This post is the last in a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Okay, I’ve rambled and covered a hell of a lot of ground. To be honest it’s hard to give a proper masterclass or How To for blogging because the beauty of the form is there are no rules. I know what works for me but it’s unlikely to work for you and some of the best blogs I’ve seen have been approaching the medium in ways I hadn’t ever considered before. You should use blogging (and other similar web services like Flickr and Last.FM) in the same way you use other forms of communication like the telephone or your local pub - in ways that work for you and the community you’re part of.

And while this might be scary be assured that underlying it all is the magic that makes the internet work, the reason that you can find stuff on Google, how an American became a fan of you band on MySpace or how you got that commission because someone blogged a photo of your work with a link to your site.

Blogging might be as easy as writing an email but its the structured metadata that takes your message and makes available to the right people across the world. And the beauty of it all is you don’t have to think about it, unless you want to (and it’s not that hard really - hell, I can’t write programming code and I get it). You just need to go to wordpress.com (4talentmagazine.com is built with Wordpress), blogger.com, typepad.com or some other blogging service and get posting and linking. The internet looks after the rest.

< Week 7: plugging into the system

< Read the series from the start

Next on 4 is Channel 4’s vision for the future. Fresh talent, fresh perspectives, youth, diversity and innovation in all its forms will lead and shape the channel’s content in the years to come. So with our readers in mind, we asked those at the commissioning coalface what’s pushing their buttons in 2008.

Who we spoke to:

Liam Humphreys, Commissioning Editor, Features | Walter Iuzzolino, Deputy Head, Features | Dominique Walker, Commissioning Editor, Factual Entertainment | Alistair Pegg, Editor, Factual Entertainment | Ruby Kuraishe, Editor, Factual Entertainment, E4 | Simon Dickson, Deputy Head, Documentaries | Meredith Chambers, Commissioning Editor, Documentaries | Kate Vogel, Editor, 3 Minute Wonder | Jan Younghusband, Commissioning Editor, Arts & Performance | Shane Allen, Commissioning Editor, Comedy | Andy Auerbach, Commissioning Editor, Entertainment | Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor, Education | Jo Roach, Commissioning Editor, Education | Kevin Sutcliffe, Deputy Head, News & Current Affairs | Camilla Campbell, Commissioning Editor, Drama | Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor, New Media Factual | Aaquil Ahmed, Commissioning Editor, Religion | David Glover, Commissioning Editor, Science | Katherine Butler, Head of Development, Film4 | Ade Rawcliffe, Diversity & Talent Manager | Alison Walsh, Editorial Manager, Disability.

Browse all the responses >

Image by Tom Gaul

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Now let’s say that you’re actually really boring. There’s a market for what you do but to be honest the mechanisms of how you do it aren’t really of interest to anyone. Or let’s say you just don’t want to communicate all this fluffy personal nonsense. Blogging as I’ve described it here just doesn’t interest you in the slightest. Allowing for the fact that you probably haven’t read this far (which, if you’ll forgive me, demonstrates a limitation of the magazine form - online this “post” would stand alone and those for whom it might be relevant would find it through Google regardless of what came before or after it on the blog itself) the blogging form still has value to you.

You’ve probably heard the term Web 2.0. If you’ve investigated it a bit you might think it has to do with something called User Generated Content and heralds a revolution whereby professionals are overthrown in favour of the amateur masses, or somesuch nonsense. While this is a side-effect of the blogging revolution it’s not what’s really important about it. What’s really interesting is that the internet is starting to be populated by data that is structured and interchangeable according to established standards.

To illustrate what this means think of a library full of books. Every book is different with unique content but there are aspects of the books that fit into categories. The title, author, publisher, Dewy Decimal categories, dimensions, ISBN, and so on. This information can be indexed by the library to not only identify what shelf the book is held on but how it relates to other books in the collection, very handy for books that cover a number of different subjects.

Most blogging services, along with services like Flickr and YouTube, structure the information you put into them in a similar way. So a blog post has at the very least a title, date, category, and the content itself. And because this is based on accepted standards all this information is interchangeable. Which means anyone can take your content and stick it into a giant database automatically. And then people can ask this database questions and find relevant and accurate information which may well include your content.

You might hear people talking about arcane and mysterious arts like Search Engine Optimisation but this is pretty much all there is to it. Put your stuff online in a manner in which Google can understand it and you’ll appear in the relevant search results. If you have photos on Flickr that are accurately tagged in relation to their subject then they’ll appear in the searches for those subjects.

You don’t have to run a “blog” in the accepted sense of the word in order to get into this game. It’s just that blogs automatically structure themselves in this way and since they’re very easy to use it makes sense to take advantage of this. This YouTube video called Web 2.0 Machine explains this rather well. And when you’re doing this, have a think about how that little search query works for a piece of video. It’s all about the metadata, a piece of jargon which simply means “data about data”. Give you stuff metadata and people will find it. If you don’t have properly structured metadata your website will just sit there with nobody finding it, no matter how lovely it looks.

< Week 6: first impressions

Next in the series: in conclusion >

Words: Catherine Bray
Illustration: Jem Robinson

Persuasion will take you far in this world, whether your aims are the noble betterment of mankind, the making of cold, hard cash, or some as-yet-unimagined hybrid. From Martin Luther King Jr to David ‘the Father of Advertising’ Ogilvy, a talent for combining language and delivery to get people on your side is well worth having. With this in mind, we gathered some insider tips and tricks from a lobbyist who writes speeches for rhetoric’s man of the moment and potential future US president, Barack Obama.

When it comes to making speeches, those with the position and public speaking skills to carry them off aren’t always the ones who put pen to paper in the first place – which is where the writers come in. Over dinner in Soho I meet Jacob Rigg, who through his work for the Liberal Democrats and American organization Democrats Abroad, has come to write for Barack Obama, a politician hailed as much for his magnetic style and persuasive speeches as his liberal policy agenda.

Jacob himself fits well into the new-style politics with which the Obama campaign is associated. Having attended state-school followed by Greyfriars Hall, Oxford, at 26 he’s much younger than you might expect of a man playing this kind of role both in UK politics and 2008’s highly-competitive Democratic presidential candidacy race.

And unlike some who would exclusively stress the scientific side of politics, citing poll data and column inches as the sole indices of a persuasive campaign, Jacob is prepared to allow a breath of the artistic side of life into his work, describing speechwriting as like “poetical storytelling.”

