I began playing with filmmaking when I was 12. My three cousins and I would spend long summer days filming action-adventures on our parents’ camcorders, churning out titles like “Mission Improbable” and “Kill Will” for family entertainment. It was only later, when one went on to win a short film competition for the Hammer & Tongs movie “Son of Rambow”, that I began to think of filmmaking as anything like a serious proposition.

Whilst studying Medicine for 2 years in London, and then Theology at Durham, I often found myself drawn back to film. For my Theology dissertation, I wrote and made a film on a train. I bought a £3,000 camera on my credit card, managed to secure a carriage on the Cambridge to London line, and shot it in a couple of days, with a lot of help from friends. The dissertation gained a first, but more importantly, it cemented my passion for the whole craft of cinema.

I started to make videos for other people, and soon the companies they worked for, founding my production company, Authentive, in 2005. Authentive grew over the years until I was directing and producing in collaboration with teams of trusted freelancers, making hundreds of films for our clients. But there were stories of my own that I wanted to tell. They spilled out in poetry I wrote. They formed into bedtime tales for my daughters.

In 2018, I wrote and directed “Box Office Smash” which blew me away by winning 14 awards on the international festival circuit. Encouraged, I made another short, “About”, co-written with my friend and novelist Theodore Brun, which also gained 14 awards. My third short “The Stupid Boy” was my most ambitious film to date. The script was awarded top ten Finalist in the International Screenwriters’ Association's Shoot Your Short screenwriting competition, and then it went on to win 55 awards at 75 festivals, and qualified for the 2024 Oscars® and BAFTAs.

Poetry and filmmaking involve the same core process for me; contemplating and meditating on an idea until it takes a final shape, in whatever format is most appropriate. Taking inspiration from the likes of T. S. Eliot and Mary Oliver, my poems, like my films, seek mainly to explore inner landscapes through the use of metaphor and symbolism. 

I have performed poems live in London, created light-box installations of them for the London Design Festival, and continue to share them via Instagram, experimenting with how to convey them. One such experiment was my poetry short, “The Hero”, which won Festival Director’s Choice Best Poetry Film at The Sunny Side Up Film Festival 2020 in Oklahoma, USA. My next film FIRE LILY will feature a poem I wrote in the days after George Floyd’s murder, and I am also working on a series of poems called Land of Fire and Ice.