BBC

BBC ORATORY

A trailer I directed for a series of TV shows on the BBC about the power of great speeches.

We street cast kids from a school in West London. Non of them were actors. We then got them to learn the famous Martin Luther King speech prior to filming. Unfortunately, the Luther King Foundation lawyers never got back to the producers with written permission, so just a day before the shoot, the speech was changed to the JFK speech instead.

The kids handled this change brilliantly. It’s hard to see online, but when these films were screened on the telly, the lip-synch was perfect.

I love street casting and am always delighted at just how brilliant some non-actors can be when put in front of the camera.

BBC NEWS ON YOUR MOBILE

This commercial promotes the BBC’s online news service by showing historical events over the last 50 years or so.

I love trying to recreate the past on film. The caravan scene is based on my childhood caravanning holidays, and I love how the art dept captured the essence of this.

The other scene that is quite personal to me is the one based on 9/11. It was lunchtime, and as I walked past a Central London pub. I noticed a strange mixture of people all staring at the pub’s TV. I went in to see what they were all looking and we all watched in silence as those terrible events unfolded in front of us.

It’s something that I will never forget, and I recreated it for this film.

BBC WWI

This was a great job to work on. I loved the variety of it all. For some shots, we only had 10 minutes because of the availability of the journalists that we were filming, and for others, we built huge sets. For example, the women in the munitions factory which we recreated in a studio. We had to change this shot in post-production to remove a vintage stepladder that was in frame. The stepladder was one of those old-fashioned ones with wheels and some lawyer high up in the BBC said it broke health and safety rules - despite the whole scene being set in a munitions factory. Sometimes real life really is like an episode of ‘The Thick of it’