In these darkened rooms, the editor has the power to slow or speed the pace of a film, to add drama or tension to a scene or to rearrange sequences entirely. In the edit suite decisions are made 24 times a second, where the addition or subtraction of a single frame can entirely change the meaning of a scene and where through the edit, a cinema audience can share the subjectivity of a bomb technician, soar high above the shanty towns of Joburg or be guided into the imagination which allows Claireece “Precious” Jones to escape her abusive Harlem home. In this one-off masterclass, we ask the movie industry’s most respected figures a question. What makes a good editor?

“A sense of how to tell a story and an innate sense of rhythm,” explains Walter Murch, who remains most famous for his work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient. “Editing is visual music, and all of the sensitivity to rhythm and pace exist in the flow of images. The process itself is similar to the way jazz musicians perform, in that there’s a general melodic framework that you’re trying to get across in how the scene has been written and shot, but exactly what sort of shot you’ll use and where you’ll cut, those things are improvisatory at the moment of doing them.”

“Then, I guess, you have to be patient,” he adds. “You’ll work for 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week, seeing the same stuff over and over again. Frequently something isn’t working, and you have to keep trying to figure out new ways of making it work. That’s fine the first or second time, but you have to be prepared to do that 16 or 17 times just for one scene. Multiply that by the number of scenes you have, and add in the interaction between scenes and the restructuring of scenes, you have to have a high level of patience.”

Julian Clarke, days away from locking the cut of The Whistleblower, agrees. “Editors find tricks to shake themselves into a new perspective, even after you’ve been working on the same thing for many months. I find showing it to someone who hasn’t seen it for a while or an outside witness can shake you up, help you watch it in a different way and avoid settling into the malaise of accepting something as being good simply because you’ve become accustomed to it.”

“Another big part of the role is serving as a figure of impartiality,” says Julian. “Understandably, the director has a clear notion of what their film should become, particularly when they’ve written their own screenplay. They then suffer through the production and the warzone of set, where they may have had to fight with a line producer in order to secure a certain shots, and they can become emotionally tied to that footage. In my experience, editors don’t have the same kind of baggage, and can be objective about what is and isn’t working, and its arrangement. I come at it less from a perspective of executing the script, and much more about what is serving each scene and the film as a whole. There’s a lot of big personalities in movies, and I’ve found that it’s good for the editor to somewhat egoless; a force for calm in creating the movie.”

Joe Klotz, whose work on Precious was critical in balancing the tone of the film, agrees. “It depends on the director but, in my experience, an editor is a lot of times the friendly ear on a production. You have to really be measured, but the editor is often the person who can help them hold a film together.”

Walter explains the early process he uses in the early stages of constructing the film. “My particular method involves a lot of preparatory work. I screen the dailies at least twice, making a record of my first impression and then taking more detailed and considered notes in the second screening. I kind of let it roll around in my head, trying to get some glimpse of how I might put a scene together. Once I start to edit, that process becomes much more instinctual. A peculiarity of the way I work is that my first assembly is done without any reference to the sound. I’m asking the scene to be visually clear; whether you can understand through body language, and the intensity of the performance, something of what is being told. Once I’ve put that together, and maybe refined it once or twice, I’ll turn on the sound and see what I’ve got.“

“A good editor will often sift through all the footage trying to find the best moments, finding things that even the director, actors and the writer weren’t necessarily aware that existed,” adds Chris Innis, who picked through the huge shooting ratio for The Hurt Locker. “I’m the only person on the entire crew who has watched all 200 hours or so of it. Kathryn Bigelow had said that there was no off switch on the cameras, so editorial was the only “off” switch. I have always believed that it is better to give editors more time to absorb the material and to refine it before a director gives his or her notes anyway, and this film proved that theory to be true, where Bob Murawski and I were given time to do a good job before Kathryn stepped into the cutting room and we worked on her notes.”

“I wish everybody worked like Lee Daniels worked,” explains Joe as to the director’s involvement in the editing of Precious. “He set up a creative environment and would allow me to cut a scene any way I thought would work to be right for the film. The material called for a range of styles but literally anything went, and I was doing things I’d never done before like long dissolves the use of stills and abstract cutaways. He’d be sitting at the edge of the couch and, after a while, it was my goal to try to make him fall off that couch in shock and disbelief – the result was a really fertile edit room, and collaboration was a big of that.”

