Simon Sylvester's Blog, page 2

Grey rubble, green shoots

2024 then eh? Completed it mate. Somehow. This has been a really hard year for almost everyone I know. I’m not going to dig into the difficulties here – I’ll try to focus on the good things that happened and move onwards in good heart. The headline is that I’m ultimately fine, and so are my family, and I’m fiercely aware the same can’t be said for many millions of others. Enough to say that I’m quietly pleased to be moving to a new calendar.

The systemic implosion of TV and documentary commissioning has had a huge impact on my work this year. I understand this as a bit of a perfect storm, with the inevitable rebalancing of the post-Covid bubble exactly at the crisis point of new media’s schism with broadcast media – just as AI nibbles into post-production crewing. In truth the industry probably needs this time of reckoning, but it still hurts. Between January and June, in the absence of other jobs, and in combination with looking after poorly family, I instead wrote a novel and took on a term teaching at Kendal College. That carried me into the summer, and from there my editing work picked up. In recent months I’ve cut films for Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Beyond The View, as well as writing/script editing and cutting the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2024:

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…I enjoyed that one – both the editing and the words, which I wrote in collaboration with outgoing festival creative director Claire Carter. Right after the festival I cut the KMF highlights reel, and also a brilliant performance by classical clarinettist Jack McNeill at an iconic Lake District location. I’m really excited for people to see that, but it’s Jack’s to share, so I’ll wait for him to release it before posting it here.

2024 brought more voiceover poems – the second for a map-making company in the US, and the third is here in the opening minutes of this excellent documentary about Sandscale Haws nature reserve:

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My biggest project this year was editing a documentary about the Refugees Rock charity, but that won’t be released until January – so I’ll share it and say more about it then.

Two of my highlights of the year came at concerts. The first was realising a 24-year ambition to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor live. Their seminal album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven was released in the year 2000, immediately and completely transforming the shape and momentum of my listening. It was the first time I’d heard field recordings folded into music, and that returned me to my early teenage years, where I stayed up late with my radio, inching through frequencies, FM then AM then MW, seeking out broadcasts on the very edge of listening. That experience – snatches of voice and song like ghosts in clouds of white noise – made me a ghost myself, another traveller lost in static. Political, defiantly analogue, wild and ferociously human, Lift Your Skinny Fists is my favourite album, and I’ve loved almost everything GYBE have released since – but I’ve never had the chance to catch them live. I bought tickets the moment they announced a UK tour for the new record. Mon and I caught them in Manchester, and they were everything I’d dreamed of for those 24 years – by turns devastating and euphoric, utterly transporting, great walls and waves of sound collapsing into chasms of silence. The live concert took all the craft and the bones of the records and piled on blood and muscle and power. It was extraordinary. The title of this post – Grey Rubble, Green Shoots – is taken from the new album. Seems fitting.

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The second gig was neither wild nor fierce but was equally special. At the start of the year I spotted Orcadian composer Erland Cooper due to perform at St Mary’s Church in Ambleside as part of the brilliant Aerial Festival – an unambiguously artistic celebration of the connections between music and land that casts a spell across the Lakes every autumn. I already knew some of Cooper’s work, and his record Folded Landscapes is a core part of my writing soundtrack – more on this in a second – but I didn’t really know what to expect from this concert. It was the premiere of his new work Carve The Runes And Then Be Content With Silence – written several years ago, recorded onto a single magnetic tape reel which was then buried until such point as it was discovered. Read that last sentence again. Cooper buried the only copy of the recording – and when it was discovered and dug up, he rewrote the score around the warping and degradations of those years in the soil. Where the tape had stretched – that stretching was factored into the final score. Where the tape was destroyed, lacunas of silence now punctuate the piece.