Softly-spoken, with a tendency towards genial self-deprecation, Jacob slightly underplays the extent to which his own initiative is responsible for his achievements – a trait he shares with the man for whom he wrote the influential Ebenezer Baptist church speech Radio 4 praised as up there with JFK’s ‘Ask not…’

Obama’s speeches are often compared to those of Luther King Jr, but Jacob reveals you’ll need to go further back in history than that to find the source of persuasive language. “People used to mock me for this,” he admits, “but if you’re interested in writing speeches, read Aristotle’s Rhetoric. For most of the stuff that’s out there, rudimentary tricks, Aristotle cornered the market thousands of years ago.”

It was Aristotle who first defined rhetoric as “the art of discovering, in a particular case, the available means of persuasion.” As Jacob puts it, “it’s great; there’s actually a handbook on it all,” though he acknowledges that “very few people have the willpower to drag themselves all the way through it.”

Willpower is a trait held in common by most politicians, but the overriding factor that has set the most persuasive ones apart over the last fifty years has been their skill at using burgeoning audio-visual mass media techniques. How do you go about presenting yourself well in the age of 24/7 rolling news?

“Obviously when you’re communicating through a television set, you’re communicating in different ways to people. When Ronald Reagan was president, he made a big thing over the fact that he was communicating with people in their living rooms, and often when you’re at a speech – David Cameron’s speeches are like this – they don’t seem that impressive face-to-face. He doesn’t get so passionate. He has bits where he does, but he understands that really the big influence in this country is on the people watching the six and ten o’clock news.”

Jacob contrasts this with the famous case of Neil Kinnock’s pre-election tub-thumping of 1992: “It went down amazingly well in Sheffield with the Labour voters, but he looked like a very irate mad bald man to everyone else on television. And a lot of people, perhaps over-blowing it slightly, cite that as one of the reasons he lost the election. Of course, Barack is a dream to work with in that his voice and demeanour are so suited to writing speeches with such melody.”

Tailoring presentation to medium then, is a key lesson. But what about content? “The struggle is to say something that an audience doesn’t want to hear, and then make them empathise,” asserts Jacob. “This creates an emotional resonance in a speech that many British politicians fail to create.”

These tensions between presentation and content, and between being TV-friendly and charismatic in person, make for a complex cocktail for the speechwriter to anticipate. “In one sense you’re trying to get a soundbite that journos, particularly television journalists, are going to pick up on,” Jacob admits. “But on the other hand, which isn’t necessarily the toughest part of it, you’re trying to get the crowd gee’ed up - and you’re mixing that with what people in their homes are going to be interested in.”

Unsurprisingly, Jacob finds that the writing process will also vary depending who will be delivering your speech. “When you’re writing a speech, the guy who’s giving it always has a certain style. A good speech for Barack is not a good speech for, say, [Lib Dem leadership candidate] Chris Huhne, who is a classic example of a bit more of a policy guy, but less inspirational in that rhetorical sense.”

‘Inspiration’ is a familiar word in the reams of writing about Barack Obama’s style. But it’s not all about charm, or at the other end of the spectrum, hard facts. In-between you’ll find the delicate art of formal technique; a balance of quantifiable tricks and more subtle, almost theatrical, writing tropes.

“The established techniques are things like lists of three,” Jacob notes. “This is what stand-up comedians call a turn-the-corner. It involves typically a list of three items followed by a fourth item, which is unexpected. Interestingly, no-one’s ever really done much research into why they’re compelling and other numbers aren’t.”

Jacob is keen to stress the creative side of this work. “Varying the rhythm of the speech is very important, and again, there’s very little research done on it, but one of the interesting things is the link between theatre, music and speechmaking. A speech isn’t just a piece of writing – it’s there to be given rather than read.”

Talking specifically about the Ebenezer Baptist church speech, Jacob suggests that “one of the things that speech did very well was varying the rhythm, in terms of there being a very clearly defined beginning, middle and end of the speech, which helps people know where they are. It’s like going to rowing trials at Oxford: they ask you to hop on a rowing machine, but don’t tell you how long to row for. Ten minutes feels like forever because you don’t know when it will end. The big mistake of many speechwriters is not signposting the structure of the speech – audiences switch off.”

Lastly then, if speechwriting is indeed an art, with what other arts does it share its key characteristics? And how can anyone writing a piece of persuasive writing, political or otherwise, extrapolate from that knowledge to improve their craft?

“It’s sort of like a musical composition,” is Jacob’s final take. “You’ve got the introduction, and you establish the ideas – and I’ve taken ideas from Solzhenitsyn, King Lear, and even a Lacoste advert before – so people kind of know what you’re going to talk about, so they’re intrigued. They wonder how you’re going to expand on that, and you end that section generally by changing the rhythm or pace of the speech.”

“Then have the middle where you’re expanding on those things, and then you summarise them at the end and come back to it: like a symphony. Still, I’ve got a long way to go before I can really tell other people about how to write well.”

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

So here you are, trying to turn your creative skills into a business that pays your bills and here I am telling you not to worry about the polish of what you’re putting on the internet. Isn’t that a bit like meeting your bank manager dressed in torn jeans, and chewing gum? Sure, it might be you but is it wise? That’s ultimately a decision you’re going to have to make for yourself, but be aware that blogging doesn’t dictate a particular style. You can be as formal and polished as you want.

In fact, taking a bit of care over your words and presentation can be rather refreshing and make you stand out from the crowd. And you don’t have to completely be yourself. This is the Internet so feel free to invent aspects of your character and play with them. You could even pretend your business is a corporation with offices around the world rather than based in your kitchen and push this spoof to absurd limits. Maybe your ‘factory’ is staffed by sentient robots or something. The possibilities are endless, really.

But above all remember that the blog doesn’t replace other more traditional forms of marketing. You’re probably still going to need some kind of brochure that looks all slick and some kind of formal business statement stuff. An analogy I like to use is a high street shop.

The window display is slick and probably dictated by the bods in head office. People glance at it and know immediately what they’re getting. It’s beautifully designed and communicates the message well. So the potential customer comes into the shop and starts chatting to the guy behind the counter. He’s a little hungover and stressed but very passionate about the products on sale and has the sort of knowledge that comes from being immersed in an industry. As it happens they don’t have what the customer wants so he sends them to a similar shop down the road but the customer is impressed with the service and likes this guy on a personal level so they make a point of coming back.

Assuming you’re a sole trader your best marketing tool is yourself. If you’re running a stall at a craft market or pitching your film to funders your personality is going to go a long way to clinching the deal. The same goes for online. You need to complement the lovely photos of your work with a bit about yourself. And, in my experience, the simplest way to do that is to tell your story in a blog.

< Week 5: what about me?

