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.

Sometimes you watch a clip on You Tube that stops you in your tracks.  The Ukrainian sand artist, Kseniya Simonova, tells the extraordinary story of her homeland in a way that took my breath away.  My mother-in-law survived eighteen months of starvation rations and permafrost to escape from one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags in 1941 so this a story I am familiar with, but I was still spellbound by her storytelling artistry.  What a beautiful medium to work in, a light-box and some sand.  This is the Ukrainian version of the X-factor. Eat your heart out Simon Cowell.

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……

I was introduced to the extraordinarily soulful music of Cesaria Evora in 1997 by an American Music producer, who handed me a plain cardboard sleeve with the two words ‘Cabo Verde’ printed on it. Cesaria was born in the Cape Verde island of Sao Vicente and is known as the barefoot diva because of her propensity to appear on stage in her bare feet in support of the disadvantaged women and children of her country.

Long known as the queen of the morna, a soulful genre sung in Creole-Portuguese, she mixes her sentimental folk tunes filled with longing and sadness with the acoustic sounds of piano, guitar, cavaquinho, violin, accordian, and clarinet. Evora’s Cape Verdean blues often speak of the country’s long and bitter history of isolation and slave trade, as well as emigration: almost two-thirds of the million Cape Verdeans alive live abroad.