Ah, such a great weekend watching Ashley work his magic with the newly-scanned copy of The Beachcomber, which he picked up from our lab in Berlin last week.

The quality is superb and all the light and energy you get from an actual film projection has been lovingly restored in the digital environment. The process was smooth and again reflected the tremendous amount of effort and patience put into each shot as it went onto the film, making the cut painless and the retouching minimal. All a far cry from the long sessions of grading we did on Tantamount, where jarring yellow barriers and brooding grey skies posed great challenges for Final Cut’s presets. Now in a world where every colour can be honed individually (thank you DaVinci), every shot’s existence had been justified on set and where the depth of real film offers limitless scope for bokeh, softening and warmth, I feel like we are starting to become masters of the frames (at least the key ones) in our projects.

On this theme, our next short is going to be governed by rules on colour, framing and visual references just to push us even further. Once you start to see the world through not just a lens, but through a lens and onto a screen, I feel as though the whole filmmaking process becomes infinitely more immersive. We are planning to shoot throughout November and I’m already very excited!

On The Beachcomber, we are now into the final stretch after picture lock, with a copy going off to our new teammate and composer Jordan Dobbins for him to start putting together the score. I can’t say too much yet, but we have very exciting screening plans once the process is complete – watch this space…

As the summer rolls into autumn it’s easy to lose energy on the creative parts of our lives and I don’t think the shorter days help. (At least, I have always found sunshine to be far more conducive than rain to my writing – though my writing does almost always feature gloomy weather!) To this end, I’m looking forward to connecting with new people, and reconnecting with old friends, to being our new projects to life over the next few months. I’m off to Stockholm for a weekend with the aim of coming back to London refreshed and ready to dive in: with the London Film Festival coming up, a screenplay to finish, The Beachcomber to showcase and our new film to produce, we’re going to need all the help (and, in between all that, rest) we can get. Let’s see what happens.

Our new digital cut of The Beachcomber, starring Lily Taylor, screens in London the first weekend of November.