Next in the series: plugging into the system >

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Now, reading all this you might be saying, “This is all well and good but, frankly, I can’t write,” and that’s a fair comment. After all, you’ve chosen the medium of film or clay or needlepoint rather than wordsmithing for a reason. How do you join this global conversation if you sort of write like a 10-year-old? Here’s a few ideas for a few sorts of creatives:

Cartoonist: Diary comics are a no brainer really. Don’t worry if your life is boring, just think of it as a daily drawing exercise.
Pottery: Video the creation of your pots, especially if you use a wheel.
Animator: As you’re working on a piece post up stills and trial clips.
Photographer: Go play on Flickr for a while and feed your work (and others’) into your blog.
Textiles: Photos of works in progress. Model clothes yourself.

You can probably adapt those ideas to all manner of things and no doubt think of many better ones.

But the big thing here is not to worry about creating something worthy of a Pulitzer on your blog. Use it to record what you’re up to. If you’re selling at a market take photos. If you’re giving a talk, record it and make the audio / video available. If you’ve been thinking about issues related to your craft, jot down some notes and ideas. Treat it as a scrapbook for your journey as a whatever-you-are.

And here’s the thing. No matter how mundane it might seem to you it’ll be fascinating to those who can’t do what you do, especially if they’re interested in the stuff you do, and they’re the sort of people you want to be interested in you.

< Week 4: getting personal

Next in the series: first impressions >

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Blimey, I went off on one there. Sorry about that. You just want to know how you can use a blog to increase the audience and customer base for your creative endeavor and here I am wittering on about causality and intertwingularity and stuff. So let’s bring this down to earth with some real world examples.

Say you’re a photographer looking to develop your business in the area of portraiture and wedding photography. You’ve got a lovely website that shows off your best work and maybe even a section where clients and their friends and family can order prints online. Now, part of your appeal is your skill with the camera but another important part is your personality. You’re not just selling your art, you’re selling yourself.

Now you could have a page on your site with a biography but that’ll probably come all all contrived. What you want to do is talk to the potential clients in your own voice, telling them your story. A good example would be stevegerrarddiary.com where the titular photographer Steve Gerrard writes about the work he’s been doing. The hook is his jobs tend to veer between beautiful wedding shoots and dirty rock photography so each post will usually have a selection of shots from a couple’s happiest day juxtaposed with some hairy monster screaming on stage.

But that’s not why it works. What really comes home to me is how Steve’s character is brought out through the blog as he talks about his strange life. You feel like you know him and his family. Not too much, mind. He’s careful to keep the private private. But just enough that you’d feel comfortable asking him to record your wedding. At least I know I would.

Another great example is theblackapple.typepad.com, brought to my attention by Antonio Gould in is fifth New Media 4Cast for 4Talent. Here Emily Martin blogs about the stuff she sells on her etsy.com site. Etsy is sort of like eBay without the auctions and only for handmade items but while it’s great that you’re in a curated space (rather like, say, Camden market) it can be hard to rise above the crowds. You need to add more that just the details the site will let you enter. You need to add yourself. Emily does this brilliantly with her blog talking about the new products in her store, the motivations for creating them, and dropping in little nuggets about her own life. Again, nothing too detailed but enough that her readers can identify with her as an individual. And judging by the number of comments each post gets she’s developed a pretty dedicated community.

But there’s one very important thing that both Steve and Emily do that I haven’t mentioned. They both link to “the competition”, in Steve’s case other photographers he knows and likes, in Emily’s case other Etsy shops she buys stuff from. In a small way they’re setting themselves up as resources for their communities, partly because it makes sense to support your peers to build a sustainable environment but also because they’re human and that’s what humans do. And as other bloggers in their communities do the same the effect is quite dramatic as a network emerges that is structured and easily navigable yet always changing and evolving as people come and go. Nobody ever has a complete handle on what’s going on and no-one is in charge but it works.

< Week 3: everything is intertwingled

Next in the series: what about me? >

Words: Nick Carson
Images: Courtesy of Framestore CFC & Ninja Theory

They were once a printmaker, a NASA shuttle engineer, a sound technician and a software developer. Nibbled by the CGI bug, they changed tack - and left in their wake the likes of Monsters Inc, Batman Begins and The World is Not Enough. Now they’re giving something back: 4Talent magazine grills the battle-hardened tutors at Escape Studios about the many facets of computer graphics.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

Escape’s manifesto is simple: “to provide the global computer graphics community with the best training, technology and talent in the world.” While in-house tutor and recently-crowned Maya Master Lee Danskin insists that there’s “no such thing as a 3D industry” per se, one thing that film, TV, games and commercials share is a voracious thirst for CGI production talent. It’s just the way it’s applied that differs.

Character design

“Character design is about injecting life. You may not be able to draw, but if you can sculpt then it’s much easier,” suggests Escape’s Character guru Nick Savy, whose proudest spot on his showreel is an indistinguishable 3D stunt-double for Christian Bale in Batman Begins.

Playing God with the caped crusader may sound like a small boy’s dream - and Nick admits he’s spent his life sketching comic books and cartoons - but he’s keen to point out that character building, like animation, involves a huge amount of repetition. Woe betides a rigger who puts a bone out of place.

“You have to be precise when building your rig. I once purposely made my students do a rig wrong, and then re-build it,” he smiles. “They were very pissed off, but that repetition is so important - for Batman we did 62 versions of the rig and 38 iterations of the muscle system.” It’s all-too-tempting to quip that character building builds character - although you may well risk repetitive strain disorder in the process.

Nick’s route has been something of a rambling one. When in a band in the mid-80s he became obsessed with synthesizers, mixed some tracks in the studio and ended up working as a sound engineer for five years. It was helping his brother on a corporate video in ‘92 that first broke him into his current trade: “I learned animation; he paid me with a computer,” he states simply. “I’d never touched computers ‘til then.”

When Sega were setting up a new studio, Nick managed to weasel his self-dubbed “crappy” ‘folio in front of them. One small segment made the difference: “A random animation of a psychedelic hippy. He had a pointy hat with a sphere on the end, surrounded by Saturn’s rings. When he bent forward it rotated, dangling in time - it was the secondary animation that caught their eye.”

His seat-of-the-pants journey makes for exhausting listening. He worked in games for five years; was interviewed for Glassworks while his wife was giving birth; eventually became head of the FMV (full motion video) dept, and then moved to into commercials.

After three more years he ended up at Pinewood Studios as a modeller. “They asked if anyone had experience of rigging, and ended up making me Head of Characters. Then I was taken on at Double Negative to work on Batman, where I peaked.”

His first film project, it was a hefty 8-month stint. “By the end I was bored crapless,” he chuckles. “But it’s the only one I actually got my name on the credits: usually there’s a big turnaround of staff - lots of freelancers. People get missed off.”

