I remember the first time a color telly came into our family home. I can see the proud look on my mothers face as it sat in its wooden box on the pale carpet next to the pink three piece  suite, the long curtains hanging behind it and the white rug on the floor that we loved to sit on in front of the fire. It was always at 4pm when we got in from school and had a cup of tea and biscuit and we were allowed to watch Blue Peter. My mother was strict about what we watched.

I don’t remember being hugely interested in the telly and maybe that was because of the restrictions, but it was always quite a treat when my mother called me in to watch something that she thought would be really good for me to watch, usually a nature program or something to do with animals. Once she even got me out of bed to watch a film about monkeys. I was a bit afraid I remember because we were not allowed out of bed once night had fallen. So it was a bit confusing!

Still my love of the outdoors, my pets and the garden were much more thrilling and as my own children grew up we had very little television apart from a video machine so they could watch their favorites on wet days. As they became teenagers of course it became more necessary to have one it seemed, but I never became attracted to it and could not sit long enough in front of the screen to get really absorbed in anything.

So it seemed somewhat strange that I had the desire in me to create any sort of film but I did! In fact every partner I had I bought a camera for! I had little cameras myself but clearly hoped for a camera man in my life.

Then in 2008 I met my beloved the wonderful Ben Cole, cinematographer supreme, with an amazing eye for capturing film footage. I wanted my own film, to spread my own messages this way, to be visual and artistic and include sounds from nature. I wanted to present my work to the world in a way that was not just through words. This passion grew in me. And then I met Ben and knew he had the means to create this for me and with me.

So we do. But in the beginning I realised one thing I had to do was make the effort to do this myself and not depend on my partner and his skills. I had to have a go at it at least.

So I did. One of my first little efforts became a reality. I was determined and with the help of a few friends I managed to create one of my first little films, on a very small home video camera, no sound equipment, no lighting, no clapper board or crew. I edited it myself on my laptop over a few evenings of trying to keep focused and sit for long enough to find a completion. It was raw simple and not professional. But it was my little film and told a tale of connection to nature, in its simplest form.  Now that Ben and I make other films and I’ve learn’t a lot from him and witnessed just how much goes into this process, I cant help but feel a little proud of the nerve I had to make something in this way and put it out there. I’m not sure which touches me more, the message in the film or my first attempts 🙂