I was seventeen when I invested £400 into my first camera, it was a JVC 30GB hard disc drive camera.

It was also around this time that I started to play around with video editing on my desktop PC.

One of the first things I edited was a 10-minute version of the 1931 Frankenstein. It wasn’t nearly as good as the full-length film, but it did start to teach me nuances of pacing and ensuring that the right amount of information is conveyed to the viewer. 

My first video making projects were random and short amusing videos I would edit together about my friends, either from footage I had filmed or from footage they gave me.

Very quickly I became much more ambitious with the lengths and complexities of what I was editing, which is how my first couple of films came into being.

 

The Better Villain – My First Short Film

The Better Villain is a 16-minute short fictional film that is a homage to the comedy films of the silent film era.

It has a slapstick, slightly surreal and student made quality to it.

Like most first films, this one is pretty flimsy.

But that’s kind of the point, because it’s through making the mistakes the first time around that your practice improves.

The Better Villain tells the story of two thieves who break into the same house, without realising they have broken into the same house, and then end up being outwitted by a third thief – the better villain.

I made it in 2007 with a couple of my friends.

It was produced for one of my A-Level Film Studies assignments and I only had to make a 2-minute sequence, but I ended up making the rest of the film to go around it.

The film is a black and white silent comedy film with only a musical track and three intertitles to tell its story. I had just discovered the silent film era about this time and I had been completely blown away by the concept of telling stories visually without reliance on dialogue.

Find out more about The Better Villian >>>

 

The Not Even Gay Trilogy – Documentaries

Three comedy travelogue documentaries I made with my banterific friends that chronicle our crude teenage antics with the ultimate pursuit of intoxication.

Not Even Gay – 30 mins. Filmed in May 2007. Edited in 2007. Re-edited in 2009.

Not Even Gay: The 2ND Coming – 60 mins. Filmed in November 2007. Edited in 2009.

A Not Even Gay THRE3SOME – 2 hours and 32 mins. Filmed in July 2009. Rough cut edited in 2009 and 2010. Final cut edited between 2010 and 2015.

As the films progressed my editing for their final presentations became increasingly more ambitious.

By the time, the third one rolled around the audio-visual storytelling had entered the realm of the epic, as can be seen from the trailer I made for the final cut of A Not Even Gay THRE3SOME…

Not Even Gay came about when my friends asked me to bring my JVC camcorder along on a day trip we had all planned down to my friend’s caravan on the coast.

Full credit goes to my friends, because I didn’t see much point in bringing my camera along. I did not think we were that interesting.

It was only when I sat down and looked back through all the footage that I started to see a narrative forming as our witty characters jumped off the screen… so I edited the footage into a narrative structure.

Not Even Gay: The 2ND Coming was our attempt to do it bigger and better… and ultimately resulted in us being kicked off and banned from the caravan site.

A Not Even Gay THRE3SOME was the phoenix rising from the ashes. It chronicled our attempt to rectify the errors of the second one and actually properly achieve what we had been trying to do from the start of the trilogy – the ultimate pursuit of intoxication.

These three films not only gave me a great opportunity to practice my editing, but they taught me the hardest part of documentary making – taking the random chaos of life and turning it into an enthralling story.

Our story is now the stuff of legend.

Find out more about the trilogy >>>

 

Down A Word: The Story of NEXT FRIDAY – Documentary

An accidental documentary I made with a group of friends in 2009 and 2010.

It chronicles a night when I got drunk – far too drunk, don’t ever get this drunk – lost my mind, went on a verbal rampage, proceeded to destroy the porcelain of my friend’s toilet and completely blacked out with no memory of what a complete idiot I had been.

Being the creative and self-mocking person that I am, I decided to make a documentary out of it.

In January 2010, I recorded some interview footage of the friends who had been involved, which I then cut together with the original incident footage and jazzed it all up into a witty final presentation.

Find out more about Down A Word >>>