As the story goes, director Chris Nolan was dubious that a digital Batman would be convincing enough on the big screen, and wanted as much stunt work in camera as possible. Nick was part of a team that set about creating screen tests to be projected next to live action. Christian Bale was body-scanned in full costume, and then the resulting 3D model was equipped with a complex rig, coloured with a bespoke shading system and key-frame animated - no motion capture was used. Thankfully, Nolan was impressed.

“You’re interpreting the world into 3D - not the mechanics, but how something moves,” Nick concludes. “Modelling and skinning is very artistic: how the crease works when an arm bends; how material crumbles under the armpit; how the muscle inflates. It’s how it looks, not necessarily how it works. Then it’s up to the animator to make it move.”

Animation

Seeing animated characters interact with humans in ‘80s toon-gangster flick Who Framed Roger Rabbit sparked creative impulses in Jeff Pratt, an engineer at the time. He opted for a change, went to art school for four years, and fortuitously ended up at the doors of Pixar just as they were gearing up for a second run at Toy Story.

“They’d had story problems, and it was on hold,” he recalls. “At the time I was the fourteenth animator hired; they thought I’d be one of the last. There were 40 in the end.” In such a large team, and with CGI animation requiring increasingly realistic movement, an aptitude in engineering helped him specialise.

“I like the technical aspects,” he admits, small surprise given he started out tinkering with space shuttles for NASA. “Take the spring in Slinky Dog – I was the only animator that could understand how to make it work convincingly, using sine waves and so on.”

And while the traditional process of sketching scenes frame by frame has been replaced by tweaking rigs and walk cycles, roles are also split differently. “For hand-drawn animation, a team is assigned to a certain character to make sure it’s drawn consistently – when you’re working on computer, that’s all defined already,” he points out.

“On a production like Toy Story or Monsters Inc there’s a team of up to 40 animators – you can’t have two animators on one character while the other 38 sit around twiddling their thumbs. You work on the shot as a whole.”

With the whole team dipping into a central pool of characters, it’s essential to get the puppet controls set up properly in the first place. “A modeller and a rigger will work closely with the animators to develop a character and test it,” confirms Jeff. “The more the animator knows about rigging, the better: it helps to understand the whole process.”

Fundamental to all forms of animation is the walk cycle, and as with the character rig, this will be crafted first. “A team of animators will spend two weeks honing it down to minute details, and then it’s used by everyone in production,” he reveals. “You’re always improving: walk cycles are unique to each character, and help to define personality.”

With rival studios pushing each other’s standards higher by the day, it’s crucial to stay across all new developments – and Pixar provides its animators with bespoke preparatory software that’s updated for each production. So with a clutch of seminal CGI masterpieces behind him, what were the peaks?

“For me, milestones are technical ones,” he confesses, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background: “the fur in Monsters Inc; the clothes in The Incredibles. It’s getting close to absolute realism now: motion water works pretty well off-the-shelf; clothing still has its bugs but it’s pretty good.”

So how important were those four years studying tomes of art history, traditional drawing, photography, colour theory and the like? “It’s useful, but none of that is required for animation,” Jeff admits. “A polished 20-second piece will get you a job, not whether you can draw.”

Games

“At some point in the future, the visual quality of Film and Games will be indistinguishable,” foresees Simon Fenton, ex-Sony Computer Entertainment and now creator and tutor of the centre’s Games courses. “But there’s a real demarcation of roles. In film, you could just be a character modeller. In games, until recently a senior artist would do character, environment, assets, everything. Now those roles are starting to separate.”

Equipped with a Fine Art degree in Painting & Printmaking, Simon might not seem like the archetypal gamer – although it was the printmaking process that first got him interested in mechanical reproduction, not so far away from rendering thousands of frames to produce an animation sequence.

“That was 15 years ago, when silicon graphics machines were the price of a house,” he recalls fondly. “The only way to get access to the software was as a runner at a post-production house. So that’s what I did. I taught myself Alias and Softimage in the evenings: I was actually sleeping in the studio to get access to the machines.”

At a similar time, Lee Danskin was starting his career at Alias Research, putting the wheels in motion for the first ever version of Maya. With a visual effects background – he went on to co-found Smoke & Mirrors 3D, before becoming Deputy Head of 3D at influential London post-house MPC – he speaks with a helicopter view.

“Yes, the finished products are converging, but the way you apply tools in the pipeline is very different,” he reasons: clearly the language of a man who’s dealt with budgets and workflows as well as the creative coalface. “You’ll never have to master camera tracking in games, or compositing – they talk about tri-stripping, and how many texels you have.”

Creatively, an understanding of film is useful: “The language of cinematography will come into gaming,” Lee admits. “They’re starting to apply the process of a real-world camera to a virtual camera, so you’re not always bumping into walls jerkily. But you’ll never have to reverse-engineer a virtual camera as you do in the effects industry.”

Particularly with the growth of hi-def consoles, there’s never been higher demand for stunning 3D game graphics – and Simon asserts that the volume of work has quadrupled in recent years. “Studios are outsourcing to India and China to meet the volume, but this can be an unhappy experience if the quality isn’t up to scratch,” he goes on. “As a junior artist in the UK you have to hit the ground running, specialise, and raise your game to make it worth paying you more.”

Win £10,000 of animation training >

Words: Claire Spencer
Images: Courtesy of BAA

Animation in the UK is constantly subject to change. Always up for a challenge, the British Animation Awards (BAA) have tried to keep pace: we chat to some of 2008’s talented crop to gauge the state of the UK scene.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

You don’t need super-sensitive radar to pick up that at a time when computer-aided animation can be produced so quickly, slower techniques have fallen out of favour with many major studios.

This general trend continues despite of the efforts of studios like Aardman, and major film-makers like Tim Burton, who have continued to reap success with audiences through the tried-and-tested methods of stop-motion and replacement. Their success is encouraging, as it shows a real willingness on the part of global audiences to accept animation as a multi-faceted medium: so long as you have the scripts to back-up your chosen technique. And the popularity of ads like Sony Bravia’s Play-Doh, winner of the Commercial Craft and Commercial Direction categories at 2008’s BAAs, suggests that even the biggest global brands can harness the value in variety.

As such, many animators see the BAAs as a useful yardstick to gauge the UK scene. Aardman director Luis Cook praises Britain’s current crop of animators: “The UK, to my mind, produces some of the most original and interesting animation in the world.” He should know, having both won the Craft Award and been a runner-up in the Best Short Film category.

