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.

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……

Making a short film for a  NHS funded anti-smoking project in Hammersmith, I was struck by how many people still smoke in London. We’d set up our camera outside Hammersmith tube station to capture some vox-pops as people came off the tube. It is only when you stand still for an hour and observe the habits of the people around you that you realise how many people still smoke. We talked to a number of people who’d desperately tried to give up – big time smokers with deep etch-a-sketch lines scoring their cheeks. The saddest interview of all was with a frail ballet dancer, who been smoking since the 50s and could only be interviewed in between sessions with an inhaler. But it was the brutal cynicism of the tobacco companies that finally got to me. We were shown an executive memo that had been circulated within one of the tobacco manufacturers marketing departments – ‘We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid’. When you learn that DNA starts to mutate after fifteen cigarettes, you never see them in the same light again.