Film Was My First Fixation
Film Was My First Fixation
Filmmaking | Cinephilia | Film Studies | Film Theory | Film Criticism | Screenwriting | Editing | Videography | Microfilmmaking | Documentary Making | Photography | Creative Producing | Writing | Research | BA (Hons) | MTA Portfolio
Film was my first passion
It was my first education.
And it was my first means of major creative outlet.
I absolutely love dabbling in anything film related!
Growing up, I gravitated towards films more so than anything else. When everyone else was obsessed with things like Pokémon or football or music or skating… I was always focused on film.
My film fixation started at the age of six when I learned how to fall with style while watching Toy Story on constant repeat. I was a very energetic youngster and I would get so enthralled by the films I was watching that I would re-enact them… while I was watching them.
Films, cinema, movies, flicks, whatever you want to call them, offered me doorways into other realities that I found vastly more inspiring and educating than what I was receiving at home or from my schooling.
Films are what started my writing because films taught me how to read. I started out hating reading… then I was blown away by the James Bond films at the age of nine… which lead to me eventually reading the Ian Fleming Bond novels… which nurtured me into a very proficient reader surprisingly quickly… and, before I knew it, I was writing my own stuff.
My taste in films greatly diversified when the age of the DVD got into full swing and kept me in a constant state of pocket money bankruptcy. My interest in filmmaking was also ignited thanks to the DVD extras that took up the time I should have probably used for doing homework, revising for exams or sleeping.
I would watch film after film, over and over again, analyzing their film form, the rhythms of their editing and allowing my imagination to be inspired by the process.
I moved onto writing my own scripts and experimenting with making film content in my late adolescence, which is what ultimately lead me to study my BA (Hons) in Creative Writing with Film and Screen Studies.
My bachelors degree empowered me to refine my understanding of cinema and advanced my filmmaking practice.
In my mid-twenties, my attention broadened beyond film due to varied concentrations of my MTA Portfolio in Sustainable Globalisation and Creative Enterprise.
But film studies and filmmaking still formed active components of my postgraduate studies and now I am even making a feature documentary about the trials and tribulations of building my self-directed master’s degree.
As ever, my cinephilia and filmmaking practice continues to flourish…
Notable projects
Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle – Award-Winning Research Paper
My BA (Hons) theoretical dissertation.
Ways of Being is the length of a masters degree thesis.
It was praised for its high attention to detail.
It won a Media Futures Research Excellence Award.
It received the highest mark ever awarded to a dissertation Film and Screen Studies dissertation at Bath Spa University.
The paper deals with the larger physiological experience of film viewership from a scientific perspective, opposed to just focusing on specific film texts or film theories.
Building my own theories on the neuroscience of cinemagoing and film viewership, the paper goes on to challenge complacent thinking in the film industry, film exhibition and film theory in relation to current and proposed technological and artistic reformulations of the cinema industry.
Find out more about my dissertation >>>
EYES – Web Series
My BA (Hons) practical dissertation.
EYES is a web series concept proposal package.
The project was awarded the highest mark of the Creative Enterprise Project module.
The package includes…
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- A series bible story-world concept overview document
- A produced 7-minute pilot episode that I wrote and directed
- A planning portfolio document detailing the administration and development
- EYES of a Storyteller development blog
- An incomplete mock trailer and website
- An appendix of other materials
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Keys / Busybody– Award-Winning Screenplay
A short film script I wrote as part of my BA (Hons).
The script won a Critics Choice Award.
It also went on to be used as a go-to practice script for the university’s filmmaking students.
Busybody has been adapted something like twenty times now!
I was never happy with the initial and rushed Busybody version, so I eventually revised it into a new polished script.
The new (and better) script is called Keys.
Find out more about Keys / Busybody >>>
Fencing – Documentary
A 6-minute documentary I co-created with my colleague Thomas Wiltshire about the Bath Sword Club, the UK’s biggest fencing club.
Fencing was produced for my BA (Hons) documentary making studies and was awarded a first.