“It’s quite disparate, ranging from kids’ shows to commercials, short films to music promos. Every two years the BAAs bunch it all together, get it screened around the country and then celebrate it with an awards ceremony.” Luis stresses the face-to-face aspect of these kinds of meet-ups as key in what can be a lonely industry: “It also gives animation folk the opportunity to surface and say hello to each other which is great as we don’t get out much.”

In mid-March, this year’s finalists were invited to attend the ceremony at the BFI South Bank. But winning and losing seem to be alien concepts to those involved.

“It’s weird to think about this ceremony as a competition,” muses Tibor Banoczki, a runner-up in the Student Film category. “Who do I compete with? We are really different directors with different tastes and approaches. It’s like a strange Olympic Games where every kind of sport competes with one another. It would be impossible to decide which category was better.”

This attitude is typical of animators, particularly as compared to industries like music or film, where auteur culture can attract hefty egos intent on hogging the limelight. Animation is usually more collaborative, with its devotees seeing themselves as sharing a common passion.

The animators we spoke to believed that animation’s current strengths revolve around its diversity as an industry, which allows animators from all areas to come together and enjoy each other’s work. An event like the BAAs is an ideal opportunity to get the thoughts of a variety of animation talent, and that’s exactly what we’ve done, hunting down insider tips and tricks from the finalists.

Craft

Luis Cook’s comically macabre piece, The Pearce Sisters, was a worthy winner of the Craft Award. The piece tells the tale of two charmingly grotesque sisters, whose desire for human contact leads them down a slightly grisly path. The process for producing the piece was, in true Aardman style, painstaking in its precision and attention to detail – and not a piece of clay in sight. Cook and his team started off by animating the blank characters and the set in 3D, before printing out the frames and animating the details in 2D. Both strands were then matched up in After Effects to achieve a hand-drawn finish. It took 18 months to complete.

The worthy runners-up were Ian Mackinnon with Adjustment – his combination of flip-book animation and live action – and Joanna Quinn with Dreams and Desires: Family Ties, showcasing her refinement with deceptively complex pencil-on-paper animation. Ian’s film follows a close relationship as it degenerates in a world where the line between an artist’s animation and live-action ‘reality’ has become increasingly indistinct.

We grilled both Ian and Luis for their views on what it takes to be a successful animator in the modern market.

Both parties assert that inspiration for their work comes from a wide variety of sources – within animation alone, Luis cites everyone from Philip Guston and Saul Steinberg to Pee-Wee Herman as having had an impact on the way he works.

For The Pearce Sisters, he did a lot of research into outsider art, particularly St Ives artists Ben Nicholson and Albert Wallis. The resulting rough-around-the-edges effect frames the tale perfectly.

Ian, who graduated from his Masters course 18 months ago, has found plenty of mutual inspiration in classmates and colleagues. “We keep in touch,” he says. “Collaboration is so important; there’s a real community element.”

Luis agrees, asserting that the industry couldn’t survive without that sense of community. “A smart director simply surrounds himself with people far more talented than himself – writers, editors, designers, animators, and sound people. He pulls it all together by keeping everyone happy with money and cake and then takes all the credit at the end,” he chuckles.

Luis’ journey from student to animator has been a varied one, passing through Berkshire College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic before becoming a freelance illustrator and teacher. Subsequently, he produced pieces for the BBC and Royal College of Art (RCA) before becoming part of the Aardman family.

“I never intended to be an animation person; it was an accident really,” he muses. “However, as I was working as an illustrator I obviously drew a lot, so a friend of mine threw me in at the deep end and got me to work on a series for the BBC called Small Objects of Desire. That got me into the idea of moving illustration, so I applied to the RCA and VSO at the same time. VSO didn’t get back to me, so I ended up doing animation.”

Ian is also an RCA alumnus, but his path to the BAAs had a more technical base, kicking off with a degree in Computer Animation – which involved a great deal of mathematics. “That opened up a lot of ideas to me,” he recalls, suggesting that the conceptual end often comes first for him as a result.

“With Adjustment, the medium definitely inspired the story,” he admits. Indeed, the two are inextricably interlinked – the animation is the story.

From Luis’ point of view, the industry has a way of restoring balance, just when it seems as though one medium is reigning supreme. “I think it ebbs and flows. A few years ago we thought 2D was being killed by computers, but it seems to be coming back as a response to the masses of CGI features. Maybe it’s more of a cross-fertilisation. All these ways of working seem to reinvent themselves, forming a collage of old and new technologies.”

There may seem to be less sand animation, or oil-on-glass, such as Clive Walley was making in the early 1990s, in the mainstream in 2008. But rather like the winklepickers, tank-tops and drainpipe jeans of decades gone by, just when you think a trend’s been rightly ditched in the dustbin of history, suddenly it’s everywhere again, perhaps under a new name, or more interestingly, having evolved into a slightly more complex beast.

Short Film

Osbert Parker seized the award for Best Short Film firmly in both hands with his technically-precise masterpiece, Yours Truly. Using a combination of miniature 3D environments and camera-manipulated magazines and movie stills, Osbert has created a thrillingly dark tale of love and murder.

His is a fine example of how to use stop-motion technique to its full effect, as the slightly awkward, jerky movements impart an air of film noir to the proceedings.

The equally compelling runners-up were Elizabeth Hobbs with The Old, Old, Very Old Man, and the aforementioned Pearce Sisters. Elizabeth plumped for watery blue ink on white tiles, inspired by the images of Charles I on the Delftware at the British Museum: “I couldn’t have made the piece in any other way,” she asserts.

Alongside Craft, the award for Best Short Film is one of the most highly-regarded at the BAAs. Elizabeth Hobbs shares how it feels to be recognised in such a category. “I was surprised and delighted,” she smiles. “I often feel a little bit outside the animation industry because I work mostly on my own at home, only really emerging to have a drink with my producer by the canal, or to do the sound design at Fonic. Having invested so much in a film and persuaded other people to do the same, it’s nice to have the film noticed.”

The variety within even a single category emphasises the varied backgrounds that these animators have. Elizabeth, like Luis, started her journey as an illustrator. “I was writing and making artist’s books and prints, and developed the desire to make the narratives work over time. I started by making flip-books and Jacob’s Ladder books, and then took it to the next level by borrowing a camera and making two films using fuzzy felt,” she recalls.

This eventually led her in 1998 to a postgraduate degree in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, where she started to make films using the familiar materials from her printmaking days. However, Elizabeth’s different background and approach makes her consider the process of animation in a slightly different light. “I have the feeling that the best animations come from single-minded, slightly bonkers people working on their own in the dark,” she laughs. “But I do appreciate that it is slightly different for adverts, pop videos and features.” Some types of animation do lend themselves to solo flight, and Elizabeth’s delicate techniques are among them. Ultimately, it comes down to preference, media, and how much you are willing to undertake.