Unapologetically rooted in the seas and skies of Orkney, Cooper often uses birdsong, field recordings, poetry and oral history in his work (much like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, now I think of it) and so it was with Carve The Runes, interspersed with snippets of poems by George Mackay Brown. Uprooted and planted again in Ambleside, the concert was a work of extraordinary beauty, movements both melancholy and uplifting. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the concert made me realise that I had never experienced live classical music before – by which I mean unamplified. The sound filled the church like air… it didn’t feel to me to enter my brain through my ears but to exist in my mind spontaneously through an act of communion with the people and the place. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Mon and I floated home as though carried by the fog.

That novel then. I’ve been brewing on it for years, and had about 20,000 words of notes to work from. I started writing in January and had a 90,000 word manuscript finished in May, which I think is pretty good around the other things I had going on. I sent it to a dozen excellent reader/writer friends, and took receipt of some strong and consistent feedback. My redraft now needs redrafting, but I hope to get through those tweaks and send it out in January. It’s more speculative/fantastical than The Visitors, but it covers the ground I wanted to cover. It’s the book I wanted to write – about loss, and change, and grief, and awe. I’m long enough of tooth to know that doesn’t mean it’s a book people will want to publish or indeed to read, and that’s okay. In the past I’ve spent years working on novels I didn’t believe in, but I believe in this one. Even if I can’t find a publisher I’m glad I wrote it.

I think that’s enough for now. It’s been a hard year, and I’m glad to shut the door on it. I go into 2025 with my family around me and a good sense of the things I’d like to do with my time in this world… I might even lay down another Resolutions blog post… not least resolving to write about things like Godspeed You Black Emperor when they happen, rather than accumulate the weight of so many things to write about that I never actually have the time to write them. Should probably have worked that out by now…

Much love to you people. Heading into 2025 like Lindow Man:

First with the berries, then with the blade,
third with the noose and then with the stave
baptised in bog and cast into drown
throne cut from sod, moss for a crown
so I go to meet my god:
headfirst in water
a mouthful of mud

Scraps

After a couple of weeks away, and on the back of notes from some excellent readers, I’ve started redrafting the novel. It feels strange and strangely comforting to splash back into that watery world of flooded hearts and flooded houses. I’m weirdly thankful for the industry slowdown that’s given me the space to write, but things are starting to pick up again, and I’m back to work editing some really exciting documentary projects. That means redrafting comes whenever I can grab it – odd mornings and evenings, scrambled hours here and there – and all the while, quietly, quietly, starting to think about what follows…

This is a picture of the cork board above my desk. Each of these scraps is the ghost of an idea. I don’t know what will happen with my current novel, and I don’t know where I’ll land next. Some might be screenplays. Most will likely go no further than this. I’ve reached the conclusion that every project is so distinct that writing a novel essentially means starting from scratch, every time, and learning to write all over again. Maybe one day I’ll stumble across some sort of process that allows for better structure to my writing and my time. Until then – scraps and pins.

International mobster

Summer’s here – the swifts are back. That’s my marker. I haven’t seen as many this year, but they’re here, seven or eight screaming madcap circles round the house. I care more about birds as I get older. We’re lucky to live near a park with a copse of scrub and willows at the back of the house. Long-tailed tits scatter through the trees and blackbirds swap arias from the hawthorn trees. I’ve been using the incredible Merlin app to brush up on bird calls, and now stand happily in the garden just to hear them sing, trying to tell a wren from a willow warbler. A week or so ago I stood in the dusk and listened to a single thrush churning through lunatic combinations of calls. It sang with such urgency and power I believed that single bird was holding back the night.

Red in tooth and claw: yesterday a sparrowhawk all but brushed my head in pursuit of a blue tit, which tried and failed to hide in the hedge and was plucked out by the razors of talon and beak and gone, gone, hung dead from one claw as the raptor beat away with lazy power. There’s always a luminous silence after the sparrowhawk. It takes the birds a while to make themselves known again. This afternoon we’ve watched a single blue tit scavenging through the woodshed for spiders and bugs, stitching a loop between food and nest. I think this is a solo parent now. I wish him or her well with a Sisyphean task.

Even now I can hear the swifts around the house, most often gone by the time I reach the door to look. They could as well carry me with them. As always, someone else has phrased these things better than I ever could; friend Ali recently sent me this poem by Ted Hughes. It’s a cracker. His language so perfectly evokes that scattergun headlong chaos that swifts bring to summers.