Walter explains how he manages the masses of material that arrives in the edit suite. “When I’m beginning to work, I manufacture an index card structure for the film. Essentially I work with coloured cards and different coloured inks, so for a sad scene I use subdued colours where emotional scene have more vibrant colours. The card is bigger if the scene is longer, and I use a diamond shape if I consider it to be pivotal. When you look at all these cards together up on the wall, the flow of colour tells you something about the emotional geography of the finished film, and I can get a pretty good sense how something is going to work when we drop or transpose scenes, and what’s going to be a good transition emotionally. It also has helps logistically, in that I put tabs on each card to indicate that a scene has been shot, and whether or not I have cut it yet, which enables me to locate myself in terms of the schedule without really having to think about it.”

As someone who has championed the use of new technologies, including the pioneering use of digital editing through employing Final Cut to edit Cold Mountain, this is perhaps a little surprising. “I tried to do it digitally but I didn’t like the results,” he admits. “Using techniques that you’d use in kindergarten, with glue and scissors kind of makes it more friendly. So much of what we do is digital and on the screen, it helps the general atmosphere to have a number of things that are made by hand and for me, the system has to have this handcrafted quality to it.”

“The wonderful thing about this particular line of work,” he adds, “is that it’s like a little R&D department where you’re trying to examine various aspects of human perception; figuring out works and what doesn’t, and what you can and can’t get away with. It’s similar to what magicians do, in that they work on this complicated dance between human perception, focus of attention and timing in order to produce the illusion. The editor is basically doing the same thing.”

Walter recalls an observation he first made while editing The Conversation. “I discovered that some of the cut points I had made intuitively coincided with points where Gene Hackman happened to blink. At first I thought it was odd, but I’d happened to read an interview with John Huston where he talked at some length about this idea of a film edit as a blink. I realised that where we choose to blink has something to do with what we are thinking and, though I absolutely don’t believe that you should cut every time an actor blinks, there is a similarity between where people blink in real life and where a film will cut from one shot to another. Each shot is a thought or a sequence of thoughts and what becomes significant is those moments is when the editor chooses to bring that thought to an end through a cut. To get more sophisticated, someone who doesn’t blink a lot but who seems to blink in the wrong places strikes us as not really participating in a conversation, perhaps because they are thinking about something else. By extension the blinks of an actor like Gene Hackman, who is so deeply in his part, are falling in the right place for that character, as he is thinking the same thoughts as his character.”

“It’s funny that you can find those bits that can really help you when you have an entirely new idea and are trying to change the meaning of what’s going on in the scene,” adds Julian. “The actor may not be doing anything in those moments before action has been called, where they’re just waiting with a neutral look on their face, but you may be able to read something into it. It doesn’t happen too often, but there’s been more than one instance where I’ve ended up using something like that.”

“I am a believer that rebirth is an inherent part of the fabrication of a film and, in order to be reborn, something has to die,” says Walter. “What I mean by that is that the ideas, emotions, images and sounds collected in dimensionless world of the script have to then be interred and reborn though the three-dimensional, and temporal, world of shooting. These ideas and emotions then re-emerge through the two-dimensional world of the edit suite, where the time of the manipulatable image can flow forwards or backwards at the editor’s discretion. Each of these discreet stages operates like a different language, with their own strengths and weaknesses and the editor is tasked to reinterpret the work of the previous language in terms of what you can achieve in the present. The problem that any translator comes up with is that, in order to really translate one language to another, you have to betray the original language in order to both be true to the ideas underneath the language, and to the particular language that you are dealing with at that moment.”

As someone who has also served as writer and director before he began editing, Julian agrees. “There’s a real connection between the writing process and the editing process, in that you are in control in so many respects. There are limitations of course, imposed on your writing by the budget you have and on editing through the material that has been shot, but both roles still offer an incredible blank canvas, of how you can affect the story as a single person without needing a huge amount of resources. Being on set is the complete opposite, where you need this kind of military apparatus in order to accomplish anything: time is limited, money is limited, locations are limited and with these finite parameters, you work on what you can get. Writing and editing are points where you can take a step back and be contemplative, where there isn’t that time in production where there is this immediacy of making decisions and moving on.”