Cutting Edge

This category is perhaps one of the most important, as it represents the crème de la crème of the industry’s most daringly innovative artists. Semiconductor’s Magnetic Movie was the overall winner: shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory in California, this stunning short film unleashes itself on reality, exploring magnetic fields by bringing them into a dimension that we can sense and appreciate.

Set to a backdrop of NASA scientists discussing their techniques, Magnetic Movie is a marvellous marriage of sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing.

The runners-up in this category were Osbert Parker’s Yours Truly, and Interstellar Stella, produced by AL and AL. The latter sees a child model exploring the mystery of herself and her contrasting lifestyle via the advertising stills in which she’s featured. The film is a visually-stunning combination of high definition live action and 3D/2D CGI composited video. As one might expect, the techniques demonstrated by all the finalists were quite extraordinary, making it incredibly difficult to narrow it down to a single winner.

Getting in at the ground floor, we spoke to winners Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor, finding again warm words on the subject of diversity in animation: “The scope of the awards has definitely opened up the field of what is considered animation,” Joe notes. Things that were once products of the underground can use the BAAs to emerge into the mainstream – Magnetic Movie itself would not look out of place as an advertisement, and the techniques it showcases have limitless potential. However, both Ruth and Joe consider themselves to be artists over animators, and Magnetic Movie was the result of introducing time and space into their art. AL and AL also have a background in Fine Art, which they studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, graduating in 2001.

Like many of their contemporaries, the idea came before the medium, but the media bring ideas of their own. For their next project, Ruth and Joe are working on a multi-screen installation drawing on the movement of the sun and earth – still animation, but approached in a completely different, more interactive way. Of course, comments-enabled video-sharing sites like YouTube have provided a platform from which the artists can interact with the audience if they choose to do so. But is it a good idea?

“It’s nice to establish a dialogue,” admits Ruth, “and we’ve always aimed to get our work out to people. We released material on a DVD in 2001, and this is just another way of achieving that effect, only faster.”

It doesn’t seem to have harmed their success, although several of the animators we spoke to admitted to having had their hands burned by particularly harsh audience feedback – in such an subjective artform, with so much time and effort invested, criticism can cut deep.

“To an extent, you have to make up your own rules,” Joe asserts. “You have to bring yourself into everything you do, and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time on it. It’s probably one of the most time-consuming things in the world.”

As such, he warns against rushing to get your work out there for its own sake. “Don’t expect it all now – just work through your ideas, work hard, and the results are their own reward.”

Student Film

As the most grass-roots of the awards on offer, it is in the Student Film category that we may peer into animation’s future. “I think it’s good for people to collectively recognise achievements within the industry, as new standards can be set making for better things to come,” asserts George Gendi, the creator of Pingpongs, a runner-up in the category.

“Awards ceremonies also do a pretty good job in bringing everyone in the industry together in the same place at the same time. Everywhere you look you see someone you’ve met or slightly recognise. I think to give awards is to say that this is what people are enjoying at the moment, but it also highlights the direction in which things are going.”

The winners of the Student Film award (and joint winners of the Public Choice Film Award) were Tom Brown and Daniel Grey, with t.o.m., the uncomfortably curious tale of a young boy’s unusual daily routine. Originally produced for their final year project at the International Film School of Wales, the plot revolves around Little Tom’s decision to remove his clothes in order to get out of a day at school.

Using the 2D frame-by-frame effect on the computer, Tom and Daniel have demonstrated how truly flexible animation can be if you’re willing to put the hours in. Short-cuts could have been taken, but the resulting piece sympathises with the young protagonist in a way that a hastily-constructed Flash movie never could.

The runners-up in the category were Pingpongs and Milk Teeth, and we spoke to their creators, George Gendi and Tibor Banoczki, to see how they feel about their future as animators.

Also using a mixed-media technique, Pingpongs deals with the intimacy of relationships in an easily accessible manner, which is undoubtedly what has brought it to the attention of the BAA board. “Its selection affirmed for me that there are certain aspects of the film that are really strong,” George says cordially. “Ultimately, making work that lots of people can enjoy is very important to me.” This represents one of the greatest strengths of the BAAs – by recognising the quality of the work being made by students, or anyone who is at the beginning of their journey into animation, it encourages them to continue working towards their goals.

Tibor on the other hand combined photo-realistic 3D backgrounds with 2D paper cut-out characters to create the eerily tense Milk Teeth. The lack of dialogue is a masterstroke, as it sets the scene for the slightly creepy young boy who follows his elder sister to a secret rendezvous one night, and everything that transpires as a result. “We didn’t start with the story,” he recalls. “The first things we wrote down were the character of the place; the atmosphere. After that we started to think about the human characters and the plot. The medium just came after that. It was a long process to find the right visual word for the film.” He also highlights the importance of his Hungarian roots on his work – inspiration comes from life, not just from art.

As the category title would suggest, all of the finalists are recent students. Tom studied animation at the International Film School of Wales, whereas co-director Daniel studied Fine Art at the University of Wales before enrolling on the same course. Tibor graduated from Moholy-Nagy Arts University in Budapest, and more recently attended the NFTS in London, with Milk Teeth as his graduating film. So, how do the bright hopes of animation characterise the industry facing them today? Nominees in other categories have identified genres that have been less popular in recent times, but like his contemporaries, George is not too worried about what lies ahead.

“Although some sub-genres have become less popular, they can’t be replaced and they can always be found. As long as we make an effort to look for what we like if the mainstream isn’t living up to expectations, then there will always be variety, and nothing will totally die unless technology goes backwards.” Tibor agrees, and asserts that as long as animators care about the message they are putting across, the medium and its surrounding techniques will fall into place.

“Keep your talent busy,” asserts Tibor. “It’s important to have talent, but it’s equally important to keep on working. If you finish a film, start another one. It doesn’t matter what kind of film it is, or whether you have money. Just keep your mind and hands busy.”

Words: Catherine Bray
Illustration: The Boy Fitz Hammond

What your course won’t teach you: the dos and don’ts of interviewing the good, the bad, and the reluctant.

Scene: hotel room, interior.

The elegantly attired star reclines wearily on a sofa, awaiting yet another dull interrogation on their latest project, sternly instructed by the PRESS OFFICER to ignore any enquiry tainted with even the most elusive tang of controversy. Our hero, the journalist, waits outside the suite, running over in their mind a carefully prepared list of clever questions designed to truly engage their icon with their perceptive insights.