Swifts by Ted Hughes

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialize at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come —
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters —

A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue —
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up — then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo —

The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.

Red Needle

I wanted to share some recent film work. Commissioned by Run The Alps and ON, with additional support from OMM, Red Needle is a short documentary following ultra-marathon runner Sarah Gerrish. Sarah lost an ovary to cancer at 15 and the second to a malign cyst at 36, putting her directly into surgical menopause and a world of fatigue, brain fog and exhaustion. The film was led by Sarah from the first meeting to the final cut, and I honestly couldn’t feel more humbled to have worked with her on the script and the edit.

There’s still a sense that menopause is taboo – and no one really talks about early menopause or surgical menopause at all. Making this film has been a space for Dom and I to listen and to learn, and I only hope we’ve done some justice to Sarah’s experience.

The film premiered at Kendal Mountain Festival 2023 and was subsequently nominated for TGO magazine Film Of The Year – all the more special for being a readers’ award. At the time of writing there are still 4-5 days left to vote, so if you enjoy the film, please sling a little love our way.

Under the hammer

A year at least, I think, since I posted anything; it’s been a time of change. In Easter 2023 I made the monumental decision to leave Kendal College, where I taught the Film Production course for 12 years. While I always loved teaching the students, the job itself changed radically in that decade, and honestly I was becoming unwell. Leaving was an exceptionally difficult decision… but also the right one. I’m a different person for stepping away. I didn’t realise at the time how heavy a thing it was to carry.

So what next? I’ve left to pursue freelance editing and to carve out time to write. I haven’t exactly stopped writing, but I’ve written far more screenplays than prose, and when I sit down with my novel it’s increasingly hard to pull the right words together. That’s a part of myself I want back, and I understand it needs work. My novel has been stalled at 30,000 words for over a year while other projects called me away; last week I sat down and wrote 500 words on it. That felt good. I want more of that feeling. Writing is a muscle: use it or lose it.

What else? I’ve finally released The Potter’s Field. There’s a lot I’d do differently if I was starting again, and overall the process confirmed I’m more of a writer and editor than a director – but I’m also exceptionally proud of what we pulled together on a shoestring. Particular shouts for Jenny Ann McKay and Marie Rabe, my sensational lead actors. They had incredible chemistry from the very first rehearsal, and it was all I could do to get out of their way. I’m proud to share The Potter’s Field:

I’m also thrilled to announce the release of Maggie, a short horror I wrote for the talented . James has done a phenomenal job with my script, and the performances by Shaun Scott (he of Moon Knight, The Bill) and Lukwesa Mwamba (she of Carnival Row, Doctors) are so good. The film won awards all over the world and has now been picked up by horror channel Alter, where it was seen by 50,000 people in the first two weeks – very humbling. I’m now working on a feature film based around the same characters. I’m not naturally drawn to horror, and I don’t mind admitting that plunging back into this world has given me a few sleepless nights…

I also wrote, co-produced and edited this promotional piece for Impact International. It was a challenging brief and I’m really pleased with how it turned out:

My other work of note was cutting 1h30m of drama scenes for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I put myself through a mangle to get the first cut delivered inside a week; a few months later, as I was teaching myself some new software, I went back to recut my favourite scene, Hand To God. Brilliant acting – mind the language though…

There have been some other commercial edits, and a little copyediting work – but the big news is that I’ve done some editing for the iconic BBC property show Homes Under The Hammer. It’s been an absolute blast cutting Homes – I’ve loved every moment. Back for another shift just before Christmas.

To tie all this together, I set up a website as a portfolio for my editing – if you’re interested in my other work, mosey over to SimonSylvesterEditor.com for loads more films.

Now what? I’ve just finished a short doc called Red Needle that I can’t share till the new year; that’s some of the best work I’ve done, I think. I’m redrafting my feature script for Maggie – after a couple of months away and some good feedback, I can see that I need to cut some characters and some locations, to condense and combine and simplify. The core of the story is good, but I’ve added too much around it. I sometimes think that screenwriting is as much about the things you don’t write as the things you do.

