Diamond  is a short, immersive film depicting Diamond Plantation, a small enclosure on Woodbury Common. I chose to make a film about this place because I wanted to keep the canvas small while getting used to my new camera, and also because I wanted to see what would happen when I kept the location very tight. 

It’s proven the most difficult film I’ve ever made, not least because I’m unsure what it’s about or who it’s for. I’ve made immersive, place-based films before, with a strong focus on look and texture and an absence of dialogue – but even then, it was following documentaries like sleep furiously  and still created with a film festival or conference circuit in mind. Making a film as part of a photography MA raises the question of exhibition space, photography being a medium of the gallery, and some of the images deliberately taken for their abstraction. Certainly, every single person I’ve talked to about working with the moving image for this module assumed that what I’m making is video art, and that’s telling. 

So – maybe – this would work in a gallery space? I’ve certainly seen worse films in galleries, but I’m so very new to thinking this way, I’m feeling my way in the dark. With next to no experience, no art background at all, and little guidance, I feel I’ve come very little distance in understanding the moving image in a fine art context. Certainly, I find the overwhelming majority of what’s called video art to be alien and uninteresting – that’s to say, when I’m actually able to find my way to a complete work online – the digital walls around video art are frustrating to say the least and something that keeps it in its niche. 

That’s not to say I’m throwing in the towel with this direction. Far from it. It’s been a very busy few months and I haven’t had the chance to do this justice – certainly, I remain interested in the moving image in other contexts than the cinema, and note that several of my favourite directors are too. But if I’m going to work up a piece for a gallery context, it’s going to take a lot more thinking, experimenting and research. And definitely finding more practitioners whose lead I can follow. 

I swiftly abandoned voiceover for Diamond. This is most odd, as one of the reasons for the turn to moving image was to include words, but the subject was so subtle here that a voiceover would have completely dominated. Instead, I chose to make more use of sound to expand the space – the soundtrack is multi-layered, and often was recorded completely separately to the image. It’s far from perfect. Working on heathland means no protection from wind and my on-camera mic picked up too much wind, even with a fluffy. Many of the sounds are very subtle – rustling bracken, bird song, water, distant conversations – and so traffic and aircraft noise are far more intrusive than I’d like, even if they’re definitely part of the feel of the place and not to be omitted. Sound is something I want to work with more carefully next time and am planning to splash out on some decent kit in the coming months. 

One of the decisions I had to make was duration. Some of the shots are very long – one is over four minutes to allow for clouds to throw patterns behind trees. I didn’t feel that very long takes work in this film – though that’s perhaps timidity on my part. There are strong philosophical reasons for long static takes of nearly static scenes and the effects those create, but I didn’t feel I’d earned the right to do that here – I was very much aware of this being watched by peers and time-pressured tutors and impatience causing them to pay less, not more attention. I think in a gallery context, which is essentially a contract for attention, it would feel very different, and long takes on multiple screens would be great. But that’s a long, long way in the future before I can think more in terms of that. 

I know Colin didn’t like the shots with the static wood in the foreground and the barely-moving background. And I also know that Jesse doesn’t like me using very shallow depth of field. And I guess that’s where personal preference comes into play – this IS what interests me. I like the strangeness of those shots, as if they are both still and moving, as if manipulated, and I like how shallow depth of field replicated attention and thus subjectivity. I don’t believe I’ve a chance in hell of taking my photography anywhere beyond this course so I might as well make the work that I want to see. These shots might not work in the context of this film either – I’m prepared for that – but there’s such a strangeness and presence to them it was crucial I include them. It may be that in future film work – and by that I mean cinema – such shots can be used to punctuate my work, as cutaways, as interstices. They are precisely how my stills photography and my filmmaking intersect, which is exactly what interests me on this module. They are my style. My visual language. That thing we’re all supposed to be working on.