Something a little different today: I’m delighted to share this video for my friend Iain and his band Red Flag Waltz. One of the things that made working on this so interesting (apart from the song being a proper banger*) is the small fact that Iain, not to mention the rest of the band, are based in Japan. They filmed each other with mobile phones at rehearsal and sent me the footage, plus a load of shots from their various gigs. A few days later and this is what we cooked up for new single And It Goes:
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* I’ve worked on a lot of music videos, as both camera assistant and as editor. It only takes a couple of listens to know whether you’re in for a good week or a loooooooong week. Thankfully And It Goes was a joy from top to tail.
2024 then eh? Completed it mate. Somehow. This has been a really hard year for almost everyone I know. I’m not going to dig into the difficulties here – I’ll try to focus on the good things that happened and move onwards in good heart. The headline is that I’m ultimately fine, and so are my family, and I’m fiercely aware the same can’t be said for many millions of others. Enough to say that I’m quietly pleased to be moving to a new calendar.
The systemic implosion of TV and documentary commissioning has had a huge impact on my work this year. I understand this as a bit of a perfect storm, with the inevitable rebalancing of the post-Covid bubble exactly at the crisis point of new media’s schism with broadcast media – just as AI nibbles into post-production crewing. In truth the industry probably needs this time of reckoning, but it still hurts. Between January and June, in the absence of other jobs, and in combination with looking after poorly family, I instead wrote a novel and took on a term teaching at Kendal College. That carried me into the summer, and from there my editing work picked up. In recent months I’ve cut films for Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Beyond The View, as well as writing/script editing and cutting the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2024:
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…I enjoyed that one – both the editing and the words, which I wrote in collaboration with outgoing festival creative director Claire Carter. Right after the festival I cut the KMF highlights reel, and also a brilliant performance by classical clarinettist Jack McNeill at an iconic Lake District location. I’m really excited for people to see that, but it’s Jack’s to share, so I’ll wait for him to release it before posting it here.
2024 brought more voiceover poems – the second for a map-making company in the US, and the third is here in the opening minutes of this excellent documentary about Sandscale Haws nature reserve:
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My biggest project this year was editing a documentary about the Refugees Rock charity, but that won’t be released until January – so I’ll share it and say more about it then.
Two of my highlights of the year came at concerts. The first was realising a 24-year ambition to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor live. Their seminal album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven was released in the year 2000, immediately and completely transforming the shape and momentum of my listening. It was the first time I’d heard field recordings folded into music, and that returned me to my early teenage years, where I stayed up late with my radio, inching through frequencies, FM then AM then MW, seeking out broadcasts on the very edge of listening. That experience – snatches of voice and song like ghosts in clouds of white noise – made me a ghost myself, another traveller lost in static. Political, defiantly analogue, wild and ferociously human, Lift Your Skinny Fists is my favourite album, and I’ve loved almost everything GYBE have released since – but I’ve never had the chance to catch them live. I bought tickets the moment they announced a UK tour for the new record. Mon and I caught them in Manchester, and they were everything I’d dreamed of for those 24 years – by turns devastating and euphoric, utterly transporting, great walls and waves of sound collapsing into chasms of silence. The live concert took all the craft and the bones of the records and piled on blood and muscle and power. It was extraordinary. The title of this post – Grey Rubble, Green Shoots – is taken from the new album. Seems fitting.
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The second gig was neither wild nor fierce but was equally special. At the start of the year I spotted Orcadian composer Erland Cooper due to perform at St Mary’s Church in Ambleside as part of the brilliant Aerial Festival – an unambiguously artistic celebration of the connections between music and land that casts a spell across the Lakes every autumn. I already knew some of Cooper’s work, and his record Folded Landscapes is a core part of my writing soundtrack – more on this in a second – but I didn’t really know what to expect from this concert. It was the premiere of his new work Carve The Runes And Then Be Content With Silence – written several years ago, recorded onto a single magnetic tape reel which was then buried until such point as it was discovered. Read that last sentence again. Cooper buried the only copy of the recording – and when it was discovered and dug up, he rewrote the score around the warping and degradations of those years in the soil. Where the tape had stretched – that stretching was factored into the final score. Where the tape was destroyed, lacunas of silence now punctuate the piece.
