Week One
June 22-28, 2026.
This is the inaugural instalment of the Seaverses weekly journal. Although I publish the photograph and journal entry on the site most days, I only send out one newsletter per week, so as to not to overburden your inbox.
The shape of the week was set by the crippling heat that besieged the UK and Europe. On Monday I launched Seaverses, on a bit of whim, but post-production on my current feature film stalled under the weather.
I’d say the week was a battle of competing muses: hope, anxiety & frustration.
22.06.2026
Setting up this Substack over a couple of days has been restorative, and it’s had me looking back through the images again. I really looked forward to taking my photo this morning to be able to share it; feeling very positive about the week ahead. Although, we’ve got a heatwave here in the UK, which is really not favourite for post-production.
Back when I had big edit studios in London, on days like this, when everyone asphyxiated under the orange city dust and heat, we would abandon the whole enterprise and relocate to the pub - clients, editors, everyone. But not this week, I need to get my head down and make progress.
Over the weekend a difficult-to-find book that I’d been waiting for finally arrived. The book is an account of one of the stories that I’m covering in this film, a murder case from 40-odd years ago. I’m not making a crime film, to be clear, but crime is part of it, and getting hold of materials from a case this old has been tough. I was hopeful that the book would include a number of photographs which I could then trace to source, but alas, nothing. Text only.
Still, it’ll be an interesting read. But it’s not going to do what I wanted, which is annoying; it’s going to drag me back into research. I’ve been trying for weeks to go through the courts and get the evidentiary record, but it’s a challenge - they don’t have records stretching back that far, and the clerks that I have spoken to are finding it difficult, which is a bit strange - it was a high-profile case and I didn’t expect it would be this tricky to pin down the records. The county has a system in which you have to present in person in order to interrogate the police files. In other parts of the US, I’ve been able to surface materials by just putting in a request online, but here I have to either find someone local who can go to police precinct, or fly out from the UK myself, which I’m not going to do. Other options are getting in touch with the author of this book to see if he can help; or the lawyers. I have reached out to the lawyers, but nothing back from them so far. Sourcing the evidence remains a stubbornly live thread.
Yesterday was Father’s Day. My children are still small, they both asked if they could visit their grandparents for the afternoon so we dropped them off and my wife and I went to a lovely mediaeval pub, in an idyllic, sun-splashed valley, and had a lazy drink.
My wife reminded me that a couple of friends who lost their jobs in the last year both took several months off just to regroup before looking at what might come next. She said that I should try not to be too hard on myself about the time pressure - that leaping into a new project straight away is moving forward, and isn’t self-indulgent. I was grateful for the unqualified support, and took the permission to spend a bit of time getting the project right, and to not start panicking about money just yet.
Damn it’s hot.
23.06.26
The weather broke overnight, a full-fanfare thunderstorm at 4am, which brings welcome respite from the repressive heat. It’s good news for getting on with the edit, but bad news for my daughter’s ninth birthday on Friday, and she’s tearful.
In the UK, with our water industry collapsed into asset-stripped ruins following privatisation in the ‘90s, the storm inevitably means that the water company will begin pumping sewage into the sea this morning. Paddle boarding after school on Friday is out.
24.06.26
This heat, this infernal heat.
I’ve been getting into a good editing rhythm, but my Mac packed up yesterday, overheated around 6pm. It was operating at 19% capacity, impossible to work in the timeline, everything was stuttering and hanging. So I had to call it, went and got a cold beer and watched the World Cup.
It was a bit annoying. I’d just found a decent way to work around the interruption to composing the music, which is to carry on, attempt to hear the music in my head, and then arrange the cut accordingly. I make notes for when my composer returns, and try to leave the correct spaces and breathing room on the timeline, which I can kind of loosely judge from experience. Here’s a sample of a shorthand note from yesterday:
[10:21:32:16] Beat/impact – the same one as from the first cells shot in the intro, matched against the first shot in the seq. Increasingly urgent and unsettling, a swarming sound building under shots 1-6 and then: “I took off running”, another impact [same sound] and bring it back down into a long-note bass pulse for rhythm.
I would normally use commercial music reference tracks and I started doing that with this project, but commercial music doesn’t quite fit what’s needed for this film, which has a very specific approach to music, and cutting with it was obscuring what I actually require from the score.
The sea is incredible this morning. An azure lake under a slab of glass, ribbons twisting across the horizon.
