Abandoning oil painting in my second year of art school, I graduated in 1995 with a handful of experimental Super8 films. Keen to continue my filmmaking journey, I bought an old 16mm camera with my last student loan and started shooting low-budget short films in Bristol’s indie scene, whilst working as a cinema usher and labouring on building sites. Thinking about film as a career, I decided against applying for film school as it was so expensive and I couldn’t face more education. Instead I had the ‘great idea’ of making a 16mm feature film, figuring the process would be my own film school.

By 1997 I had a rough script, written mostly while gallery-supervising at Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre, where I also worked in the evenings as an usher. I was torn between a transgressive punk aesthetic, embodied in the underground scene of ‘80s New York (Nick Zedd, Beth B, Richard Kern) and the kind of slow European cinema where plot takes a backseat to character and mood (Wim Wenders, Eric Rohmer, Clare Denis). These two influences I mangled together into a massively under-developed script, and then teamed up with budding producer Chloe Wyatt who was also keen on the ‘DIY film school’ idea. Having secured a small Lottery grant of £3,000, we went into production in March ’98. The production phase took six months, shooting in week-long blocks on out-dated BBC film stock; using begged & borrowed equipment, and employing a cast & crew made up entirely of our friends. 1999 was spent editing and trying to raise completion funds. Finishing post-production on favours and credit card debt, One Thick Second was finally completed on 7th Dec 1999. It premiered at Bristol’s Cube Cinema in late Jan 2000, where it played to a full house for three nights, before showing at a few festivals and an early internet channel (Skynet) before fizzling out as we eventually ran out of steam. A few industry figures expressed surprise that we had managed to make this whole film completely under the radar and wanted to know what I had next. The answer was ‘nothing’ - I was ill, badly in debt and completely spent!

Twenty years later, having dug out the old Digi-Beta master tape and got it transferred, I am able to see the film a little more objectively. One Thick Second has many flaws and rough edges. For a start it needed a lot more work on the script (it would have helped if I finished it before shooting…). Structural problems meant the final edit ran to a no-mans land of 53 mins. The dialogue and performances are patchy; the only actor I actually cast for (who wasn’t a mate) was Jo Keith, who plays Lena in Cornwall at the end. She improved as takes progressed but my lead, non-actor Jon Webb, would quickly lose interest, so that was a real problem. The sound is pretty terrible in places and I still lacked a lot of experience in lighting. Yet beyond the nostalgia of viewing what is essentially an elaborate diary of my life in late ’90’s Bristol, it somehow makes a virtue of it’s rough edges. At the time I felt that British films tended to fall into one of two camps - the Ken Loach camp or the Richard Curtis camp, and - with very few exceptions - there didn’t seem to be anything in the middle. I wanted to make something about the British sub-culture I was living in.

By the time the film was finished I was already working regularly as a commercial camera assistant. I have always been someone who struggles to get going creatively; I saw that to make a career of writing & directing I would need to be a prolific content generator. Furthermore, as a director I could never imagine letting go of the camera, so in the end it was natural that I graduated towards cinematography. Today I work as a director of photography based in London and have appended this One Thick Second material to my professional website.