As regular LWLies readers will know, we’re interested in more than just meaningless celebrity gossip and exhausted Hollywood conjecture.
For us, cinema is not an exclusive or privileged art but an organic, limitless medium that is shaped and informed as much by independent, autonomous individuals as by major studios and box office-driven executives.
That’s why every week we’re going to be giving up-and-coming grass-roots filmmakers a platform to present their work.
–
Who are you and why have you made a film?
My name is Andrew Telling and I am a filmmaker/musician type person. I made this film to document my friend/artist Wordtomother when he travelled to the south of Italy to paint at Fame Festival last year.
What’s your pitch?
‘Hey dude, you want to go and make another film?!’
What kind of experience do you have?
I have worked in the corporate/commercial side of video for a few years, but the last few years have seen me explore my own ideas and style of production.
What makes your film stand out from the crowd?
The edit and the music, I hope. I avoid using stop motion techniques to show the work being created and focus more on abstract angles of the artists’ technique and the environment they are working in. The music I wrote for the film is hugely important too as it lets me create the edit/narrative and convey the emotions I need to as and when.
Where are you in the process?
It’s finished!
Tell us about the highs…
The people we met, the abandon monastery and the valley/river we walked at dusk, the daily hassles of painting and filming in the street and the Milano home-cooked Italian food every single day.
And the lows…
When it rained, the sun burn, lack of coffee and the realisation that some shots weren’t in focus, which I only found out when editing at a later stage…
What advice would you pass on to anyone following in your footsteps?
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, don’t be afraid to talk to your peers and ask for any advice and just jump in the deep end.
What are your hopes for the future?
To work on a feature-length documentary and a series of short films and hopefully play some of the soundtracks live to the films. It’d be nice to create a different environment for people to take in the film other than a computer screen.
Grass Roots – Madre (text) by Adam Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