It was also highly praised and embraced by the Bath Sword Club.
Find out more about Fencing >>>
366 FRAMES 2012 – Photography Project
A year-long project where I took and showcased a photo a day.
I undertook my 366 project as a self-directed project alongside my BA (Hons) studies.
Studying photography and honing my photographic skills helped to improve the overall visual design and application of my visual thinking.
Find out more about my 366 project >>>
365 FRAMES 2015 – Experimental Filmmaking Project
A year-long project where I filmed, edited and showcased a video a day.
While there are a good number videos I produced along the way, the momentum starts to dip towards the end of the project.
Filming and editing a video today can be quite exhausting when you add on top of all the other things you need to get done.
I skipped quite a few days towards the end and never got around to editing all the footage into a short film.
However, this project did go a long way in refining my microfilmmaking skills.
Find out more about my 365 project >>>
Outside the Box Inside the Box – Documentary (ongoing)
The story of how I created my own master’s degree and the problems I encountered along the way.
Watch this space.
Filmmaking Focuses
Creative Producing takes a concept and make it a reality. In filmmaking, a creative producer is typically a highly skilled manager and leader who wears many hats and understands each aspect of the filmmaking process.
I was a creative producer on my EYES web series where I produced, wrote, directed, filmed, edited and managed the cast and crew of the project.
I thoroughly enjoy being a creative producer because its transdisciplinary and entrepreneurial nature is what I’m all about.
Independent Filmmaking appeals to me more so than the mainstream industry because I like the go-getting and innovating aspects of being an indie filmmaker; as well as the fact that it allows you more creative control over what you are making.
For me, filmmaking is just a glorified hobby, I don’t consider it to be my main source of income, so, in that sense, I can afford to do it on my own terms.
Screenwriting has been a focus since my late teens when I started writing my own short film scripts and it was also my main incentive for studying Creative Writing as my bachelor’s degree.
I love writing and inventing stories from scratch. There is also something much more mentally engaging about writing a story in script form because (if you are a filmmaker) you are always thinking about the logistics of how what you are writing can realistically be filmed, which definitely inspires more creative thinking as a writer.
Editing is probably my favourite part of the filmmaking process. To date, most of the time I have invested in filmmaking has been spent in the editing suite.
To me, editing is quite similar to screenwriting, but instead OF inventing material from scratch, you already have all the material, you just have to make it work as a whole, which doesn’t always work and is the for reason why you often have the creative challenge of reinventing the project in the editing process.
Microfilmmaking is often used an alternate term for independent filmmaking, but I take it as referring to the production of films that are less than 3-minutes in length and are made to exude something of a “cinematic” quality.
My 365 FRAMES 2015 experimental filmmaking project was partly about giving me an opportunity to refine my ability to make microfilm content that have well-rounded stories with a cinematic escapism to them. It didn’t always work, but alongside my 356 project videos, I also produced twelve microfilms using the Vimeo Cameo app.
Videography is the process of capturing moving images on electronic media. It’s the video equivalent of photography and typically does not involve any other aspect of the filmmaking process other than filming an event.
To date, my favourite videography experience was when I filmed A Machine to Listen to the Sky, the final year project of my colleague Daniel Tapper (who did the sound design on EYES).
There is something incredibly relaxing and therapeutic about not having to worry any other aspect of the filmmaking process other than what you are filming.
Video Producing is what I would typically refer to as the production of informative video content for marketing and business-related purposes.
A standout example from my portfolio is a product concept video I produced for Designability (formerly known as BIME).
Find out more about my video producing for Designability >>>
Blogs
Something to do with Film – Film Focused Blog
This blog collects together all my writing and thoughts on anything film-related.
It also includes all my filmmaking projects from 2007 up until 2016.
Ways 2 Interface – Media Focused Blog
I created this blog for the Multimedia Studies and Creative Technolgies concentration of my MTA Portfolio.
It picks up where my BA (Hons) theoretical dissertation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, left off.