Unapologetically rooted in the seas and skies of Orkney, Cooper often uses birdsong, field recordings, poetry and oral history in his work (much like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, now I think of it) and so it was with Carve The Runes, interspersed with snippets of poems by George Mackay Brown. Uprooted and planted again in Ambleside, the concert was a work of extraordinary beauty, movements both melancholy and uplifting. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the concert made me realise that I had never experienced live classical music before – by which I mean unamplified. The sound filled the church like air… it didn’t feel to me to enter my brain through my ears but to exist in my mind spontaneously through an act of communion with the people and the place. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Mon and I floated home as though carried by the fog.
That novel then. I’ve been brewing on it for years, and had about 20,000 words of notes to work from. I started writing in January and had a 90,000 word manuscript finished in May, which I think is pretty good around the other things I had going on. I sent it to a dozen excellent reader/writer friends, and took receipt of some strong and consistent feedback. My redraft now needs redrafting, but I hope to get through those tweaks and send it out in January. It’s more speculative/fantastical than The Visitors, but it covers the ground I wanted to cover. It’s the book I wanted to write – about loss, and change, and grief, and awe. I’m long enough of tooth to know that doesn’t mean it’s a book people will want to publish or indeed to read, and that’s okay. In the past I’ve spent years working on novels I didn’t believe in, but I believe in this one. Even if I can’t find a publisher I’m glad I wrote it.
I think that’s enough for now. It’s been a hard year, and I’m glad to shut the door on it. I go into 2025 with my family around me and a good sense of the things I’d like to do with my time in this world… I might even lay down another Resolutions blog post… not least resolving to write about things like Godspeed You Black Emperor when they happen, rather than accumulate the weight of so many things to write about that I never actually have the time to write them. Should probably have worked that out by now…
Much love to you people. Heading into 2025 like Lindow Man:
First with the berries, then with the blade, third with the noose and then with the stave baptised in bog and cast into drown throne cut from sod, moss for a crown so I go to meet my god: headfirst in water a mouthful of mud
According to the good people at WordPress dot com, this is my 300th post, which I see simultaneously as an amazing thing and also an awful lot of words that no one’s ever going to read. As ever, though, I write this mostly for myself; it helps me to clarify my thoughts.
I’ve written before about my experiences with The Pitch. As one of the runner-ups, I was awarded a small production fund to do something with. After spending much of the last year not really knowing what to do with the budget, I’ve moved increasingly to the thought of making a short film myself; in and around Kendal, working with the talented people who live here, keeping the whole thing as local as could be. Without having a clear idea of what to work on, I started mulling on single images and scraps of ideas:
A hanging tree high above a valley.
A stack of flat stones on a riverbank.
A kite, bobbing, soaring, sliding on the wind.
A man with an axe, walking towards a small house.
This was an experiment in free-writing as much as anything else, letting ideas move through association. And there was no story and there was no story and then suddenly there was a story: The Potter’s Field.
Potter’s Field in Hart Island, New York, c.1890
In the Bible, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, but the Priests wouldn’t take back the blood money. Instead they used it to buy a potter’s field for the poor of Jerusalem. A potter’s field is an area of land where all the seams of workable clay have been extracted, leaving a chaos of rocky trenches and holes. These fields are no good for farming, but all over the world they’ve been turned into pauper’s graveyards; burial grounds for strangers and destitutes. After hanging himself, Judas was buried in the same field his blood money paid for.
I found this utterly extraordinary. There’s a circularity to it, a Zenlike completeness, a sweeping up, a recycling of something wasted. It shapes a terrible betrayal into a coherent future: not righting a wrong, but filling a void: what’s broken can always be fixed, and what’s fixed will always be broken. I couldn’t find a moral in it, and that ambiguity sung to me. The ideas began to tumble, spilling like dominoes: a woman betrayed. A guilty man. A child. Two children. A river, a farm. Chickens and eggs. And a kite… the joy of flying a kite.
