Screened at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Noli - The Too Long, Too Difficult, Too Raw Short Film Festival.
This is a five-minute film I made with Northern Film + Media (now North-East Screen) for their Blueprint programme. Blueprint was a scheme designed to produce new shorts by early-career film and video artists. I was really honoured to be chosen alongside some fantastic rising talents: Madeline Smyth, Megan Watson, Matthew Ward, Dominic Nelson-Ashley.
The Commons is about the connections between common land, fairy mythology, the birth of the internet, fungal biology and UFOs. If that sounds like a lot, it is - but the connections are closer than you think, and the whole film is designed to form a closed loop, ending at exactly the point where it began - a fairy ring of narrative.
I did a lot of things for the first time on this project, most significantly workshopping a script with a group of fantastic young actors. One of them turned out to be a keen dancer too, giving the film a whole new ending I hadn't anticipated. The whole process was fast, chaotic, full of ideas and improvisation, and I felt completely supported by the producers - the perfect mix.
It might have been slightly too chaotic - I forgot to credit the archive footage in the film, which comes from Georges Méliès's landmark A Trip to the Moon. Whoops. The other source material was credited properly: that's Dominic Nelson-Ashley on the soundtrack, reading the poetry of that great working-class bard of the commons John Clare.