“Each film is a new life,” suggests Walter. “The wonderful thing about filmmaking is that every project is different in terms of the personalities, conditions and technology involved, and all of the inherent excitement and uncertainty that comes with that. Inevitably there is some discovery that you are going to make about the system, the process or yourself, and those variables there are so great there’s very little danger of repetition.

WALTER MURCH’S STUDY OF EDITING, IN THE BLINK OF THE EYE, MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S THE CONVERSATIONS: WALTER MURCH AND THE ART OF EDITING FILM AND CHARLES KOPPELMAN’S BEHIND THE SEEN ARE ALL AVAILABLE NOW.

Never written anything like this before – the gist is we write a section, then send it on, the next writer flips an Oblique Strategies card, writes their section on that tip, then bounces it back. We thought this was rather clever. Thankfully, so do the publishers. Book out 2013.

Mr Rupert can be found online at Stride Magazine.

With Porky otherwise unavailable, he sent representative DJ Shepdog for the first of five visits west, the last of which – we kid you not – in a private investigative capacity, with button hole camera and other recording tech-trickery. Shep has since established the Nice Up! label, and is a regular at Bestival and the Big Chill.

Earlier in the year Danny Bilson, of Saints Row developer THQ, made a point of how his company’s new slate of games for 2011 would set them apart from the titles that initially defined the label. Saints Row may have been borne a GTA clone, but ambitions for the title have far outgrown this predecessor. Bilson explained that freedom was critical to the new game, with the conceit of offering an over-the-top experience centred on fun and the comedy of causing mayhem rather than realism. In Steelport, the Stillwater Saints have the temerity to fire themselves into battle from a human cannon, kick the enemy in the knackers and batter them around the head with a bat fashioned from a sex toy.

The game begins with a character customization section that says a lot about the coder’s intentions. Dress your character as a giant bunny, a wrestler or a crime fighting kick ass. Set yourself up with a zombie voice that may cause you to miss half of the plot, but cry laughing with a larynx not far from Zed – the screeching gang leader from Police Academy. The system is so easy to use and so infinitely customizable that characters modeled on celebrities have already made it onto the web in their droves, and allow you to play as Mia Wallace, Shrek or Old Gregg from The Mighty Boosh. The sense of personal ownership and a commitment to an individual experience extends to everything in game, from the vehicle you drive to the weaponry you’re packing.

Saints Row’s graphics may be cartoonish in comparison with contemporary action titles, but the open world environment offers so much variety and freedom that the pure, unadulterated fun far outweighs these aesthetic limitations. The city of Steelport is loaded with opportunities for those with an appetite for destruction, and the story mode can be abandoned entirely for a slew of side missions which feature everything from tanks to tigers, streakers and sonic boom guns, as well as gimp masks and Genki’s bizarro gameshow. Almost every daft activity earns respect points; the in-game currency that can be traded in for further gadgetry, feeding an intoxicating and addictive cycle to try out everything the city has to offer from the adorementioned human cannonball truck, laser equipped jets or the skull-crushing boxing glove appendage, the Apocofist.

WWW.SAINTSROW.COM

Watergate Remembered examines Watergate as a constitutional crisis rather than a scandal, the more conventional label, and evaluates its enduring significance for late 20th and early 21st century American politics, notably regarding the perpetuation of the imperial presidency, scandal politics, campaign finance reform, the public presidency, and cinematic imagery.

The book grew out of a US Presidency Centre symposium on Watergate, held at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in late 2009, and was expanded into an international collaboration in association with the Institute of Leadership Studies at Loyola-Marymount College, Los Angeles.  It is simultaneously published in both hardback and paperback, and contains original research essays by four UK scholars and five US scholars.

You can buy a copy at Amazon.

First published in Clash magazine.

Since being announced last year, and our sneak peak at E3, the ClashClick team have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the latest incarnation of Elder Scrolls. Having spent a couple of weeks with it, we reckon it’s the best game of the year by far. Grab your chainmail, light the torches and saddle the horses as we explore the dungeons and dragons of Skyrim.

We get through a lot of disks at Clash HQ, the majority of which are played through and cast aside in favour of the latest in a never-ending line of blockbusters. The tech industry has always traded on the next big thing, and developers have become increasingly sophisticated in grabbing our attention. Whether through live action TV spots, Hollywood style trailers, teaser footage or beta levels online, we find ourselves drawn in. The promise of more powerful graphics engines, advanced non-linear narratives and extended game play is commonly a tiny bit disappointing, where the reality is that there are probably fewer than a half a dozen titles each year that genuinely deliver the paradigm shift all this marketing spend promises.

