An artisanal producer of quality broadcast comestibles.
Producer/Director making BAFTA, RTS and Emmy award-winning and nominated films. Grierson finalist. Experience of most film-making situations; live, long-form observational, short, very short, 90 minute, feature, multi-part series as sole director, series director and self-shooter on all formats for many major world broadcasters and the web
now
The power of ordinary
For the last few weeks I’ve been preparing a film about a long-lost celebrity, a musician of world renown. Among the footage of him performing, dashing and impassioned, all the more romantic for being almost lost in the rice-sized grain of mid-century 16mm black and white, some home-cine scenes of him with his wife and baby.
They stand by their car in a layby. He strokes the family dog, dandles on his knee the child who will also become a celebrated musician, looks at some new trees in the front yard. The film is uncut. The people jump and judder. Exterior is followed by interior, Summer by what might be Christmas. The Kodachrome Single-8 did well in the sunshine, but inside, the lush reds and blues are underexposed, the hero elusive, looming out of the shadows to peer into the lens, like a deep-sea creature.
The performance archive is edited. There’s a narrative, but the home movies are no more than rough notes, inconsequential things recorded, long-lost jokes silently laughed at, fragmentary, but therefore for some reason all the more real, properly intimate. I remember a summer spent reviewing the Duke of Edinburgh’s home movies, never meant for the public gaze. Early in their marriage, he clearly flirts with her, buttoned-up and tweedy on a Balmoral terrace. She gives him the eye, says something unforgettable but forgotten. I felt transgressive.
This week, I rediscovered some footage I shot in a friend’s Mayfair shop a mere twenty years ago. She’s the cobbler Georgina Goodman, no well-heeled dressing room complete without her gorgeous footwear, more sculpture than shoes. I was instantly back in an autumnal afternoon. In her atelier, George sifts through mood boards and materials, carries my four year-old daughter on her hip around the showroom. The jewel-like AW04 collection is all about.
In one hundred years’ time, this footage will reveal far more about the designer than official footage or studio pack-shots ever could because it’s random, un-produced and intimate. Grabbed images tell us about memory, the more degraded and wobbly they are, the more real.