After months of chewing through images like puzzle pieces, suddenly and sharply the whole picture hung together. I wrote my first draft of the screenplay in about an hour, and was on my tenth draft in a week. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve written, and though I’m not in it, I’m also in every single line. Ultimately, the story is really simple: it’s about someone trying to say sorry, and someone else who isn’t quite ready to forgive.
Now I need to make it. I want to make it. That means producing and directing: the organising, galvanising, driving and delivery of a project from first idea to final edit. Finding a crew, casting actors, sourcing locations and kit, props and music. Insurance. Catering. Scheduling. There’s so much to do, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, and so I’ve built myself an armour of spreadsheets and lists. Spreadsheets for each of the schedule, shot list, budget, props list, costumes, research sources. There’s safety in those numbers. Making sense of the mountain; single steps on a journey.
I’ve surprised myself with how much satisfaction I’ve discovered in the budgeting, in the planning. At the moment I’m working out menus for a three-day shoot. How can I feed fifteen people with healthy food and snacks and teas and coffees and keep it on budget? These challenges are testing different parts of my brain, and I’m really enjoying the new processes. It’s good for me to learn. And I love cooking. Just like this guy:
Delicatessen
Along with the pragmatic work, I’m constantly divining a creative language for the story, thinking and feeling my way through how I want it to look. I’m lucky to have the gifted Dom Bush as my Director of Photography, and I’m already so excited at what we’re going to cook up. Dom has such an eye for a face, for a moment. The story is very intimate and I’m looking for emotional spontaneity in the scenes; I’ve been studying Normal People and Sound Of Metal and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, trying to better understand how those moments have been captured so wonderfully.
I’m still a writer, or trying to be. I’ve never wanted to be a director, but I want to direct this. There’s magic in film. It does things no other medium can do. This story is personal, and there are truths in it I want to tease out. In so much of my work, all of that happens in my head, my notebook. It’s a new experience for me to open it up, to share the process with others. I’m learning a lot. It’s good.
I’ve called this pt.1 because I’ll wrote more about this along the way. Same Bat time, folks, same Bat channel.
I’m exceptionally proud to share ‘Only Weather’ — the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2020. I wrote and edited the piece, which was produced by Land & Sky and spoken by Keme Nzerem.
It’s been a challenging brief, aiming to strike several balances — reflective but not sanctimonious — sincere but not depressing — hopeful while acknowledging the damage done by coronavirus. I hope we succeeded.
Quick update to share one of my other recent jobs — when not writing / teaching / parenting, I’m also a video editor — here’s my latest cut for director Daniel Brereton and Dom at Land & Sky. Lovely to work with some high-res 8mm scans.
Buzzing to share the news that my script A Bed For The Boy has been shortlisted for the FilmBath / IMDB Script To Screen Award. This is great for several reasons:
Firstly, A Bed For The Boydid okay at the Grim North Screenplay Festival, and it’s nice to know it wasn’t a fluke — imposter syndrome is always drinking alone somewhere at the back of my brain, giving me evil grins whenever I look over.
Secondly, there are only five of us on the shortlist, and I’m thrilled to have made such a small cut from such strong competition. That’s really grounding.
Third, in the incredibly unlikely event that I win, there’s a £5,000 production fund for the prize. The story is about a man trying to move a sofa across an estate by himself, and that would be enough to do it justice.
Fourth, the judges are absolute badasses, including Col Needham, the founder and CEO of yer actual IMDb.com.
Fifth — perhaps finest of all — the shortlisted entries will be performed live by actors. Normally this would take place onstage at the awards ceremony, but with the Covid-19 lockdown, the event has moved online this year, and the readings will be streamed live instead. This is a really big deal for me — it’s the first time I’ll see one of my stories performed by actors. Regardless of the rest of it, that’s an incredible thing, and I’m humbled.
I’m also really looking forward to seeing the other final pieces, all written by some staggeringly accomplished filmmakers — there’s Lambing by Katie McNeice, How to Hire an Escort by Werner Vivier, The Influencer by Rachel S. Thomas-Medwid and Out of Sight by Jesse D. Lawrence. I count myself incredibly lucky to be sharing a shortlist with writers of their experience and quality. Best luck to them all!