It is mostly just a collection of my reflections and observations on the multimedia technologies that are increasingly changing our relationship with reality.
As of 2016, I no longer use this blog.
EYES of a Storyteller – Project Blog
The development blog and portfolio for my BA (Hons) practical dissertation, the EYES web series project.
366 FRAMES 2012 – Project Blog
My 366 photography project where I took a photo a day throughout 2012.
365 FRAMES 2015 – Project Blog
My 365 experimental filmmaking project where I made a short video a day throughout 2015.
Early filmmaking
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 edited 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 seeed 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 story 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 engaging 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 >>>
Abandoned projects
The Miracle of Crowdfunding / A Miracle Mockumentary – Documentary
This project started out as an ambitious crowdfunding campaign for a master’s degree that I ultimately did not undertake.
I became enamored with the idea of building my own postgraduate education, which is how my MTA Portfolio came about, so I withdrew from my original master’s degree and abandoned The Miracle of Crowdfunding campaign before all the footage had been filmed for it.
However, I didn’t want to leave four months of footage unused, which is how I hit upon the idea of The Miracle Mockumentary, a film about me trying and struggling to crowdfund the tuition fee for my master’s degree.
The real focus of the film would have been about the hardships of surviving and thriving as a young person in today’s complicated world… based upon the real life struggles that me and George, my colleague who helped me create The Miracle of Crowdfunding, had experienced while filming the original crowdfunding material in 2014.
Ultimately, this project was abandoned because the building of my MTA Portfolio kept getting in the way of writing a script for the new material that would have integrated with the material filmed for The Miracle of Crowdfunding.
Additionally, George became increasingly uncomfortable with portraying himself and his private life on-screen.
Some of the material filmed for The Miracle of Crowdfunding may yet find its way into my Outside the Box Inside the Box documentary project.
Find out more about the Miracle projects >>>
Breaking Cinema – Podcast
Breaking Cinema was a documentary storytelling podcast about our relationships with cinema and multimedia that I started developing in 2014.
A considerable amount of work went into developing the format of the podcast. I recorded hours of content for it and even had some theme music made before I abandoned the project in 2016.
Breaking Cinema mainly developed out of my frustration with the dominant complacent thinking of film theory; as well as my dissatisfaction with the lack of film podcasts that went deep into analyzing the workings of cinema and our relationships with multimedia.
I didn’t want to listen to yet another film podcast where a group of people sat around discussing topics and ideas that have been discussed before.
I recorded sixteen test episodes, varying between 30 minutes all the way up to 90 minutes in length. Some episodes I did solo and others I recorded with colleagues who I thought would bring insight and differing perspectives to the focus of the discussion. I recorded the test episodes to help me figure out what form I wanted the podcast to take.
The format I decided on was an experimental documentary storytelling podcast that would constructively explored cinema, multimedia and human psychology from a lucid and lateral, but highly entertaining and quirky perspective.
This meant each episode would have a different focus with each episode being a constructed presentation – some episodes would be documentaries, others would be audio dramas and a few would be self-reflections on the podcast and other projects I was working on.
You read more about the development of the podcast and read my detailed outlines for the first ten episodes on my film blog.
Find out more about Breaking Cinema >>>
Living With Hammy – Documentary
Envisioned as something of a sequel to Down A Word: The Story of NEXT FRIDAY, Living With Hammy chronicles a week I spent living with my friend Nick Hammond, a.k.a. Hammy, during my university summer holidays in 2010.
I never got round to editing the final documentary, but I did edit together a short teaser trailer to make my friends laugh.
In the footage I portrayed a very annoying version of myself who was constantly winding Hammy up, so the documentary would have edged into being something of a mockumentary.
I was annoying because that is how I could be, but also as revenge for how annoying Hammy had been to me over the years and because I knew it would provoke some amusing responses from him.
Ultimately, I didn’t edit the footage together because it got buried under all my other university commitments and, after viewing all the footage, I didn’t think what I had filmed was all that interesting.
Find out more about Living With Hammy >>>