You’ve set up the interviewee. You’re on a long lens, 15 feet away. You’re ready to press the red button then you remember: you forgot to white balance. How many times has that happened to you and does it matter? ...

Save yourself money Every self-shooting course I teach for Landmark Film School, I get asked the same thing: which camera should I buy and what else do I need? I realise gear is expensive and work/income has been hard to ...

Canon or Sony?   I get asked this so many times. Sony has achieved an impressive dominance in factual TV so, unsurprisingly, people already in the industry often ask do I teach on Sony.   I always say the same ...

  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. ...

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 ...

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 ...