it rang true; not only was the … Continue reading Contentment and Chris Marker’s Chat écoutant la musique (1988)
Above is the trailer for the next short film, Heavy Water. This is to be the longest film this year and the most ambitious in terms of scope in spite of future projects containing narratives and actors. Heavy Water ‘s difficulty is the connection of its two main themes represented by adjacent places on the Suffolk coast; the strange, liminal landscape surrounding Sizewell nuclear power … Continue reading Trailer – Heavy Water.
“My mother lives in the windy Orkney Islands. It’s certainly a wonderful place to be brought up in.” – A Portrait Of Ga In making a short film about her mother, the experimental filmmaker, Margaret Tait, essentially drew upon an interesting dialectic between place and youth. With 1952’s A Portrait Of Ga – a 4 minute short, shot on 16mm and with a voice-over by … Continue reading Place and Youth in Margaret Tait’s A Portrait Of Ga (1952).
The Menhir Motorway is the first film of 2016 and it should set the tone for the rest of the year’s projects. Having filmed in late December, a mere few days before Christmas in the freezing edge-lands of Wallasey on The Wirral with the help of my girlfriend, Lauren (who took all of the proceeding digital photos of the shoot), the film has been gently … Continue reading Short Film – The Menhir Motorway.
Above is the trailer for the first film project of 2016, The Menhir Motorway. The film has been slightly delayed due to missing virtually all possible deadlines in regards to getting the film developed but it is now well on its way to being finished. Unlike virtually every other landscape short that I’ve made, this is one about an area that is personal to me, … Continue reading Trailer – The Menhir Motorway.
Above is a showreel built from footage I’ve shot over the last twelve months. Compared to last year’s showreel, this one feels far more defined and less haphazard with the visual ideas I want to play with. Gone are the mixtures of stop-motion, digital and film, instead replaced entirely by different stocks of super-8 footage. This year has felt like a much more defined trajectory … Continue reading Showreel 2015.
It feels odd to finally be able to say that Holloway is finished. This oddness derives not just from the fact that it has been the longest planned film that I’ve produced so far (starting all the way back from Robert Macfarlane’s first email to me in February 2014) but because the subject of the film itself is never-ending. The holloways of Dorset do not … Continue reading Short Film – Holloway (Robert Macfarlane).
“It is for this reason that we find that co-existence, which could neither be in time alone, for time has no contiguity, nor in space alone, for space has no before, after, or now, is established through matter.” (p.12, 1891) – Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea Volume 1. It seems fitting to open with this quote from Schopenhauer when discussing the themes behind … Continue reading Short Film – Weirdstone (For Alan Garner).
For my last film of the year, I wanted to put into practice some of ideas that I explored in my presentation at this year’s Folk Horror conference, held at Queens University Belfast in September. I had already filmed the footage before I presented my paper (though didn’t get it developed until a good few weeks after that) but had already been forming the ideas … Continue reading Short Film – Tarot.
Celluloid Wicker Man 