I’m serious about drama. Having done TV, music videos, lots of corporate and extreme sports videos, nothing compares to the challenge of drama and the endless creative possibilities it presents. In the UK the Film Council has been given its marching orders in an act of extreme self-mutilation by an over-zealous government keen to be seen as proactive. It seems devastatingly short-sighted given that we appear to be about to enter a golden age of British cinema. Big claim, but the democratisation of film tools is already seeing a younger, bolder generation of creative filmmakers come through in greater numbers than we’ve seen for a long while. There’s a lot more crap but the golden heart is beating strongly.

Virgin Media Shorts is an open film competition that celebrates short film, offering a great first prize, great support to filmmakers and an increasingly aware and savvy community to go with it. Put simply it’s now the biggest short film competition in the country. And yet, every year I completely fail to enter anything. It’s partly the 2’20″ time limit which does me in every time, and it’s partly that I always find myself too busy. Last year we wrote and produced a film for the competition and ended up with Please Hold, which now weighs in at over ten minutes. We missed that limit by a country mile. This year I wasn’t going to bother because I simply didn’t have an idea I thought would be strong enough. Then, ten days before the competition deadline, I had a brainwave. So we ended up putting an entire film together in a very short space of time.

These days I’m fully aware that what wins competitions is the ability to create a genuine emotional response to a film. More and more people are becoming adept at ticking the required ‘film’ boxes: nicely shot, use of the closeup, decent editing, music and picture etc. However, very few people seem to have that innate understanding of what makes a story a story, or indeed what makes great film great. For a long time I relied on whizz bang to see me through, pummelling my viewer with dynamic visuals and glossy craft. Now, I don’t bother with any of that. Not because I don’t enjoy it, but because I’m much more interested in a different kind of challenge: making people care.

Brighton is the latest in a number of short essais to develop this side of my sensibilities. And it all started with a simple idea: a father comes out to his son. I think the process behind how I went from this idea to the film we eventually made is pretty interesting and I’ll cover it in a separate blog. On the day we kept it really loose. I’d done a recce the day before and scouted some locations I thought would be good but half of them we didn’t end up using because while on the Saturday it had been grey and empty in Brighton, on the Sunday it turned out to be the hottest day of the year and everyone and his dog was in town.

There was no script, the actors were briefed on what we wanted them to do and how we wanted them to do it, then we just let them get on with it. We knew we were going to have to shoot master shots with minimal additional coverage and that was basically it. Three different locations, three different emotional registers, but the same scene. I decided to shoot it myself, on the 5D, using the Cinestyle picture profile, with the express intent of making it look as un-DSLR as possible. Partly because I’m sick of it, partly because I didn’t want that look, and also because I knew many of the other films in the competition would look very DSLR-like and we wanted to be a bit different.

As always I worked with my trusty co-director Gez Medinger, soundman Simon Wan, camera assistant Stephen Parker with Sarah Linstra our production manager. Big thanks to Leoni Kibbey for helping with casting and of course our cast themselves Henry Maynard (who’s becoming my Joe Pesci) and Andrew Macdonald, who were both taken to some pretty uncomfortable places during the shoot. I’ll dig into the whole process in a future blog in more detail but for now I hope you enjoy it. The 3’20″ cut is far superior but 2’20″ is a cruel mistress.

Big thanks as always to SmallHD, Cambo and Zacuto for their continued support.

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