‘Almost anything you do will seem insignificant,
but it is very important that you do it‘    M. Ghandi

It’s funny how things can come together so quickly. Last weekend I was looking at all the people across the globe coming together to mark the 350 global day of climate change awareness and still thinking, I should be doing something.

Then a friend told me of the UK Guardian’s 1minutetosavetheworldfilm competition and I thought, right, this is something I could have a stab at. And hadn’t I for the last month been working on a micro-script for a new film piece and hadn’t I been digging out old Hi 8 footage and reading Mark Lynas book High Tide particularly the chapter where he describes the havoc rising seas are already having in some pacific regions. Still, it was a bit of an effort: I hadn’t made any work for a year and half, my editing skills, none too proficient in the first place, were pretty rusty and I only had 3/4 of the script done before bringing some of the footage into my pc and I had to the day job to contend with too. Still, the funny thing is, I sorta knew that the starting is the key and the ending would appear, if I EVER started.

The new work is all old footage, recycled even, from a rather special trip I did in 2000 to a very remote place. It conveys probably a lot of ideas that continually circle in my head and ideas that come and go when I’m in my own wood. Incidentally our spruce forest is amazing in a storm, if you close your eyes you could be in the midst of a crashing, angry ocean – when we lived in our old mobile home, it often used to shudder and shake like a boat too.

Here it is.

If you like it, do feel free to give it a vote here , if you have done so already, thank you! Voting continues until this Fri 6 November.

If you want to share it on Facebook so your friends can see it too, click here

The top 15 films (selected by both the public and the panel -who coincidentally consist of the aforementioned Mark Lynas and all out superhero Director of the Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong, amongst others) get shown across the UK before the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Change summit in December and then taken to Copenhagen to be presented there (cor!). Mind you, I didn’t really realise this until well into making it, as I just got it in before the deadline. It’s also fantastic to see the wealth of ideas from all over the globe who have entered the competition.

The big win for me already was something I had forgotten, that deadlines are in fact ‘lifelines’ for creative work. It was also a bit odd to make something so new, then hit a button and have so many see something that I thought people might not understand. I am already a bit bewildered by the many positive comments and how people seem to connect with the beauty and ideas that I was trying to juggle. Perhaps my mum is right, the poetic can connect more than you think, she put it like this, ‘you will catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar’ and I think she is right aboukt this too, ‘you should be making lots more films!’ Thanks Mum xxx.