Oceanic Global Film Festival winner

‘Dive Tierra Bomba Dive‘, the second film I have commissioned/execed directed by Joya Berrow & Lucy Jane, the dynamic duo who go under the name The Right to Roam, has been selected as one of the four winners of the Oceanic Global Film Festival. It is centred on a young woman who aspires to lead the fight to protect the marine environment of her native island off the cost of Colombia.

The film received a special screening (with director Q&A) on Earth X TV last week.

Lucy & Joya

Vimeo Staff Picked

The first film we worked on together was ‘Surf Girls Jamaica‘. It was recently spotlighted by The Guardian 

This Real Stories podcast is a good listen about the making of Surf Girls.

Memes of the Plague

I made this one this morning…

I think I’ll make one everyday for the next while.

Here is the one I springboarded from…

I wanted to bring it closer to home, Slough being a British comedy generic for shit place.

Big Fish Fight

What a great way to start the new year of work, the multiplatform dimension of the Big Fish Fight, a short season of programmes focusing on saving our seas and consuming fish sustainably, powered by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s short series Hugh’s Fish Fight and incorporating programmes by the likes of Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal.

The season has got off to a cracking start with
* 14,000 sign ups to Hugh’s Fish Fight (Discard) Campaign on the first night, now up to 41,500 within 24 hours – making a total to date of 83,972.
* 80 Fish & Chip Shops added to the MackMap, encouraging alternatives to cod & chips at our local chippers
* Trending #1 on UK Twitter on both nights so far
* over 3,000 people per night joining the Big Fish Fight Facebook campaign hub

The big win so far is Tesco’s changing their tuna sourcing/practices

To add your backing to the campaign sign up simply here

#1 on 11.1.11

#1 on 12.1.11

Illustration by George Butler for Channel 4’s Big Fish Fight online

4 things that are bothering me about the Credit Crunch

To celebrate our record recession as marked by today’s announcement of a neat 0.4% shrinkage of the UK economy between July and September, making this recession the longest since records began, here are 4 things that have been bugging me on this front…

1
Earlier this week I read in the Evening Standard an article celebrating the rise in retail sales figures in September with a woman from Selfridges revelling in all the spending, just like the good ol’ pre-Crunch times. Are we all just going to slip back into buying all that Chinese-made shit we don’t really need?

2
There seems to be no sign of genuine banking reform. Even Boris Johnson is now feeling stiched up by the bwankers. Short-term thinking (if you can call it thinking) is the nemesis of long-term well being.

3
In the wake of the oil prices hitting their peak, the moment they started coming down a bit, I remember reading the depressing newspaper headline: Supermarket forecourt price wars. This just after you started noticing people really thinking twice before making a car journey. Our capacity to fall back into old ways is frankly depressing.

4
People keep referring to it as if it’s another run-of-the-mill, cycle-of-things recession, perhaps a bit worse but still a known quantity. My instinct about it is that it contains elements the like of which we have not seen before and understand no better than the bwankers understood what they were doing when they bought those packages of cancerous debt.

We had a chance for a moment there to stop and reflect and consider where true value lies, make some radical changes and get our lives back into balance, perhaps healing our battered environment to a sufficient degree in the process. I hope that moment hasn’t passed but I wouldn’t bet my bottom dollar on it (if I could afford dollars these days).

Human Footprint