How do you light
your home?
Can you tell me about your most religious
experiences?
From these two seemingly innocuous questions, myself and
collaborator Alex Norris made a film which won a national
competition in Scotland in 1995/6. For several years the
scheme known as "first reels" ran by Scottish Screen (then
the Scottish Film Council) - funded short films to get
something made with a little budget and training support.
In 1995 the scheme changed it's name to "centenary reels"
to celebrate the centenary of cinema. And the films that
year were loosely themed around the birth of cinema.
I think around 10 films were commissioned at that time with
a small budget of £4,000 which sounds a lot but if you are
shooting on film, leaves just about enough for a some
sandwiches and coffee. And we did cosume a lot of coffee
because we shot at night.
We decided to make a film about the relationship we have
with electrical light. But instead of doing a documentary -
we made an audio piece first by travelling up and down the
country and listening to stories on a) how people light
their home and b) if they've had any religious experiences.
We cut the answers up whilst I was a resident artist in a
school in Manchester and made a montage of electronic
noises, answers to the questions and a sound design that
could have won the Sonic Daisy Award if we'd have entered
it.
Then we went out and shot images of London and North
Yorkshire and stuck them on top of the soundtrack. We shot
it on a clockwork camera - a Bolex - usually used for
animation purposes which meant we could shoot without
permission in a lot of places in London, whipping the
camera out for a few seconds here and there.
We shot in The Guardian printing plant in the Docklands
exactly two weeks prior to the hour that the IRA blew it
apart.
Beacons was shot by my friend Andrew Conway who had to deal
with my strops of wanting to shoot everything I made (See,
I'd had to be my own crew for so long!) and he taught us to
edit on film. He now teaches in Cleveland. Alex is a
children's entertainer and actor, and I still don't know
what I am. This was my first funded work though and it's
not perfect but I am ever so fond of it.
