Film created for the London 48 Hour Film Project 2011.
This is a final version with around five extra hours of editing.

Required Elements:

Genre: Comedy
Prop: Brush
Person: Alistair or Alison, a Collector
Line “Should we leave it like this?”

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

What I did: Produced with Charlotte Allen, filmed and edited.

Still in progress, complete write-up when the series has finished sometime.

(Switch to 720p) During the November Snowpocalypse I took a day to get out around Durham and get some footage of picturesque scenes. I used the HDR-FX1 briefly one night (the early shots) but given that I didn’t quite trust the rain-proofing to hold up against snow collecting and melting on top of it and I didn’t trust myself to get it that far on foot without smashing it into the pavement mostly I used a MinoHD on this one, which has the advantages of being portable and utterly unbreakable. Its lack of any actual viewfinder aside the awkwardly angled screen meant that I was often roughly positioning it in the hope that I had picked up something interesting but the quality of image is really astonishing for something that small.  It’s only really problem is sound quality, but that didn’t matter that much in this case as I wasn’t planning to use the audio.

I uploaded the complete results of the days filming onto flickr here.  This was my second attempt using Ehma’s Les jeux de plage for a video, my first ‘Liquefacere’ was a camera test, revisiting some previous locations from Adiemus but I was never really satisfied with the finished video so I was happy to replace it with this one. I took it down from public viewing on youtube, but I’m going to include it below for completeness sake. (switch to 720p)

Never Fade Away from Durham Student Film on Vimeo.

 
What I did: Edited, directed with Steve Hancock and wrote screenplay based on story by team.

Entry in the 2010 DSF 48 Hour Film Competition (Winner- Best Film, Best Script)

Synopsis: A heart warming tale of love after death. Ryan Renston, an activist campaigning for equal rights for the mortally impaired tells the story of how being raised by the ghosts of his dead parents shaped his life and led to him finding his cause.

Required Elements:

Genre: Biopic

Character: Ryan – An orphan

Item: A Torch.

Line: “Never leave a high-five hanging.”

I can’t remember exactly where the core of this one came from but once people starting throwing out the kind of slogans anti-ghost demonstrators might have, the rest all fit into place quite nicely. There were vague worries about wandering around town covered in white sheets while holding placards, but filming on this one went very smoothly. This film also counts as my first time acting, but with the added disadvantage of having a sheet over my head. Saturday night we crossed paths with another team, who also had a lot of graveyard footage so I had a vague worry we’d end up with five depressing films about people hanging out in graveyards, but in the end entries went all over the place, so the competition went very well.

Getting To Durham from Durham Student Film on Vimeo.

Produced for Durham University International Office as a guide for international students on what to expect on arrival (2009).

Entry in the 2008 London 48 Hour Film Competition.

What I did: Directed and edited. Written with Jessica Viccari.

Synopsis: The Detective takes some time away from work to enjoy himself… but is all as it seems? Possibly.

Elements:

Genre: Detective/Cop

Required Character: Denise Thompson – a wine expert

Required item: A Torch

Required line: “Can’t you see I’m in training?”

This was my first vaguely successful experience in filming something scripted (and also writing that script) and so the learning curve was fairly rapid. The team was small, the stress high, the computer had decided half an hour before it needed to finished that it was going to stop recognising the camera needed to write the footage back onto tape (requiring a terrifying reboot), but actually in the end it all came together just fine.  The basic principle of the hardboiled detective being endless suspicious of perfectly normal affairs got a good few jokes out of it (the nice thing about as seeing the film up on a proper screen with an actual audience is hearing people laugh at the right points). There is a problem is there being less of an ending and more of a trail off, but I personally things that end properly are

Music Video made for the unfairly talented Tom Milsom. Originally posted here.

This was my first big project and still probably the one I’m most fond of, basically it’s a series of short videos meant to accompany a performance of Karl Jenkins’ Adiemus. I’d previously done a few short videos before but this was a step up both in terms of length and style, requiring an hour of video and being the first thing I’d done using live-action footage. The camera was an old handicam, it was edited using Windows Movie Maker (which while a surprisingly useful package for something free, in retrospect made some simple tasks far more complicated than they needed to be) using avisynth to create some of the effects and some basic CG work was done in terragen and blender.

Having started to put the video together, we ran into the problem of how to sync up the visuals with the music. Rather than use a click track, we decided to resplit the videos back into their component clips and then mix it live using Arkaos. Rather than everything being fixed to regimented pace the video could follow the music, making it fit a bit more organically. It was also nice for me because it actually gave me something to do rather than just hit play.

Since I uploaded the videos they’ve collectively received over 230,000 views so far more people have seen the film in this way than actually saw it the way it was intended live and what works fine as essentially wallpaper behind a performance can work less well when separated from that; the early section of Tintinanbulum in particular both runs up against the editing limitations of Movie Maker and is desperately playing for time and blank space is used at various points throughout to leave the focus on the performers, which when they’re not actually there just leaves a blank screen.

There’s a broad elemental theme running through Amaté Adea (Air), Kayama (Fire), Cantus Insolitus (Water) but Cantus Inaequalis and Cantus Iteratus don’t really fit into any larger scheme,  and In Caelum Fero (still I think my favourite visually if not musically) is simply the result of spending a day in London. Adiemus despite being the best known and the eponymous track is the video that on its own seems most like a collection of occasionally pretty visuals set to music, lacking a unified theme of its own or a particular ending (the variation used in the encore with the Earth emerging through a coil of nighttime traffic is a more definite close), really I treated this one as a prologue, setting the stage and introducing visuals that are returned to throughout, but not necessarily something complete in its own right. In the same way Hymn works as an epilogue after the emotional heights of Kayama, just a simple one shot video of the Earth as it drifts through space (somehow lit by two different sources, but lets move on) and then slowly receding into the dark.

Playlist of video integrated with footage from live show: