Twenty-two years ago we made a film for Sheppy’s Cider. Tucked quietly away in their Farm Museum it was viewed by six to seven thousand visitors a year. I had completely forgotten about it. Then the phone rang. Could we update it? Well, you can’t really update old video formats so we negotiated on producing a new short film. The farm had grown and new ciders were being developed by David and Louisa Sheppy. We had got to know David’s parents (Richard and Mary) well during the original filming and I was inspired to hear Richard talk about stewardship of the land and passing the care of it onto the next generation. Well, the next generation are making a great success of it and I am sure he would be very proud of what they are achieving.

The film was launched on the 1st April to forty members of staff (past and present). James Crowden said some lovely words in praise of local cider and we projected the film onto a ten foot screen. It was followed by one of those unforgettable farmhouse suppers – home cured ham, Somerset cheeses, pickled onions, chutneys, fresh granary bread, fruit and bottles and bottles of cider. It wouldn’t have disgraced the film set of Delicatessen.

I hope this new version will run for twenty years too, by which time I may have digested the supper! A magical Somerset evening.

Library lovers from Glastonbury and Shepton Mallet speak out from the wall of the British Library on Euston Road, London.

Wednesday 2nd February 4.30pm. I am sitting in the window of a cafe on the Euston Road with Garfield and Ken watching the rush hour traffic gradually build whilst drinking mugs of coffee. We notice that there are a lot of police cars around, but thankfully they are all on the other side of the dual carriageway. Our rucksacks are full of video and stills cameras, a megaphone, gaffer tape, spare batteries, torches, warm clothing, and our precious ‘Save our Libraries’ banner.

I put a call through to John Bird of the Big Issue, but alas he is stuck in Cambridge. Garfield makes a final call to the media. We carefully go through the timetable again. 10 minutes before sunset we need to call the SFX team, who have parked round the corner and are ready to race in and set up their projection equipment. Ken is tweeting his growing following. At present no one knows where we are in Central London, except the press – the BBC and the Evening Standard.

Traffic builds. The pavements start to fill with commuters. Dusk settles. Still not quite dark enough. It’s now 4.50. We instruct the SFX guys to go for it. Things happen very quickly. Garfield and I wait for a gap in the traffic and then run across the dual carriageway to gaffer tape our banner onto the railings. The SFX guys race in with their scaffolding and trolleys.

Within fifteen minutes the equipment is set up and rapidly covered with a huge black cloth, so that it disappears as an anonymous piece of street furniture. Some of my Quaker friends arrive from Friends House and kindly help out with the photography.  Thank you Karl and Ian!

The diesel generator is started (it can hardly be heard above the noise of the traffic) and the 20,000 Barco projector is switched on under the cloth. When it has fully powered up the cloth is removed and the astonishingly bright light bursts across the Euston Road and onto the wall of the British Library

The projector is focussed and aligned by Alex of SFX and he loads the laptop with our ‘We Love Libraries’ film. The holding slide goes up on the wall whilst we set up the DVD and test the powerful sound system.

How wonderful to see a sign saying ‘Please do not be quiet’ on the wall of the British Library!

Kate Mosse arrives to watch the screening and meets a couple of her readers who have been following our flash-mob tweets. She has been so supportive of our film and the whole library campaign in general.

Ken works the megaphone in a way only an American can and commuters stop to watch. We all keep a wary eye out for police cars, Heath and Safety Executives, Camden Council officials, Community Support Officers, Pavement Obstruction Managers, Conservative Politicians and any other potential killjoys. Ken instructs the SFX team to run the tape.

The voices of Glastonbury and Shepton Mallet residents ring out along the Euston Road. The wonderful music of Sly and Reggie of the Suburban Pirates adds to the party atmosphere.

How great to see our Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt speaking out over the roar of the traffic. We film and record the screening and repeat the film five times, before thinking we had better leave before our luck runs out.

We grab a quick picture with Jonny and Reggie, of the Surburban Pirates, pack our rucksacks and head back to the tube at Kings Cross. We drive back to Somerset exhausted but happy and get home at 1.30am. Garfield is due to start production work on a film in Italy, Ken has gone away on a retreat and the following day I am back filming on the banks of the River Parrett for an environmental film on coastal change. In the evening I send a slightly tongue-in-cheek thank you email and picture of our flash mob screening to the head of Press and PR team at the British Library.

