This film contains images of animal remains, and frequent strong language throughout.

The film coll is a portrait documentary about my younger brother, Coll Daniels, who is currently a gardener on the isle of Iona. The film follows Coll in a ‘day in the life’ narrative, as he explains his life and his approach to it. The film is primarily a meditation on happiness, and an exploration of rural community life. By utilising the natural subjectivity of the piece – with the narrative lens going through both Coll and I’s own perspectives – not only does the film explore Coll’s world, but also delves into our relationship and parts of our shared history.

In many ways, the film is modelled after a family home film, with the use of a tape camcorder and cassettes used to replicate the home videos of Coll and I as children. Like those videos, the intention behind this film is to be fondly looked back upon.

Asbestos is an ambisonic short film with an electroacoustic score that explores the history of asbestos, its miracle properties, and how this starkly contrasts with the way it is viewed now in a modern context.

The film samples several suburban planning videos from fifties and sixties America. This white picket fence aesthetic is contrasted by the distorted and manipulated sounds, primarily recordings of power tools and various house hold appliances. The idea was to invoke a sense of a house being built around ones self, as the film turns from suburban planning to shots of the lethal mineral. Ambisonics were employed to create a sense of fear within the viewer by creating an immersive soundscape which completely encapsulates the listener.

The choice to make a film based around asbestos came from its prevalence in buildings even to this day. In Glasgow alone, there is enough asbestos that it would take an average of two life times to remove it.

Although this film explores asbestos through a very middle-class context – the nuclear family in suburbia – it has and will always be apart of the working class struggle. Today, it is the working class who remove it and it was the working class who worked in direct contact with it in the mid-century who were most gravely affected. The use of the middle class was simply to juxtapose asbestos itself, rather than be an accurate representative of the people most likely effected.

Port Glasgow was my submission for our first assignment on the Sound for Moving Image course where we had to create a film and soundscape that fit the theme of Clyde Built.

I chose to explore Port Glasgow due to its connections to the ship building industry, and its decline in the years since the shipyards closed. I was conscious to not to exploit the poverty of the town, rather trying to find the beauty in such a place. However, the town has been blatantly devastated by the lack of industry, and rather than making a film that tries to hide that, I felt it more important to unveil the tragedy of this.

The film is a lament to the working class, who were left economically and socially stranded after the collapse of the ship building industry. Port Glasgow is a microcosm of the West of Scotland; there are countless communities who have been left in an economic downward spiral following the disappearance of industry.

The spoken word was written and performed by my partner, Rosa Stevenson. It references several aspects Scottish culture. The line “the ship builders tae haud oan” is in reference to my Great-Granda, who was a ship builder and a hauder-oan, a position where he would keep the bolts in place as they were positioned in the hull.