Cut to: montage. The star and our hero are now best friends (perhaps lovers?). We see them wandering, laughing uproariously down a palm-lined boulevarde. Glugging champagne in a bar, entranced by one another’s conversation. Dashing to a car through a coruscating galaxy of paparazzi flash bulbs. Wandering under a full moon, the star offering our hero a lit cigarette. This is true love. Fade to black on a kiss.

Back to reality. Becoming best mates with your interviewee is not the reason the interview was set-up. Usually you’re there primarily to help your readers get some insight into your subject’s work, and maybe try to find out a little bit about what makes your subject tick as a person. Whether you’re a print, online or broadcast journalist, whether you specialize in entertainment, politics, lifestyle, or any other discipline, at some point you’re probably going to experience the thrill of a great interview, the horror of a bad one and everything in between. For the would-be journalist, therefore, one of the most worthwhile skills of the trade to master is interviewing technique.

Perhaps one illusion best dropped soonest is that you are there to make friends, even if you are interviewing a personal idol. Another delusion is the contrary idea that it’s a good idea to piss off your interviewee - anger makes great copy, right? Well, it can do, and depending on the kind of publication you work for, may hook readers, but bear-baiting is a different kind of talent to journalism.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be frank. However, what might be considered frank when speaking to a friend can easily seem rude to a famous stranger. A journalist who wishes to remain anonymous recounted to me with wistful regret the time he opened an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow with some honest criticism of the star’s pet project, Sylvia: “Never, ever open with any kind of derogatory comment about the star’s past work, unless they bring it up themselves, and if a PR or minder is present expect the interview to be terminated immediately. And, worst case scenario, for a complaint to be made about your interviewing technique.”

It’s the kind of gaffe that we all like to think we would never make, but for the aspiring journalist there are plenty of other pitfalls - as well as opportunities - which tend to be learned after the fact, as they aren’t necessarily taught on journalism courses. Of course, you can learn some of them chewing the fat with some seasoned pros, which is exactly what I set out to do here.

1. Don’t: Embarrass yourself and everyone else present with crazed requests.

“The worst thing I’ve ever seen done was at a series of roundtable interviews for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. One journalist, at the end of each interview, insisted on being photographed with the star as a sort of proof they actually met them. But this particular photo apparently had to involve the star holding up, or wearing, a jumper patterned with the journo’s national flag. Nasty.” James Mottram, film critic and author, The Sundance Kids

It sounds obvious, but if you’re interviewing a celebrity or other high-profile figure there’s a world of difference between politely asking someone to sign their autobiography, and going above and beyond. Some interviewees will be quite obliging; I remember a roundtable interview where The Lord of the Ring’s Andy Serkis posed happily for pictures and even recorded an answerphone message for one journalist in his Gollum voice, but it’s certainly not in their job description to play ball with this kind of thing.

2. DO: See/read/listen to your interviewee’s work in advance if possible.

“Always best to have seen whatever you’re interviewing the subject on. Mr Evan Katz, Producer of Season 5 of 24, wasn’t best pleased when I began the interview with: ‘Hi Evan, I haven’t actually seen season 5 yet, and I’m trying to avoid spoilers, so can we kinda talk about it without talking about it?’ He did his subsequent best to give away every twist he possibly could, then saying ‘Oh… I’m sorry, did I say something I shouldn’t have?’ and sniggering. Fair play though, I would’ve done the same.” Tristan Burke, freelance film journalist

It’s not always possible to get your hands on the relevant goods prior to an interview, but make sure you know as much as possible about your subject before turning up. Fact-checking your research is always worthwhile: interviewees quickly get bored of having to refute a popular misconception, and while the internet has made laying your hands on a wealth of information a relatively fast process, it’s also very easy to circulate rumours. Before asking whether it’s true they starred in The Wonder Years, see if you can find a reputable source backing it up.

3. Don’t: Underestimate the language gap.

If you’re interviewing someone from a different culture or country, check your questions make sense and aren’t going to piss people off.

“I was with a gaggle of journos in the gardens of Pinewood on the set of Stardust. Director Matthew Vaughn was wheeled out, wearing don’t-fuck-with-me-sunglasses to face about twenty hacks. And, as frequently happens, it was the overseas journos that asked the worst questions. Their first bloody question to Vaughn was ‘Has Claudia Schiffer visited the set?’ which immediately put him in a bad mood. I think if your editor’s told you to ask that question, at least butter them up first. Then they asked Clare Danes how it felt to move from being a sexy girl to a sexy woman. She looked bewildered.” Steve O’ Brien, pundit, BBC4

There are always going to be cultural differences when interviewing internationally, some of which will be avoidable, some less so. In general, save those potentially controversial topics for last.

4. DO: Take the age of your interviewee into account.

“Woody Allen and I had a strange musical chairs incident at the start of the interview. He asked me where I wanted to sit, I took a chair. He said no, not that one, that’s my chair, so I moved to a neighbouring sofa. Moments later he asked me to move again, because he couldn’t hear me. Rather boringly, I’d done my research, prepped well and it went swimmingly. I’d just forgotten to factor in the fact that 70-odd-year-old men are a bit deaf. And speaking of OAPs… I interviewed veteran Hammer Horror scream queen Ingrid Pitt at her house, and the whole thing was faintly surreal. Couple of tips: don’t laugh when your hostess drops a plate of biscuits; she thought I was taking the piss. Win her round by complimenting her on her Russian tea. Do nod sagely when her mild request to write a column for your magazine suddenly turns into a proper, scary demand. Glad her husband walked in at that point to calm her down a bit.” Graham Taylor, The Sun TV Mag

5. DO: Know your subject area.

“I interviewed cartoonist Scott McCloud in 1990 or so, with no chance to do any preparation or research, soon after he had made a splash beyond comics’ little pond with a ‘graphic novel’ called Understanding Comics. It was soon obvious that he had had his fill of being asked dumb questions by people who knew nothing about comics, and he tested me out early on, in steps - mentioning Jack Kirby (the giant of US comics), then Art Spiegelman (Maus), then Osamu Tezuka (Japan’s “god of comics”). When I replied to that last one by saying that I’d written an obituary for Tezuka, and showed that I knew McCloud’s other work too, I was in, and he became friendly and forthcoming. We talked a lot about the craft of comics, as I recall, and knowing what I was talking about made all the difference, by asking productive and even demanding questions and showing I understood and followed what he said. I got a lengthy interview out of him, and he was genuinely interested and thoughtful.” Martin Skidmore, freelance journalist

Always pursue interview opportunities that fall within your specialist subject areas - you’re putting yourself streets ahead of the writer who just takes it on as a job at no extra effort. The problem may be making sure you let your interviewee get a word in edgeways.

