film making Archives - Page 2 of 2

I didn’t even bother to check my iCal when Andy from Video Strolls asked if I wanted to come to screen in their event at Milton Keynes Gallery – I just said YES! I’ve shown films in two Video Strolls events in Birmingham and had a great time, but here was the added appeal of an excuse for a wander round Milton Keynes at night.

I’d bought a GoPro on the Monday of the week of the screening for the Nightwalk I filmed with Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kotting for the Overground film. I’d be leaving Iain and Andrew at Hampstead and the plan was that Andrew would wear the GoPro on his head to capture some of the remaining epic nocturnal schlepp (he did and it’s great).

Arriving at Milton Keynes station 10 minutes before the event was due to start I strapped the GoPro on my head and set off across the Milton Keynes grid bound for the gallery on the FAR SIDE. And wow.

I visited Milton Keynes as a kid on a coach trip from High Wycombe with my Mum. Nominally in the same county as Wycombe but further away than London, Milton Keynes was the new town on the map – the concrete citadel of the future rising from the lower end of the Midland Plain. We felt like primitive people from the Amazonian jungle propelled into a Flash Gordon future on a Green Line Bus. I’d never been back since.

Although my hazy memory of MK matched what I was seeing 30+ years on – Milton Keynes still seemed futuristic. I think it’s the absence of any other older reference points – a blank architectural slate and the clinical nature of the urban planning. The imposition of paganistic street naming and alignments – Midsummer Avenue is apparently aligned with the Summer Solstice sunrise – has an ‘Age of Aquarius’ tinge. I kept seeing Blake’s Seven super-imposed over the shopping halls – partly because that’s what I was obsessed with at the time I visited Milton Keynes in the 1980’s (Glynis Barber did so much to get me through those difficult early teenage years).

So I swept in late to the Video Strolls event with the red light on my GoPro flashing and introduced my River Roding film with the camera still rolling (don’t worry, the video above is intercut with my point-and-shoot camera). After the screening I walked back through Milton Keynes with Andy Howlett, one half of Video Strolls, and we attempted to process our reactions to this uncanny landscape and ponder on the future of films made purely from strapping a GoPro on your head when out for a wander as a perambulatory equivalent of the early cinematic ‘Phantom Rides‘.

I’ll need to get the camera set on my head straight for a start.

Screen shot from the edit

So the editing of my film of Iain Sinclair’s London Overground has formally begun. I’ve previously casually spooled through rushes, and even put together a 7 minute short cut from the first shoot for a couple events Iain has done and at which we’ve spoken about the film – but today is the day I mark the edit as beginning.

It can be a lonely business at times working as I do alone on the film-making side, although I have become so conditioned to this process now I don’t think I could work any other way. I say ‘alone’, but the shoots have been a thoroughly collaborative process with Iain and Andrew Kotting. But it’s at this stage looking down the barrels of what will become a 3 month edit that it can feel slightly daunting – the edge knocked off with each clip you view. It’s looking good.

So I wanted to share this as I go – with you – the readers of this blog, the single piece of work that links all my projects together.

I worked on a ‘big’ documentary once – one with a proper ‘big’ budget and a team, a team that changed and grew, then shrunk, as the project endlessly lumbered on for years. There was a period that must have lasted for about a year (if not longer) where the core team of 4 of us sat in a small edit suite every day viewing rushes, cutting, discussing, despairing. I took to calling it ‘the group therapy room’. This partly explains why I work the way I do on my own projects – no budget, no producers, no crew, just me and the people I’m working with in front of the camera.

Serendipitously that edit suite was next to the Overground and we passed it on the recent Night Walk for the film – it felt like a moment of redemption for all those wasted days.

Now I sit in my box room alone at midnight slowly working through the footage I’ve shot on and off over 7 months with a festival screening in the summer to aim at. From the first shoot, with Iain and Andrew Kotting walking from Rotherhithe to Queens Road Peckham, the biggest dilemma was always going to be what to leave out. There is a conversation between Andrew and Iain in La Cigale cafe in Surrey Quays that runs for about 12 minutes – I must have watched it through 4 times and I still can’t see a cut, it’s all great stuff (and if you are a fan of either of their work then it’s priceless viewing).

Tonight I’m going through a walk with Iain from Haggerston to Shadwell. I am less than half-way through the bin and there is 24 minutes on the timeline. Assuming I carry on at this rate, if I follow the old edit adage of ‘Kill Your Darlings’ then this will make the Slaughter of the Innocents look like an exercise in passive restraint.

screen shot from the edit

At this stage I feel that the film will take multiple forms. There will be the ‘feature length’ cut of no more than 80 minutes for public screenings. And I think we’ll try and find somebody to put out a DVD. But after the initial run of these I can see it as a YouTube series that could run for several episodes.

Both my previous feature docs – The London Perambulator and Make Your Own Damn Art enjoyed great runs of screenings (that continue to pop up). But they’ve also had a second life online with London Perambulator clocking up over 50,000 views on YouTube. After some successful screenings Make Your Own Damn Art was distributed online by Curzon On Demand and was also on a continuous loop at New York’s prestigious MoMA PS1 for 6 months. It was odd to sit at home in Leytonstone and imagine my film playing for 8 hours a day to passing art liggers in one of the world’s great galleries.

Independent film-makers today are spoilt for choice – as long as you don’t want to make money – and if you want to make money then you shouldn’t be making films.

Ok, I enjoyed sharing this with you – thanks for listening. There are going to be a lot more nights like this over the coming months. I better get back to the edit, Iain is just arriving at Hoxton Station – this is a really good bit.