After all the hype however, Skyrim does deliver. Oblivion, the fourth installment of the series, is something we still return to the loading tray, despite it having first been released way back in 2006. The definitive console roleplayer, the game borrowed from classic titles Bard’s Tale and Dungeonmaster, but broke out of the sewers and caves of its predecessors, finally bringing the well-rounded worlds familiar to PC players to console gamers. With its dynamic lighting and well-realized environments the game still looks good, while the open world narrative and dozens of quests and locations offered dozens of hours of adventuring, and plenty of replayability.

Brilliantly, Skyrim builds upon this success without cheapening everything that established its predecessor as one of a handful of truly great video games. Set 200 years after Oblivion, the world is far larger and contains a backstory rich in intrigue. To make an analogy with another medium, the depth and complexity of Skyrim brings its narrative closer to The Wire than anything that has preceded it. Riddled with the corruption and deceit that accompanies power and politics, the gameplay is robust enough to feel like it still exists long after you turned off the console. The main quest is engrossing in the way a great book can be, though by abandoning the fixed class system in favour of allowing players to develop their characters in a more organic manner, the result is an enriched experience, wholly dependant on the preferred manner of play.

Then there’s the dragons. Genuinely terrifying creatures, their appearance in battle causes everyone to panic – enemies desperately firing into the skies or seeking cover. They roam an expansive world where every creature and item serves some form of purpose, whether to be cooked up in a health-restoring recipe or forged into new armour. Skyrim allows plenty of freedom to make your own way through the environment, and there’s so much to learn and do it’s worthwhile spending the time doing so. These missions are far from the hidden packages of the GTA series, or the pointless trinkets and trophies of countless other titles. In Skyrim, completing quests and learning skills is genuinely rewarding and offers a deeply personal gaming experience which blazes the trail for the next generation of open world titles.

WWW.ELDERSCROLLS.COM/SKYRIM

We talk to Vincent Kummer, of the game’s development team, about causing trouble in paradise.

“We knew that the game had so many aspects to it, which would be difficult to fit into a traditional two-minute trailer,” explains Vincent, referring to the innovative short film that announced the game’s arrival in February. The trailer, where a child’s parents unsuccessfully fight off a horde of undead, had gamers desperate to get their hands on the title and won the animation studio responsible for the film a gong at Cannes.

“We wanted to get across the emotional experience of the game and used a family to show that the zombies could hit anyone and everyone,” says Vincent. “We had a feeling it would be controversial, but really wanted to differentiate our game from others out there. With so many triple A games out there you have to find your own niche, seek out the people you want to check out what you’re doing and tailor the message towards them.”

Mission accomplished. While The ClashClick shelves are heaving with shambling corpses, Dead Island sets itself apart from other zombie titles with a deeply unsettling tone closer to George A Romero’s earlier movies than contemporary undead fare. The resort setting provides a trippy location for the title’s ultra-violence, where blue sky and sun kissed exteriors are contrasted with the dark corridors of a hotel complex and dimly lit holiday bungalows.

“The art direction came from us trying to design a paradise resort that we’d like to visit, and we drew upon real locations,” Vincent explains. “It also offered us a logical next step in that once the player leaves the resort itself the island is going to look completely different – in that it doesn’t have that level of luxury around the rest of the place. We wanted to get the player out of that cocoon, and trade on the idea that the island is a trap right now.”

“Obviously the game has been in development for a long time,” he adds. “From the beginning we wanted to balance the open world environment with the terrifying reality of what other survivors would do faced with a zombie outbreak. The feeling we were going for was that the only thing you’re fighting for is your own survival. It was clear for us that not everyone would like the game, in that it has a different pacing and is focused on mêlée combat. We wanted to create a real and desperate experience, rather than one where a rocket launcher is placed in every corner and tried to focus on the back story and characters.”

