At last my first ‘proper’ film is finished, so it is with enormous pride and pleasure that I direct (pun very much intended) you here. Working with the guys at Chocolate films these past few weeks has been an amazing experience, and I feel I have learned so much. We edited the film together on Monday afternoon, in a two hour session which blew my mind. My facilitator, Ross, was so expert with Final Cut Pro: watching him splice the film together from it’s component parts, then adding the required effects and music, made me fall in love with film and film-making all over again.

I couldn’t help thinking back to my university days, and all that time I spent thinking about whether film was a language. Yesterday, I decided, it is: what Ross was doing was using a form of language, constructing sentences and statements from it’s component parts, tailoring them to achieve the effect he wanted. Yet unlike ordinary writing, which I use so much and so often that it is now mundane, this to me was a brave new world, made up of thousands of other diverse, exciting elements. Here was a new way of expressing myself, of saying what I wanted to; one which opens the door to a thousand more possibilities. It whetted my appetite, and now I long to do more.

The resulting film, I think you’ll agree, is brilliant; at least, I’m very proud of it. I wrote it a few weeks ago: I decided what I wanted to say and how I wanted to shoot. Yet my script was quite rough: in reality, it all came together in the edit; that’s where the film was created. To watch that process on Monday afternoon captured my imagination, inspiring me. I’ve already bought and began to play with Final Cut Pro, for now I’ve seen what you can do with decent editing software, I’m dying to see what else I can make, what I can say, with this marvellous new form of communication.