There’s more to say – I’ve rediscovered a childhood hobby, I’ve been to France, I’ve started swimming in the Lakes – but I’ll keep the powder dry on that lot. I’d like to get back to blogging more often – use it or lose it, right? …and so I’ll leave myself some things to talk about.

Backwards in the dark

On a train, shuttling back into the black. It’s late August and I’m drunk. A handful of beers with friend Dave and heading home. The clouds still hang a rime of blue but the summer’s over. Autumn is here. Autumn is the spider time.

Talking with Dave made me feel like a writer again. I often don’t, these days, but we’ve spent our cups in novels and film theory and learning needs and what it is to swim. The pub is beside a river. Fish jumping from below the surface, bats skimming above. All the gnats in a Venn diagram of doom.

I’ve been reading again. The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ — The Penolopiad — All The Pretty Horses — The Man Of The Forest. All of it filling the well. I’m writing a little, too, if seldom. The Potter’s Field is about to step into the world. I hope it will find a path.

The sky has drained to dark while I’ve been writing this. Write drunk, edit sober, right?

One out of two ain’t bad.

The Potter’s Field pt.1

According to the good people at WordPress dot com, this is my 300th post, which I see simultaneously as an amazing thing and also an awful lot of words that no one’s ever going to read. As ever, though, I write this mostly for myself; it helps me to clarify my thoughts.

I’ve written before about my experiences with The Pitch. As one of the runner-ups, I was awarded a small production fund to do something with. After spending much of the last year not really knowing what to do with the budget, I’ve moved increasingly to the thought of making a short film myself; in and around Kendal, working with the talented people who live here, keeping the whole thing as local as could be. Without having a clear idea of what to work on, I started mulling on single images and scraps of ideas:

A hanging tree high above a valley.

A stack of flat stones on a riverbank.

A kite, bobbing, soaring, sliding on the wind.

A man with an axe, walking towards a small house.

This was an experiment in free-writing as much as anything else, letting ideas move through association. And there was no story and there was no story and then suddenly there was a story: The Potter’s Field.

Potter’s Field in Hart Island, New York, c.1890

In the Bible, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, but the Priests wouldn’t take back the blood money. Instead they used it to buy a potter’s field for the poor of Jerusalem. A potter’s field is an area of land where all the seams of workable clay have been extracted, leaving a chaos of rocky trenches and holes. These fields are no good for farming, but all over the world they’ve been turned into pauper’s graveyards; burial grounds for strangers and destitutes. After hanging himself, Judas was buried in the same field his blood money paid for.

I found this utterly extraordinary. There’s a circularity to it, a Zenlike completeness, a sweeping up, a recycling of something wasted. It shapes a terrible betrayal into a coherent future: not righting a wrong, but filling a void: what’s broken can always be fixed, and what’s fixed will always be broken. I couldn’t find a moral in it, and that ambiguity sung to me. The ideas began to tumble, spilling like dominoes: a woman betrayed. A guilty man. A child. Two children. A river, a farm. Chickens and eggs. And a kite… the joy of flying a kite.

After months of chewing through images like puzzle pieces, suddenly and sharply the whole picture hung together. I wrote my first draft of the screenplay in about an hour, and was on my tenth draft in a week. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve written, and though I’m not in it, I’m also in every single line. Ultimately, the story is really simple: it’s about someone trying to say sorry, and someone else who isn’t quite ready to forgive.

Now I need to make it. I want to make it. That means producing and directing: the organising, galvanising, driving and delivery of a project from first idea to final edit. Finding a crew, casting actors, sourcing locations and kit, props and music. Insurance. Catering. Scheduling. There’s so much to do, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, and so I’ve built myself an armour of spreadsheets and lists. Spreadsheets for each of the schedule, shot list, budget, props list, costumes, research sources. There’s safety in those numbers. Making sense of the mountain; single steps on a journey.