A month earlier I joined fellow protesters outside Glastonbury Library in the snow and ice and thought how can I help this campaign? The website zocial.tv which tracks how films are shared across the web reports that within six days of being uploaded to YouTube, ‘We Love Libraries’ has become the ninth most shared non-profit film on the web. It is now playing on websites in Germany, Spain, Switzerland, New York, Baltimore, Argentina and Korea. The TUC has requested a high definition copy to screen at their outdoor rally ‘March for the Alternative’ in Hyde Park on the 26th March. I think the communities of Glastonbury and Shepton Mallet can be very proud of their impact on the libraries debate. Whilst Somerset County Council has taken our libraries off the closure list, there is still a lot to be done. If there is one thing I have learnt from working on the ‘We Love Libraries’ film it is this; I will never take my local library for granted again.

Big tobacco – taking you for a fool! from Kick Butt on Vimeo.

Launch of the three films for the Kick-Butt project at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Sitting at the back of the cinema, crowded with students and school children, watching our production and editing work appear on the 70 foot screen was nerve-wracking. But the big Christie projector, all 20,000 lumens of it, took our DVD and illuminated every single pixel. At times you could have heard a pin drop. Alex and I sat there grinning like Cheshire cats. The response was great – some very generous applause and a happy client. Digital video has taken huge strides forward and technology can now transform it into a theatrical experience. A big thank you to the team at The Riverside.

The great enlightener

Just had the privilege of working with Adam Hart-Davis who recorded the narration for our film on Coastal Change in Somerset. My minor claim to fame is that a few years ago we shared a stage in Taunton. I was one of the warm-up guys and was asked to give a presentation on sustainable tourism. He walked on as the keynote guest speaker, wearing the most fantastic Hawaiian shirt, and gave a spellbinding talk on green technology.

A true polymath, in my book he’s up there with the Jonathan Millers of this world. With 12 honorary PhDs to his name he could afford to pull up the drawbridge and remain in his ivory tower, and yet he remains one of those delightfully modest British eccentrics. The David Bellamy of popular science without the excessive facial hair.

4pm on a cold grey afternoon at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. Test screening three short films we have just produced for Kick-It, a NHS funded health project to encourage young people in Hammersmith and Fulham to kick the smoking habit. Their new 20,000 lumen digital projector, the size of a Smart car, is powered up and I sit nervously at the back of the empty cinema with Richard, their incredibly helpful projectionist. My fingers are firmly crossed.

A lot of work has gone into making the films but I have only seen them on a laptop screen, not in a state of the art 200 seater cinema with surround sound speakers. The lights fade, the DVD runs and suddenly there are the films, we made back in July, up on this huge screen. Richard adjusts the cinema amplification system to fine-tune the sound balance and I start to relax. The projector’s image and sound qualities surpass my wildest expectations. And this is just a DVD. What would it be like if we ran the films directly from the hard drive? This is no longer video, it’s a theatrical experience. Roll on the 22nd November when the cinema will be full of feisty young people at the launch. I’ll still be nervous on the day……

Porlock Bay 1891 - Charles Napier Hemy

Just completed the first interview for a film about coastal change in Somerset with Philip Ashford, a wonderful maritime historian. Crunching across the vast shingle bank at Porlock he took us back two hundred years and explained how the road and several cottages had been swept away in winter storms. As placid as the bay looked, I began to visualise the corrosive power of the sea.  Further on we came to the famous Porlock breach where an overnight storm had punched a vast hole through a twenty foot high shingle bank and flooded the marshland behind it. Later that afternoon the cameraman Alex Butter and I interviewed one of the local fishermen.  Had he noticed any changes in his time as a fisherman?  ’Well I’ve been fishing out in Porlock Bay for forty years, but in the last ten years I’ve noticed the sea has become a lot more violent and unpredictable’.  You can line up all the climate change deniers that you like, but one person with local knowledge will skewer their complacency.