Finally, a big big thanks to Paul Holbrook of Shunk Films for giving me a heads-up about the competition. Thanks comrade!
Grabbing the chance to share some really good news — absolutely thrilled that I’ve been awarded an industry bursary by the excellent people at ScreenSkills, which allows me to attend the John Yorke Story Advanced Structure screenwriting course later this month.
When I started screenwriting last year, I read as widely as I could on story forms, and first discovered John through his excellent book Into The Woods, which offers extended analysis of five-act structure. Having read and loved the book, I’m now delighted to have a place on the course, and really excited about the opportunity to learn from his team. It’s a 16-week course, with fortnightly assignments and lots of peer review. I’m juggling several long-form ideas at the moment, and particularly as I start thinking more about writing features and TV spec scripts, this is a real boost.
I can’t sign off here without a particular thanks to ScreenSkills, who do invaluable work for the British screen industries. I’m humbled they found enough in my application to fund the course fees, as there’s no way I could have afforded it otherwise. Thanks also to Dom and Luke for providing my references. I’m grateful and I’ll remember.
Worth noting that ups like this always come hand-in-hand with the downs — having made the longlist for the Northern Exposure Short Film Lab last month, I didn’t make the final cut — but that’s okay. My background in prose writing (and especially flash fiction!) has hardwired an acceptance of rejection into my workflow. It’s part of all creative industries, and really important to own it — think on Heaney’s tenet to ‘fail again, fail better’.
It’s always swings and roundabouts with these things. Along with a squillion other people, I wrote Lanternlight for the BBC’s Interconnected commission, and didn’t even make the shortlist — but here’s the lovely news that it just won best Short Script at the Lockdown Film Festival. Hey ho!
Strange days for us all. It’s hard to know what to say. The inhuman incompetence of the government, and then the superhuman efforts of the NHS. The selfishness of stockpiling and the smiles of strangers. Desperate for downtime but craving productivity. Loving the days with my children, even as we drive each other crackers. The air feels cleaner, the water cleaner — the planet breathing properly, right down into the dirt and the stones. I haven’t seen a plane for days.
Mon’s growing vegetables and baking the best bread I’ve ever tasted. We made a little greenhouse out of pallet wood and old windows. All the jobs that stacked up over the year we’ve lived here, finally put to bed. Chopping up the woodpile. Building the shelves. Hanging the gate. Moving the beech hedge. Fixing the bench. Our world returned to the work of hands: hammers and nails, sowing seeds. These things sing because they are true.
The first few weeks of lockdown brought a wave of creative energy. I wrote three short films in four weeks. That surge has gone now — I started blocking out a feature film, but found it impossible to concentrate on bigger ideas, and now the wave has washed back to wherever they come from. I’m trying to write my way back into it, figuring that short scripts are better than no scripts, and I’ve been applying for a few things — bursaries, courses, development labs. The world of film, like everything else, will change, but I need to feel like I’m doing something — I hadn’t realised how bad I am at doing nothing.
It’s coming to an end now. Too soon, certainly, but the gravity of life will pull us on.
A brood of sparrows has fledged nearby. They’re outside the window right now, five or maybe six of them, skittering all over the place, alive with restless curiosity. Exploring their new world. With every stuttering flight across the garden, they get stronger.
Just a quick note to share the news that I’ve made the longlist for a BFI Film Hub North scheme called the Northern Exposure Short Film Script Lab, offering professional development for northern writers. It’s a long longlist of 60 hopeful writers, from which ten ideas will be taken into development.
My story has a working title of A Whisper Of Wrens — it’s about a squabbling couple visiting a huge northern marsh, only to find that it isn’t as empty as it was supposed to be. It’s very much in the tradition of modern gothic, or folk horror, or urban fairytale, or low fantasy — whatever you choose to call it. This thread runs through almost all my work, drawing on contemporary things like The Loney or Midsommar or the music of The Antlers, way back to some of my earliest and biggest influences — Roald Dahl’s short stories, Link’s Awakening, the soundscapes of Godspeed You Black Emperor.
Will write more as I have it — I’m throwing lots of things into the aether at the moment, hoping some of them come back. Fingers crossed!
Simon Sylvester 