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The rasping call of a lone black crow will sometimes kick my thoughts back four decades and place me in the frosted flat landscape of East Yorkshire. This was during my first job after leaving the School of Architecture and I was working at another place of learning: The Bishop Burton College of Agriculture where [...]

For everyone who asked…  a small collection of film jargon! Pre-production can last for several years and some films never get any further. A core group of senior people develop the script, line up actors, find finance etc. Production starts when a film is definitely signed up and staff in all departments are taken on. [...]

Most years I work from the Spring until late Autumn, then paint during the winter. This year I did some big oil paintings – flowers mostly -  and some water-colours of London views that were used to produce greetings cards. Somewhere around March every year I phone my contacts in the movie business and catch [...]

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When I’m working abroad accommodation is usually provided, but if I get offered a job on a new production in the UK I often have to find somewhere to live at short notice. Liz has become increasingly insistent on helping to find somewhere, as a result of spending weekends with me in what she describes as [...]

Brazzaville 6 am – the unsealed roads mean that a thick red dust is kicked up by the dozens of mini-bus taxis that are milling round the centre of this township. We’re here to stage an explosion for the final part of the production I’m working on and have built our own shanty market in [...]

Few people who visit South Africa can avoid noticing the desperate poverty that exists away from the tourist areas. Living in Cape Town (whilst Paul was working there) it didn’t take me long to realise that I wanted to do something to help. I volunteered to work for the South African Education and Environment Project [...]

I’m in Maputo, Mozambique. It’s over thirty degrees, very humid and I’m travelling with a fleet of mini-buses containing ‘heads of department’ on a technical recce for a film. We’re not here because of the fabulous Portuguese architecture or the thick lush vegetation, but in the hope that this city’s desperate poverty will provide us with [...]

Finding your way round Belgrade is a bit of a challenge as street names and signs on public buildings are written in cyrillic script and look rather like mathematical formulae. The main shopping street in Belgrade is Knez Mihailova – Prince Michael’s street – but the street sign starts ‘kHe3’ and ‘mihailova’ contains an ‘x’ [...]

The second film I worked on was “Superman Two,” in 1979 at Pinewood Film Studios. The film would open with the three villains standing in front of the ‘Ice Palace’ set that had been constructed in one of Pinewood’s massive stages, but the scene would actually be filmed against a blue screen (then known as [...]