This combat system is critical to the success of the game, where a slew of classic weapons can be crafted into something a little more dangerous from what you find lying around.. In addition, the undead need to be fought as much with brain as brawn – the strategic deployment of weapons as important as that all important nail studded baseball bat itself, while the targeted strike system offers plenty of opportunities for some messy skull popping, limb chopping action

“We didn’t include gross-out violence for the sake of it,” Vincent explains, “but understand that gore is a part of the zombie universe, and worked hard on balancing that with the gameplay mechanics and keeping the sense of realism that had been so important for us. Mêlée was our biggest challenge. Alot of games have tried to implement it, and pretty much all have failed. A handgun always give you distance but zombies, by their nature, attack through hand-to- hand and for the player to fight like this as well really amps up the sense of immersion by throwing them right into the action. We wanted it to feel like you were fighting for your life. With the faster zombies the smart move is to go for their legs, while the Thugs swing their arms for you so by injuring their arms there you leave them without an ability to attack you.”

These Thugs, roaring monstrosities that block player progress with a fearsome right hook, are part of a terrifying array of enemies. Straight-jacketed Rams, spitting Drowners, saw-armed Butchers and bobble headed Suiciders lurk the dark corners of the island and keep those jump scares pumping.

“With a big team like this you are drawing on all kinds of influences. Some people prefer the newer movies like 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, and some like the old school stuff like Romero. The way we worked it was to take everyone’s ideas, and throw some spice in for a mixture of genres and zombies that help keep the player engaged.”

Controversy of a less palatable kind arrived on launch day, where some unfortunately titled leftover code drew tabloid attention. “Obviously we wanted the game to be perfect from the beginning on,” admits Vincent, “but some stuff happened and we responded with a fix within a couple of hours. It wasn’t a nice situation but we dealt with it as soon as we could. Its not something we’d want to repeat, but we hope players see that we wanted to deliver a game that they’d have fun with. All the, crossovers and videos that people are putting together show people are enjoying it. The first downloadable content is going to hit in the next few weeks, and we’re already thinking about a second DLC.”

Paraphrasing Romero’s Night of the Living Dead – “If you have a gun, shoot ‘em in the head. That’s a sure way to kill ‘em. If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ‘em or burn ‘em. They go up pretty easy.”

WWW.DEADISLANDGAME.COM

First published in Magnetic Magazine

Italian film director Alex Grazioli is something of a renaissance man. He began his career as a graphic designer, though the last decade has seen his portfolio shift through photography to the moving image. His first film, Odyssey in Rome, was a documentary that followed legendary director Abel Ferrara—famous for The Driller Killer, King of New York and Bad Lieutenant—as he struggled to make Mary in 2005. A mind-mangling example of meta-cinema, Matthew Modine plays a director who fights fundamentalism and his own meltdown in order to screen an account of the life of Mary Magdalene, This is My Blood.

Grazioli’s own movie is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, concerned with the making of a film that is itself about the making of a film. An ambitious debut, Modine, Juliette Binoche and Forest Whitaker, as well as Ferrara and the film’s producers, all appear on screen to comment on the movie’s inception, production and execution with disarming clarity, successfully drawing back the curtain on the creative practice of one of the world’s most incendiary and controversial directors.

The catalyst for the film was seeded in unlikely circumstances. “It was a very random situation,” explains Alex, down the line from his apartment in London. Born in Milan, though resident in New York and London, Alex speaks quickly with a strong accent though his enthusiasm is entirely infectious. “Since I came out of the first Star Wars film in the cinema, I wanted to be a film director. I’d trained as a graphic designer and become an art director, but I slowly moved towards the moving image. I had just moved out of New York and had returned to Europe in order to enroll in film school.”

“On the first day,” he says, “I did a creative writing seminar, where one of the speakers happened to be Quentin Tarantino. When they went for lunch, I sneaked myself in with the lecturers, and I ended up sitting next to him. He asked me who I was and what I was doing at the event and I responded by telling him that my name was Alex, I was 30 years old and that it is my ambition to be a film director. He immediately told me that either I was a director or not and that, rather than wasting my time, money and energy doing a degree, I should just get up and do it.”

“This was on Saturday morning,” he recalls,”and on the Monday I resigned from the course. The same day an old friend called me and invited me to her birthday in Italy that Thursday. She knew I had moved to London, and explained that they were planning a big dinner in Bologna with her boyfriend, who happened to be one of Bernardo Bertolucci’s producers. She told me that he had been in talks to a produce a religious film that Abel Ferarra was about to make and, knowing my ambitions to be involved in film, asked me if I wanted to join them. I thought that the idea of Ferrara doing something on Mary Magdalene was amazing, and I was convinced that something interesting would come out if I was given a chance to be around the film. The documentary that inspired me was Hearts of Darkness, which covered the making of Apocalypse Now, and was one of the few times that I feel I’ve truly seen behind the scenes of a film—the struggle of set, and the labor that goes into a movie. When I arrived at that dinner on Thursday, I made my pitch to the producers and within two weeks I had become a director, and moved to Rome in order to start shooting—without a clue of what I was doing.”

