Saving the World in the Nick of Time

Making films and TV About the Climate Emergency ☛ “Hmmm… tricky…” I’m at a UK-based Film and Television Market and a panel of mainly TV executives have just been asked how they’d respond to being pitched scripts on the subject of the climate emergency. “We don’t want to preach to people.”“We don’t want to scare […]

Establishment Rules

Whether and when to use establishing shots ☛ When I was at film school there was a lot of sniffiness about using establishing shots, an attitude which I also came across in some feature film cutting rooms. For some feature film directors and editors GV—or general view—is a dirty word. But what’s the beef? Why […]

Blurring the Border

Where fiction lies ☛ The question of when and how fiction can tell lies has been very present in the public mind recently, especially in the UK. The new series of The Crown has ruffled establishment feathers by taking what some see as an overly free hand with historical reality, especially in its depiction of […]

Making Music pt.2

Laying Down Tracks In the last blog we looked at choosing the style of music for your film, and how it can place the sort of film it is or where it’s set. Now you’ve settled on a musical style, I’m going to talk about what strategy to use, where in the film to use […]

Making Music

Pt.1 Style counseling. Long before movies had sound, they had music. Not the 10,000 piece orchestra of Hans Zimmer*—instead, a single pianist on a cheap upright piano, or later a cinema organ, improvising to the picture as it played. Nonetheless, from near the beginning, moving images relied on music as a trusty guide, steering the […]

Executive Stress

When Money People Monkey with your Cut ☛ In the Oscars this year Harrison Ford unpocketed a set of notes that had been given by the Executive Producers on his 1982 film Blade Runner. His intention was clearly to ridicule the wrong-headedness of Hollywood executives and the way they blunder into the editing process; these […]

Emotional Distancing

When to hold back ☛ One of the basic tenets of the industry that has grown up to help screenwriters with their scripts is: make your story as emotional engaging as possible. It’s not bad advice: well-written, emotionally impactful scenes cost the same to shoot as averagely written ones; but they can make the difference […]

Meditations on Monochrome

Should we be defaulting to colour? ☛ During the first film on which I worked, I got chatting to an old-timer in the camera department who bemoaned the lack of black-and-white films being shot. “You’ve got to have a reason to shoot in colour,” he argued. I should add that this was in the ’90s […]

Directorial Style

Why directors make their mark ☛ One thing that distinguishes many successful directors is their tendency to leave their own personal stamp on a film. From Woody Allen to Ken Loach, Spike Lee to Tarantino, directors whose names we know often give their films such a distinctive feel that, were we to be dropped into […]

Marty vs Marvel: the Flaw in the Argument

Listen Marty, some friends of ours—not me—are concerned about what you’ve been saying recently. They’re very concerned. The guys at Marvel have asked me to tell you… ‘it is what it is’. [Apologies to those who haven’t yet seen The Irishman.] After Martin Scorsese doubled-down on his comments about Marvel films not being cinema in […]