I’ve been thinking about prices of my film school courses after one of my Google reviewers suggested I should be charging double!   Currently, I’m charging £350 for my two-day self-shooting course. That’s designed to give a TV researcher ...

Here’s a one minute commercial commissioned by NHS and Oxford University. I filmed it in Oxford this month… This had to be filmed in a day with a family who were lovely but who had no acting experience. It was ...

I was thinking about how we see things. I spend a lot of very happy time looking at paintings and I was looking at the still lives in the Rijksmuseum recently. It’s not a genre that’s engaged me much previously. So I ...

I’m absolutely not a lighting DoP – I’ve worked with some deeply talented people and learned lots from them but they’re in a completely different league in terms of lighting skill. That’s as you’d expect – it was their job ...

I’m re-booting Landmark’s short filming courses. I’ve been teaching and working for quite a few different organisations since the pandemic – the National Film and Television School (NFTS), the University of Oxford, UAL in London, training courses for Channel 4 and ITV Studios and NFTS ...

This is my favourite documentary of the year so far. It’s funny in parts, very moving and perceptive about ageing, about men and women and about loneliness. I really loved it.   As it settles into its groove and, I ...

BBC1 – One Life – Rat Attack. I always cite this film as evidence of just how deeply unglamorous the lives of documentary makers are. Its final scene was shot in a rat infested back garden in Bootle, Liverpool, at ...

Over the years as a working documentary maker making films for TV, I must have asked thousands of people to take part in filming. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently – how we gain people’s agreement to be ...

It’s obviously very American and historically skewed but worth looking at nonetheless. Even from the American viewpoint, it’s hard to understand the omission of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (whatever your view of Bob, ...

Just found one of my favourite documentaries of all time online. It’s here https://vimeo.com/307839240 posted up for free by the director, Pawel Pawlikowski. It’s a beautiful piece of work: wry, comedic, beautifully filmed and edited with a cast of characters ever more ...