I’ve surprised myself with how much satisfaction I’ve discovered in the budgeting, in the planning. At the moment I’m working out menus for a three-day shoot. How can I feed fifteen people with healthy food and snacks and teas and coffees and keep it on budget? These challenges are testing different parts of my brain, and I’m really enjoying the new processes. It’s good for me to learn. And I love cooking. Just like this guy:

Delicatessen

Along with the pragmatic work, I’m constantly divining a creative language for the story, thinking and feeling my way through how I want it to look. I’m lucky to have the gifted Dom Bush as my Director of Photography, and I’m already so excited at what we’re going to cook up. Dom has such an eye for a face, for a moment. The story is very intimate and I’m looking for emotional spontaneity in the scenes; I’ve been studying Normal People and Sound Of Metal and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, trying to better understand how those moments have been captured so wonderfully.

I’m still a writer, or trying to be. I’ve never wanted to be a director, but I want to direct this. There’s magic in film. It does things no other medium can do. This story is personal, and there are truths in it I want to tease out. In so much of my work, all of that happens in my head, my notebook. It’s a new experience for me to open it up, to share the process with others. I’m learning a lot. It’s good.

I’ve called this pt.1 because I’ll wrote more about this along the way. Same Bat time, folks, same Bat channel.

A clear road

I haven’t blogged for a long time, and this post is mostly to acknowledge as much. I am actually writing quite a lot at the moment — busy with redrafts of two short films shooting in the Spring, and almost halfway through my third pass at 100 Days Of Writing. I’m working with friends Ali and Andy to maintain some momentum, and that’s completely rejuvenated my daily practice. I’ve done 100 Days twice before, though not for years — this is now day 48, writing longhand in my notebook, whether it’s a single line or ten pages. Writing by hand has been an immensely positive and creative process, and deserves a post of its own. It’s keeping me focused at a time when it would be easy to drift. Quite honestly, between college, children, my freelance work and these general global pandemic blues, I’m struggling for the time to do anything much.

It’s been six years since The Visitors was published. That feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t think of the book at all anymore, and I haven’t wanted to write another since my last draft of The Hollows. I thought I’d left prose behind. And now, after an entire year of only screenwriting, I’m starting to feel the pull of a novel again. It’s so strange. A stirring of embers in the soul. I can be quite blinkered sometimes, or set myself in particular directions, unwilling to change course — I’ve been thinking of myself as exclusively a screenwriter over these months, and it’s very odd to feel this twitch towards prose after so long away. I’m trying to see myself as a storyteller using different formats for different stories, rather than a writer in one particular discipline. That doesn’t sit especially well with me, but that’s the way it is.

I don’t know why I feel the need to define myself within one format. Existence is manifestly absurd and having reached half of my allotted time on Earth, I’m painfully drawn to the thought of walking a clear road in the second half. But in truth, of course, there are no clear roads, and there never have been. Understanding that is as clear as things get. The function of story is to organise the chaos of this life and turn it into something that makes sense, even if only for a little while. In doing so, stories fool us into believing that there is a purpose to any of this nonsense. Stories are a net that hold us high above the void; a comfort that keeps us from screaming. That’s true for writing them as well as reading them, which is probably why it hurts so much when they go wrong.

I just used a semi-colon and didn’t even notice until reading it back. I thought I was finished with those as well. Times they are a-changin.

Only Weather

I’m exceptionally proud to share ‘Only Weather’ — the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2020. I wrote and edited the piece, which was produced by Land & Sky and spoken by Keme Nzerem.

It’s been a challenging brief, aiming to strike several balances — reflective but not sanctimonious — sincere but not depressing — hopeful while acknowledging the damage done by coronavirus. I hope we succeeded.

Journeyman

Quick update to share one of my other recent jobs — when not writing / teaching / parenting, I’m also a video editor — here’s my latest cut for director Daniel Brereton and Dom at Land & Sky. Lovely to work with some high-res 8mm scans.

Stay tuned for another big job dropping soon…