“I bumped into Tarantino at the Cannes Film Festival a few years later,” he adds, laughing, “and tried to communicate to him how that lunchtime conversation had been such a major influence on my life, but of course the guy remembered nothing about it.”

Since making Odyssey in Rome, Grazioli has directed pop promos for Robert Miles and Sander Kleinenberg, continues to shoot portraits for Italian Vogue and—somewhat bizarrely—designed a book for the Pope. More recently, he has formed a production company with Catherine Carter, with whom he had worked at a label and distribution company in New York. Red Lipstick Mafia has a full slate of projects, including two full-length music documentaries—on Massive Attack and Sonny Boy Williamson—and a third film, Bottom of the World, which charts three men’s adventure to the most inaccessible place on earth.

“It was my birthday a few years ago,” he explains, “and my girlfriend at the time treated me to a lecture at the Royal Geographic Society, here in London. These three guys spoke for an hour and half to a full house, who were totally enraptured by their story of an expedition where they walked and kite-skiied to the geographical centre of the South Pole. This place is referred to by explorers as the Pole of Inaccessibility, and has only ever been reached twice before—by Russian teams, the last time forty years earlier. They were hilarious.

I loved the way these guys cracked up the audience, their talk was funny and interesting—more Jackass goes to Antarctica than the usual serious drama—and I told them afterwards that it would make an amazing documentary. They said that a few people had already approached them, but were kind enough to lend me their footage, and I spent a few weeks going through it to put together a promo which showed these three super cool, funny nutters going on a mission. I don’t want to jinx, but hopefully the film will be out next year.”

Alex explains what unifies these very different projects. “When I was a kid, seven or eight years old, my favorite program on Italian TV was called Action Now! where the presenter traveled around the world to meet up with inspiring people doing extraordinary stuff. One of the episodes was on Philippe Petit, who walked between the World Trade Center towers on a tightrope wire, one was Evel Knievel, when he jumped the Snake River canyon, but the episode that stuck with me the most was about this guy called Carl Boenish, who was the founder of BASE jumping. His motto was ‘Happy are those who dream dreams, and are willing to pay the price to see them come true,’ and I immediately made this statement my own. I’m fascinated by it, and it is the common thread in everything I do—whether that’s music video or documentary—a commonality is to tell the stories of people who are really willing to go that step further and work hard to realize their dreams.”

“With Massive Attack also, this is also the way it is in that they have a vision, and they go for it. I don’t remember exactly how we met, but I’d hooked up with a costumer designer and producer who is a good friend of the band, and had shown Odyssey in Rome to Robert Del Naja, who loved it. There’d been some talk of a possible documentary, so I met with Robert a couple of times and, as with the other projects, something emerged with us initially shooting some live performances; the Meltdown show at the South Bank, which they curated, and some dates on the world tour.”

“I’ve always been a huge fan, but part of the appeal of a documentary is that the dark sounds that have been associated with them give an impression that doesn’t really correspond with the people that I had met. They are the funniest, incredibly easy-going people and are involved with such a big family of collaborators. It’s a long-term project; there are so many aspects of the band that to cover it all is quite complex. I’ve been working on it for almost three years, trying to work out how to include their origins in Bristol, the sound system and the collective of artists involved, together with the differences within the band and their politics.

“As a documentarian, I enjoy being around the subject a lot, and becoming part of their life, so mutual trust and respect is one of the first things to establish, and I want to make sure we set up certain boundaries and topics that we might go through and others which we might not, according to subject fears and needs, while pushing what is useful to tell the story and helping them to open up. No matter how good you are at blending in the environment and people become less conscious of the camera, its presence can still make people uncomfortable. The band are simultaneously excited and reluctant, in that they are enthusiastic, but not so eager to expose themselves totally as they are quite reserved and discreet. From Massive Attack to Abel to Forest Whittaker, these people who have really made it, the difference between them and everybody else is that they are big dreamers. It is this story that connects all of my work, as a graphic designer, as a visual artist and a photographer.”