The Colours We Lost (2025)

Graduate Film Project with 1st Class Honours (Shot on BlackMagic, Edited in DaVinci Resolve)

01
The Project

A hybrid documentary exploring the importance of Bristol's arts scene against a backdrop of severe funding cuts. Shot on a Blackmagic camera with a team of three and no budget, the film speaks to artists, industry figures and a council member whose work with disadvantaged children shows what is at stake when creative funding disappears.

02
The Approach

A conventional talking-heads documentary wouldn't have done the subject justice. Bristol's arts scene is visceral and alive, and we wanted the film to feel that way. We built a hybrid: factual interviews woven with a subtle fictional narrative, music-led collages, animation and archival footage. The goal was to make the audience feel the consequence of funding cuts rather than just understand them intellectually.

03
The Craft

Edited in DaVinci Resolve. As lead editor, the film was largely shaped in the edit: working around gaps in footage, integrating animation sequences, building the fictional thread and finding the emotional arc in hours of interview material. The edit involved real creative risk, blending registers that don't usually sit together and trusting that the audience would follow.

04
The Result

A first-class film that blurs the line between documentary and fiction. It makes the case for arts funding not through statistics but through people: their stories, their work and what they stand to lose. Thought-provoking without being didactic, and formally adventurous without losing sight of the subject.