6. DON’T: Assume anything.

“I once had an hour-long interview with Sir Ridley Scott which, without anyone telling me, was shortened to 45 minutes. Needless to say, I was a little surprised when the publicist told me to wrap things up a full quarter of an hour earlier than I was expecting. The moral of the story? Always keep your last question in mind, ready to drop in if required. It should be something that you really want an answer to, and preferably something that will prompt a long answer giving you plenty of quotage. Also, as you go into the interview, check how long it’s going to be - it might have changed at the last minute and there’s never any harm in asking.” Richard Edwards, News Editor, SFX

As Richard points out, it’s always worth checking and double-checking the details of your interview. As well as being useful from your point of view, if it’s a high-profile interviewee with a busy schedule it’s helpful to the press officer to know you’re on the ball.

7. DON’T: Rely on technology.

“When Mrs Thatcher was made Minister of Education they wanted to me to do a proper profile of her, following her around for two or three days getting a flavour of her work, but what in fact happened was I was granted an hour in her office. I went along with a tape recorder with which I wasn’t very familiar and about half way through the interview I realized that the tape recorder wasn’t working and I was far too scared to say, so I went back to the office and said I’m sorry but I don’t think it added up, I don’t think this interview should run.” Katharine Whitehorn, author and veteran journalist, The Observer

Recording technology means there are plenty of journalists today, particularly on magazines, who don’t learn shorthand, preferring to rely on the dictaphone. Old school hacks may recoil, but there’s arguably nothing wrong with this - provided the technology doesn’t let you down. Accuracy aside, if you’re touching on anything contentious it is doubly essential that you have a record of what was said and that you keep the audio file so that you can prove, should you need to, that your article is accurate. Test your equipment, bring spare batteries, and if it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity you could even consider bringing a back-up recorder.

8. DO: Maintain your composure.

When interviewing legendary columnist, author and personal icon Katharine Whitehorn for the above comment on her Thatcher interview, I found myself unusually flustered. It’s one thing interviewing a major musician whose album you don’t happen to rate, or a filmic flavour of the month you only heard about for the first time this year, or a politician you know for a fact is a lying scoundrel, but interviewing someone you’ve looked up to since beginning your career can do strange things to a person. When she’d finished her anecdote, I laughed. Only I didn’t, I snorted. A great, pig-truffling snort straight from the bacon emporium. She politely pretended it hadn’t happened, and to cover my confusion I asked her to sign my copy of her autobiography. She asked me how I spelled my name. “Exactly like yours. But with a K. I mean a C. But exactly like yours apart from that. Except it’s not an a in the middle. It’s an e. The ending is identical though.” Smooth.

Words: Nick Carson
Broomfield portraits: Kate Beatty

“It’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to put together something as accurate as possible,” is the Broomfield manifesto. Following 2006’s acclaimed Ghosts, he’s taken his experiments with ‘real cinema’ to a new level with Battle for Haditha - digging as deeply into the principles of filmmaking as he does the universal issues surrounding this symbolic episode.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

“It’s great fun to play around with style,” Broomfield tells me, citing Day for Night - Truffaut’s much-lauded film about making a film - as a creative influence. Certainly since the journalistic frustrations of 1988’s aptly-titled Driving Me Crazy, he’s carved a name as a figurehead for what pigeonhole enthusiasts call les nouvelles egotistes: a growing breed of doc-makers who are themselves central to the action, together with the likes of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

It’s all-too-tempting to pin up his two most recent films as the start of a new chapter in his work, given their deviation from this trademark approach. Both are dramatic interpretations of controversial situations, with no bobbing boom or frantic chase in sight; unlike much of his personality-driven back-catalogue to-date, both stories pivot largely on a specific series of events and the complex repercussions for the many characters involved.

But like his intriguing Anglo-American drawl, or one of his elusive heckled interviewees of past films, Broomfield’s not that easy to box in: for him, both style and substance should remain organic. “I think about one project at a time; I never seem to have a problem finding my next film,” he insists. “I’m not one of these people with a list.”

The latest episode to pique his inquisitive instinct was the death of 24 Iraqi civilians in the small town of Haditha on 19 November 2005, in the aftermath of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) that killed a young marine riding in convoy. Whilst initial reports from the US military claimed that the deaths were a direct result of the blast and a subsequent gunfight with hostile insurgents, Iraqi witnesses told a very different story - five unarmed men in a taxi shot dead as they approached the scene, and 19 more killed in three nearby houses in an act of violent retribution over the following hours.

It was an amateur video clearly showing the bodies of women and children shot in their homes, passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and then to Time magazine, that laced the affair with doubt. It identified flaws in the marines’ statement, prompting a formal inquiry - although the initial conclusion was that it was collateral damage, things soon spiraled into a full criminal investigation, with several marines on trial for unpremeditated murder. For Broomfield, this was motivation enough to cement the blood-soaked incident as an example.

“I’ve researched lots of subjects that I haven’t followed through,” he admits. “When you’ve got to be with them for a year, a year-and-a-half, you might as well do something that is complicated enough, or has enough mystery to keep you going. I don’t like going into films knowing what the outcome will be: often it’s the discovery that’s exciting; changing your mind; meeting people with sides that you’d never imagined before. That’s what makes it worthwhile and fun.”

It’s a compelling approach: filmmaker both directing the action and being swept up in it. “It’s all to do with storytelling. Any way you can tell the story better so it’s more real, more entertaining, more contemporary, is great to play around with,” is Broomfield’s take. In the case of Battle for Haditha, this involved building a framework from what few indisputable facts were available - and letting the cast improvise the rest.

As with Ghosts - for which the painstaking research process including hiring Chinese students to pose as illegal immigrant workers, and posing as an Afrikaner worker himself to film the results with a hidden camera in his glasses - finding the right cast to carry the film was crucial. Not necessarily just for their acting skills, but for their genuine deep-rooted emotions, experiences and insider-knowledge that could steer both the general atmosphere and finer details more accurately than any stubborn director with a top-down vision.

Understandably, it feels like a documentary-maker’s approach to drama: letting the action unfold as naturalistically as possible. At first he considered going the full distance: tracking down the marines who had lived and breathed the sweat, smoke and blood of Haditha, and asking them to re-enact the events of 19th November 2005. But in the flesh, as he told The Times, they were “fucked up, much too jittery. Some couldn’t keep still when we were talking to them.”

One of the most shocking elements during this initial research period was the marines’ “distressing and vulgar” sense of