THE GALLOWS POLE

LEAD EDITOR / VFX

DIR: Shane Meadows | PROD: BBC / A24 / Element Pictures

“It is funny, moving, enraging, shocking by turns and always compelling. Not to be missed”

THE GUARDIAN

  • Based on the book by Benjamin Myers, Shane Meadows fictionalises the remarkable true story of the rise of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners. Set in the moorland hills of 18th Century Yorkshire, the drama follows the enigmatic David Hartley played by Michael Socha (This Is England, Papillon), as he assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a revolutionary criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history.

  • Shown above are excerpts from the Fever scene in Episode 01, where David suffers the effects of a stab wound while the village rushes to his aid. This scene was filmed unbroken for over an hour with five cameras, essentially performed and captured as a live theatre piece. The large cast was spread between interior and exterior settings simultaneously.

    Also added to this scene are further elements - mixed media flashbacks that contain important backstory, as well as a hallucinatory montage that conjures some of the mythic/pagan undertones of the story. Distilling all of this material while maintaining a pace that drives the episode forward was not a straightforward editing task.

    My design work on the RTS award nominated TITLE SEQUENCE can be seen here on the PROMOS page.

THE VIRTUES

EDITOR / POST-PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR

DIR: Shane Meadows | PROD: Channel 4 / Warp Films

“…a final 20 minutes that was among the most intense passages in TV history”

THE GUARDIAN

  • BAFTA-nominated Stephen Graham is Joseph, a barely on-the-wagon alcoholic whose precarious reality is knocked for six when his ex-partner moves abroad with their young son, from Liverpool to Australia, for a better life. With no immediate family to live for, Joseph is haunted by a past he has tried, for decades, to forget – if not actively obscure with drink and drugs. Suffering the hangover from hell – the dry spell over – he walks away from his present life and boards a boat bound for Ireland to confront hazy, fear-inducing memories from a childhood spent in the care system that he’s had to forget.

  • As editor I worked primarily on the series finale, with particular attention on the concluding half hour. The whole section sees the separate stories of Joseph and Dinah (Niamh Algar) intertwine as they each confront their own abusers, and builds steadily to a powerful ending. It was a complicated edit as there were no fixed points to dictate when and how to move from one character to the other, so it took a lot of experimentation to find the right balance and rhythm.

    I was also credited as the Post-Production Supervisor for the series, as I helped to oversee the grade, online and VFX from both a creative and a technical perspective.

DEAD MAN’S SHOES

FILM EDITOR

DIR: Shane Meadows | PROD: FilmFour / Warp Films

"An outright masterpiece. Comic, touching and drop-dead terrifying"

DAILY TELEGRAPH

  • A soldier (Paddy Considine) returns home to his small town and exacts a deadly revenge on the thugs who tormented his dimwitted brother (Toby Kebbell) while he was away. One by one the young hoodlums meet their fates as the soldier releases the hate he feels inside. A blend of horror, the supernatural, comedy and social realism.

  • Ranked No.27 in Empire’s “100 Best British Films Ever”, the film won 4 major awards on release and was nominated for a further 13. Among these was my own British Independent Film Award nomination for Best Technical Achievement for the editing. Re-released in cinemas for its 20th anniversary in 2023 it attracted another wave of positive reviews.

    The scene presented above was referenced by Alistair Harkness in THE SCOTSMAN as “a masterclass in bleary visuals and subjective sound edits”. Early in the edit we had a much more straightforward sequence, a good looking but quite neat montage to a dance tune. Shane said it was too pretty and we needed to really conjure some unsettling mayhem to better depict the drug induced madness.

    So I tried anything I could think of - crashing different songs together, with pulsing dips and raises in volume; speeding up a full ten minute take by 1000% which results in the almost subliminal flashes; jump cuts and reversals; and removing the sense of time and space by showing things in a slightly jumbled order.

    “Get up and dance at my party!”

