Since resigning from BBC staff over censorship of programmes he directed on Northern Ireland, he has worked for RTE, S4C, ITV Wales and West, UK Channel Four – and the BBC.
Winner of Jury Award Celtic Film and TV Festival (2006) for “Border Crossing;the Journey of Raymond Williams”,RTS West Best Regional Independent Production (2006) for “Till The Boys Come Home”,Gold Award at Houston International Film Festival (2000) for “The farmer who wouldn’t let go”,Prix Europa (1995) for “Video Letters” and three times winner of BAFTA Wales Best Documentary/Drama-documentary award.
Session Title: Creating a documentary vook – the combination of text and video downloadable onto a tablet – provides rich opportunities but also presents considerable challenges.
When I began making the Dragon and the Eagle vook on Wales and America, I first thought of it as a way of evading the television gatekeepers who have controlled the shaping of most of the documentaries I have made for television – iTunes claim that they do not interfere with the content of apps or vooks made for the iPhone or iPad.
I soon realised however that, even though I will be writing the text and editing the video for no fee, I would still have to find a way of funding the construction of the vook. These costs I have kept to a minimum by using only archive for the video sections but I still had to negotiate for access to the Welsh/American documentaries held by BBC Wales, ITV Wales and Sianel Pedwar Cymru, the Welsh Fourth Channel, in their archives. They have now agreed to that access on a deferred payment basis but they will want to look at what I have done when the archive is selected, edited and re-voiced.
And is there an argument for saying that they should? After all both the makers of the original documentaries and those who appear in them may object to the way I have changed the context.