VIDA 000 TRIPLE VISION 000 IGNITION FILMS 000 THE PRESENT 000 A HISTORY OF MY PROJECTS

TRIPLE VISION

VIDA transmuted into Triple Vision as Antony Cooper became involved in other things and Kez Cary began to become engaged with the work bringing more of an interest in drama. Later Renny Bartlett would replace Kez as we became more involved in both documentary and Broadcast. Early Triple Vision projects were an engagement with fiction and documentary and the Trades Unions. A seminal work for us in documentary was Making News which is still used to analyse news bias by the BBC. This was made with Jeanette Macdonald who was working as a health worker with the GLC. Bad Neighbors was another important project where we innovated text on ascreen as a form of key word subtitling - we did not want our interviewee to be diminished so we used text to 'decorate' the frame. The fiction project that was important for us was Circumstantial Evidence which saw Gina McKee's first acting role for TV. We won an International ITVA award for innovation for this.

Whilst Triple Vision were active we were on the crest of the wave. There was a sense that the sector was interested in what we might do next and very often after having innovated in a work (because we were engaged in a fusion of art and documentary) there would be a series of works around the sector that imitated the things we were discovering and putting into lay in our work.

In 1985 Channel 4 approached us to take over a project that was failing (though we had proposed the same project another group had gotten there first). This became 'On Video' - a three part series about British Video Art where we sought to contextualise the work.We thought it important to document the context for the creation of work in this field and so interviewed the artists who created the work. It was eclipsed by the higher profile Ghosts in the Machine by John Wyver. John later asked me to contribute a piece to the second series of Ghosts with other Artists like Bill Viola and Gary Hill. My work 'The World Within Us' went on to be shown on Alive From Off Centre in America and Avance Sur Image in France, as well as winning awards at Festivals such as Montbeliard and Locarno.

As this was going on I shot more and more projects and finally became Director of Photography on Out of Order, possibly the world's first video to film feature project (outside of course of 200 motels). This was made by the Brimingham Film and Video Workshop, Diected by Johnnie Turpie and Produced by Roger Shannon. This was premiered in Los Angeles in 1987. Equally I found myself going to many festivals as my work was being asked for (as was the work of a group of artists like Gorilla Tapes and the Duvet Brothers who are also less written of in the histories).

Triple Vision by this time was working with Renny Bartlett who replaced Kez Cary and Renny brought more of an emphasis on both fiction and documentary. We made various large scale projects on Russian and American Foreign Policy and the Health Service as well as one documentary on the Animal Rights Movement for which we ended up in High Court with the director being found guilty of Treason. I’m not kidding.

I made a few projects for the BBC like the ground breaking Building Sites series where I woked with Beatrix Campbell, Michael Craig-Martin and Iwona Blaswick as well as another view of video art for Granada with John Wyver, called 'In The Belly of the Beast'. We also made two more programmes on European Video Art for Channel 'On Video 4 and 5'.

At this point I headed to where I now live, Somerset, and for some years I devoted my energies solely to Cinematography before forming Ignition Films.