journal extract

sat 8 sept 7
Late this afternoon having got a number of chores out of the way since the morning I walked out to the Mersey beyond Chorlton Water park to try and get some filming done. The intention had been that after finally getting hold of a 2GB picture card for my camera I could start shooting footage for my film about the wind. But it was a beautiful late summer day, very humid, with barely a wisp of wind, so I clearly wasn’t going to get any waving grasses or anything else of the sort. Another time I might not have bothered, or just gone for the walk and not bothered carrying the camera and tripod all that way. Just lately though I’ve been feeling very positive about filmmaking, The Stones Escape had a visual sensibility lacking from previous projects, it seems to be animated with a life in the way that the other films to date haven’t been. And then there’s the fact that although my camera’s three years old now the 2GB card is a new toy giving me close to half an hour’s filming compared to just short of four minutes with the old one. On top of which I really didn’t have anything else to do. So about five o’clock I set off walking, knowing it would take me around 90 minutes.

I could have taken the bus, except that meant getting money out of the bank and then getting some change. I got some cash at the HSBC on Whitworth Street but then didn’t get any change (for a bottle of water) until closer to Withington. I didn’t then see a bus until the beginnings of Chorlton, by which time there was no real point.

Once I got to the park I walked through onto the Mersey trail alongside the river and started to follow it downstream. By this time it was obvious that there was insufficient wind, although it was still my intention to walk along to where there are open areas of long grass in the hope that there might be some movement. More seriously the sun was beginning to drop quite fast and it was clear that I wouldn’t have a lot of time to film anything. I’d already chosen to enjoy the day, and wasn’t putting any pressure on myself, so I decided to just take a walk and film anything that caught my attention. There was no especial intention beyond a vague notion that I’d like to gather material for a kind of ‘Manchester house and garden’ type project. Treating whatever flat I happen to be in as the house, and the whole of Manchester, especially the parks and green spaces as the garden. This might be a never-ending project and I certainly intend to be adding to it for around a year.

As it happened I came on a handful of tall brown grasses with seed heads standing over the rest of the green and waving lightly almost straight away. I set up and filmed them for a little over a minute. I’d intended it to be longer but a cyclist was coming and would have passed in front of the camera. Moving on there were a couple of things that looked interesting. The speed the sun was dropping meant I didn’t have time to hang around if I wanted to get to the open ground close to the path while it was still light. The walk was longer than I remembered. By the time I reached the first narrow section of open ground with long grass on the right the sun was touching the trees and the grass was both motionless and not the green colour I wanted. I turned back right away. I knew I had time to walk back along the river, through the park and to the bus-stop, and to stop and film along the way before it got dark.



The walk back was a lot nicer without the artificial pressure of having to find running grasses. Which I knew in any case I had a better chance of finding on the other side of the river. At that time of day even if there had been enough wind I would have almost certainly had to film with the camera facing the sun.

On the way back I stopped to film a concrete outlet and the structure around it up ahead on the other side of the river. Another shot truncated, this time by a jogger. But as I was meandering, as the colour of the river was so brown, as the colours of digital footage were so beautiful, and as stones under the surface were making the river churn a little further on I walked there, went down the slope a little and got three separate sections of river. One getting the whole width but cutting off either bank. One showing most of the breadth of the river and a section of the bank I was on because the grass was so green and luxuriant. And one focussing on some rocks breaking the surface on the other side of the river.

Further on with the sun setting extremely fast I got two of the shots I’d wanted earlier. Around a minute of a gateway and the foliage around it. The colours coming out in the heightened palette my digital camera produces. Everything given exactly the same weight. It looks beautiful. This and the next shot I took are my favourites of the whole trip. The next shot had a lot more shadow, and was of the huge concrete structures in the electric station across the river. The sun was mostly side-on but the square concrete arches are mainly in silhouette except where the sun touches them orange and red. The sky’s still pale blue though.

I actually just checked the films and noticed I misremembered the sequence. I shot the gate before the three shots of the river, though all three were in more or less the same place, the river shots being filmed a little down the slope. But where all four were filmed was much further on from the outlet than I initially recalled. In fact they were round a bend in the river and beyond the outlet. Then a long way further on and a few metres past my entrance to the park I set up on top of the embankment there to film the electricity station.