I’ve been circling the idea behind this project for years now, ever since I was a teenager, and I’ve just never had the chance to explore it. I’d always been taken with a filmic device in which dialogue leaps into the non-diegetic soundtrack. Sequences off the top of my head include the marriage scene in Casino, when Sharon Stone speaks to James Woods on the phone, and a scene between Cameron Diaz & Ewan McGregor in Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary (an otherwise terrible film).
My concept was to see whether I could extend that technique and do a larger piece, which would unfold as a kind of audiovisual poem, with dialogue rolling non-diegetically, but also carrying a narrative, rather than being abstracted. It’s something that I tried out on my first ever 16mm film, back in film school, but I haven’t revisited it since then and that was a drama, and this is a documentary, which is very different.
The subject of the film takes place in the U.S, across several states, and it wouldn’t have been practical for me to fly out there. That’s something that I would have done in my former career, when I had the budget for it, but isn’t feasible with my current resources.
I thought that those constraints might provide an opportunity to explore this long-running idea - since I won’t use the video of interviews, I can do them remotely, pull the audio into the soundtrack, and put images together in a more conceptual way. It may be that I am being over ambitious: I have several interleaving stories, it’s feature length, and it’s difficult to find and marshal the right images, while retaining a sense of the big picture and flow.
I’m usually quite precise when cutting, but I think with this one I’m going to have to be deliberately baggy, at least until I have a full picture cut, because I don’t think I’ll be able to get a full sense of the film, and whether the concept’s landing properly, until I have that cut, not just an assembly.
Usually, music is critical for me to even have a picture cut. I don’t cut pictures first, then lay music; I tend to get the music composed first, at least in its initial iteration, and then put pictures down on top. But in this case I think my composer being pulled onto another job might be a blessing, because it’s forcing me to think about working towards what this project needs rather than what I’m used to doing. And what this project needs, I think, is something far looser and more iterative.
A few weeks back, before my composer’s temporary exit, I had completed the first 20 minutes or so, and I sat down and watched it, and I immediately sensed that it was not working. I revisited it, chopped some out, moved some things around, changed the pace, and I have the feeling that I’m going to do that many times over as the film unfolds. I think that will prove to be a more rewarding experience and lead to a stronger outcome, albeit with a longer process.
One of the reasons that I exited my company was so that I can be more experimental and creative, and that means having greater sensitivity to the material, project-by-project, rather than working out of habit in the way that I’ve always done, according to a formula, which is definitely what I got into. This is a common pitfall: creative work can become repetitive and formulaic as the author ages and becomes set in their style and approach.
So I’m trying to keep that in mind, and work less from muscle memory and more from thoughtfulness about the needs of this particular film. And maybe it won’t work, who knows? But it’s fun to find out.
I’m not being helped by this damn biblical heat. How much I’ll be able to get done today and tomorrow is unknown. 40°C (104°F) temperatures predicted by tomorrow, and, of course, in the UK, no one has air conditioning. My studio is right at the top of the house, underneath the roof, so I am cooking.
On the flip side, the sea is absolutely stunning. Loads of activity this morning, people swimming, paddle boarding, kayaking. My only concern is that there was indeed a storm discharge yesterday morning, so the sea’s probably not good to swim in for at least another 48 hours. There’s an app where you can monitor the water quality, and I’ve got my eyes on that ahead of the weekend.
25.06.26
The crushing heat persists. The sea immutable, the sun descending mercilessly through the unanimous sky. Impossible to edit under these circumstances.
I’ve pivoted to chasing outstanding FOIA requests from various county courts and sheriff’s departments. Some of that material came in a couple of weeks ago, and it proved to be transformative for the film. This is all busy work that I need to and some point, and is a better use of my energy, given the atmospheric conditions, than a Quixotic struggle against both my GPU and God’s wrath upon the people of Southern England. Emails and phone calls it is.
26.06.26
A successful pivot.
Switching to lower intensity tasks under the heat duress worked out well. I managed to chase up some loose ends and pull a couple of bits of archive in yesterday. Although doing every single part of this project myself (bar composing the music) is slow, and can be exasperating at times, I am enjoying the opportunity to deepen my skills base and exercise muscles that have been wasting for a few years.
I’m definitely a much better and more knowledgeable researcher than I was before, which in turn makes me a better producer/director – when thinking about or designing future projects, I’ll be able to make more informed judgements about what materials are likely to be available and where to find them. I have had that ability for a good part of my career, but this film has enhanced it.