AS DEAD AS IT GETS

FILM EDITOR / COLOURIST / ONLINE EDITOR

DIR: Simon Ellis | PROD: Whatifi / Wellington Films

“Well written and produced…it’s all so engrossing”

ENDGADGET

  • Every death has its day. A ghost reveals a route back to life but co-dependency with the dead is complicated. A multi-narrative misadventure in the spirit world with sixteen potential endings, commissioned specifically for phones and shot in vertical format. Available to watch on the Whatifi app for iOS and Android. Directed by Simon Ellis, behind such works as Soft (2006), which won the International Jury Prize at Sundance as well as earning BAFTA and EFA nominations, and starring Michael Socha (The Gallows Pole), Mica Ricketts, and Roger Sloman (Nuts In May).

  • “This Interactive Movie App Puts Viewers ‘In The Director’s Chair’ — With Content Solely From Independent Creators” - FORBES

    This is a choose-your-own-adventure film, designed and filmed in the vertical portrait ratio for handheld screens. Hugely ambitious and technically challenging to create, the film offers 16 alternative pathways through to “An Ending”. Each separate strand offers around 25mins of narrative so there is over 2 hours of film in all. The playback and gameplay architecture was handled by Whatifi, a $10million startup, and AS DEAD AS IT GETS was featured at launch.

    The story map below is something that was crucial during the edit, it helps to give an overview of what this job actually involved. Each of those blocks is a separate short film, each one a link in a connecting chain.

    To help achieve more viewer immersion, the writer/director Simon Ellis decided to tell the story within a real-time duration. In the first episode a town hall clock strikes 01:00am, and from there we would track events precisely across all variations. So for example, if an ambulance arrives at 01:20am in one strand then we would fine tune all of the edits along the separate paths to make it arrive at exactly the same point in all other eventualities. Hard to achieve but very satisfying when we cracked the puzzle.

BOOTS ON THE GROUND

FILM EDITOR / COLOURIST / ONLINE EDITOR

DIR: Louis Melville | PROD: Last Bullet Films

"It is a great war movie. It is a great heist movie. It is a great horror movie.”

★★★★ NERDLY

  • Afghanistan October 2014. Five British soldiers, trying to stay alive on the last night of the Afghan War, face not only the Taliban, but also supernatural forces more terrifying than anything they've encountered before. As the night unfolds and their mission is finally explained to them, they find themselves engulfed in a labyrinthine nightmare and forces seemingly from another realm.

  • Premiered at London's FrightFest 2017 in Leicester Square, this innovative feature was the first British film to be shot entirely by its actors. Using a combat documentary approach the whole film is pieced together from helmet mounted cameras, creating an experimentally immersive experience.

BEYOND THE RAVE

FILM EDITOR / COLOURIST / ONLINE EDITOR

DIR: Matthias Hoene | PROD: Hammer Films / Pure Grass Films

"...a clever and at times brilliant take on a familiar genre"

THE GUARDIAN

  • Starring Jamie Dornan (Belfast, The Tourist), Sadie Frost (Bram Stoker's Dracula) Nora-Jane Noone (The Descent, The Magdalene Sisters), and Tamer Hassan (Eastern Promises) BEYOND THE RAVE delivers all the ingredients of a Hammer classic made for a 21st Century audience: vampires, blood, death and suspense.

  • BEYOND THE RAVE marked the return of Hammer Films after a thirty year absence. As noted by the DAILY TELEGRAPH: “the film is also at the cutting edge of distribution technology” as it was released on Myspace.tv to 18 countries in 9 different languages, to a potential global audience of 110 million.

ATTRITION

FILM EDITOR

DIR: Kelly Holmes | PROD: Artemsia Films / Arts Premieres

Best Fantastic Film at FilmQuest Film Festival

Best Director - Best Actor - Best Cinematogrophy at HorrOrigins Film Festival

Festival Director’s Choice Award at Idyllwild International Film Festival

  • Supernatural drama set in the British trenches of WW1. Along with the rest of his platoon, young Private Edwin Childs fears imminent German gas attacks. As the dreaded attack begins, how much will Edwin give of himself in the ultimate act of compassion towards his fellow men?

