The first step is to find something that inspires me. It’s not always a good thing. Sometimes it will be some music or I will see a good film or read something interesting that gets ideas flowing. Other times I get inspired by being messed around in my professional career of making more mundane videos and I get really angry and go and make something. Those projects tend to work out a lot better for me personally than the kind of videos that I make for other people for money.

Once I have the kernel of an idea I start to look for people to collaborate with me on the project. Which can be tricky now that I am getting older as everyone I know is older now as well and has responsibilities like children and real jobs. But they are an important part of my process. People like to think artists are lone geniuses but they really aren't there are always many people who help them do their art. 

I like to collaborate with people from different disciplines outside of film making. Like visual artists or musicians and dancers. Their process is different to mine and I feel like I get to learn things from them that help me with my own art. For example after spending many years sharing a studio with a variety of visual artists I feel like my composition and use of colour has improved quite a bit just by being around them and seeing what they are doing with their work. Probably a lot more than it would have if I had spent my time surrounded by other film makers.

Then we work on the idea. This mostly involves coming up with a lot of bad ideas or more accurately ideas that don’t really fit in what we are trying to do. It took me a while to learn that when you are working with people creatively a lot of your ideas are knocked back which isn’t pleasant. But while they are rejecting all your perfectly good ideas you are helping them solidify their vision of what they want. My vision for a pierce is usually quite ephemeral for a significant portion of the project. Maybe the first two thirds of the project I just have a few key images in my head. 

So when I am talking with my collaborators about the project we are doing a few things. We are establishing a common language of what kind of shared aesthetics we want. For example we might spend time talking about music that we like even though we aren't going to use that genre of music in the video. But doing that we are creating an understanding of what each other likes and that makes the collaborative process work. 

Also we start to make connections between my key images to flesh out the structure of the work. So we find locations and costumes and these choices start to fill in the missing parts between the key images. Then hopefully it takes on a life of its own and it just starts to low. I like to make choices that remove a lot of the we can do this or we can do that early on. For example choosing the location very early locks you into how you are going to go about the project. If I decide we are going to film at this location an hour way a lot of choices are made for us then. We are going to spend 2 hours of our day travelling so we can only do X amount of filming which means we can only do these 5 scenes for example. Maybe a better example is if I say ‘this is going to be historically accurate’ a lot of the aestheic choices have been made for us and we don’t have to worry about them anymore because we are going to be making our choices from the position of historical accuracy. 

Once we have done all that and filmed it or animated it. The editing process begins. Which I enjoy but it does have its unpleasant side as well. I have to look at my mistakes and there’s often no one I can blame but myself. Usually I watch the rushes with the cast and other collaborators and it looks good and everyone is happy. But then once editing begins it’s maybe not so great and the real work begins. I usually don’t like what we have done for quite some time and I have to find a part that I like. Once I find that part that works like I wanted it to I can get to work and make the other parts fit. It’s a bit like the key images that I mentioned earlier.

Then I don't know when it is finished. Sometimes I just stop once I think it’s doing what I wanted it to do. Other times I discover that it’s really about something else during the editing process and have to change things quite a bit to get it finished. Sometimes I have a deadline. I like to have a few days to not look at it before I decide if a work is finished. It can be pretty hard to maintain objectivity when you watch something over and over for weeks. Sometimes you are overly hard on yourself and it’s not actually as bad as you think it is when you don’t look at it for a few days. It’s a good way to catch any ‘I am just sick of this I will just do it this way and be done with it’ choices which you always regret later.