    ATTRITION stars Lewis MacKinnon (Victoria), Jack Roth (Bohemian Rhapsody), Edward Hogg (Taboo), and Jack Parry-Jones (Our Girl)

  • ATTRITION was an international co-production between the UK and France, produced by Anne Beresford of Artemesia Films (UK) and Charles Paviot of Arts Premieres (France). It has screened nationally in France multiple times on France 3, initially as part of a special slate of programmes to commemorate Armistice Day.

TALKING WITH ANGELS

FILM EDITOR

DIR: Nick Wild | PROD: Angel 2.0

"Fast-paced, funny and incredibly entertaining"

FRANKLY, MY DEAR

  • Starring Vic Reeves (Shooting Stars, Bang, Bang, It’s Reeves and Mortimer), Jane Horrocks (Absolutely Fabulous, Little Voice), Kayodi Ewumi (Enterprice, #HoodDocumentary) and John Thomson (Cold Feet, The Fast Show)

    Bogus stage psychic Bernard de La Reine is suddenly gifted the ability to see Frank, a genuine heavenly angel wandering through the streets of Northern England dressed in a blue velvet suit. Frank is not your traditional angel. Overworked and underpaid he has one final mission to complete his "tour of duty" and one last soul to save.

  • It was a real pleasure to work with such a talented comedy cast on a really entertaining premise. Particularly Vic Reeves / Jim Moir, who I have long been a fan of since the Big Night Out days in the nineties. I once bought a painting from Vic called Doctor Death and His Beagles, which I present here unrelated to anything else whatsoever.

THE SEA IS AN EDGE AND AN ENDING

FILM EDITOR / COLOURIST / ONLINE EDITOR

DIR: Lavinia Greenlaw | PROD: Film and Video Umbrella

“…there’s a subtlety and an intellectual curiosity…that belies the wrench and rawness of the material”

THE GUARDIAN

  • The poet Lavinia Greenlawhas written and directed THE SEA IS AN EDGE AND AN ENDING, a short film investigating what it means to lose your memory and disappear into the present tense. Its framework is a sequence she wrote about her father’s death from Alzheimer’s. The film focuses on what it means for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free.

    THE SEA IS AN EDGE AND AN ENDING was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Metal with the support of Wellcome Trust. Supported by Arts Council England.

  • This was the first film by poet and author Lavinia Greenlaw. Although she had a precise approach in mind, I was nevertheless able to collaborate closely with her on the timings, rhythm and use of imagery to help support the poetic framework.

    In the colour grade, Lavinia directed me to create a very washed out look where the colour has leached from the world as a means of reflecting the father’s gradual separation from his old self. The film has screened in various galleries across the UK and is presented here in full.

IN THE MEADOW

FILM EDITOR / COLOURIST / ONLINE EDITOR

DIR: David Alexander Smith | PROD: UK Film Council / Sodalite Films

“The film is unsettling and really does show what short films can achieve with tender love and care. My pick from the London Short Film Festival”
IGN UK

Nominated Best British Short at Edinburgh International Film Festival

  • Starring Tuppence Middleton (War and Peace, Jupiter Ascending, The Imitation Game), and Chris Larkin (Master and Commander, Valkyrie). A married man and his younger mistress head into the English countryside for an illicit birthday picnic. As the afternoon progresses, events begin to take a disturbing turn.

  • Selected in Sight & Sound’s Highlights of The Year, the film screened at festivals worldwide.

    “It relentlessly takes you places you didn't expect to go, each scene offered all the more impact by Smith's keen sense of pace. The story grows into a wonderfully sinister study of morality” - LITTLE WHITE LIES