A mission to the Isle of Wight for Squarespace

Tom Nicholls - Head of Editing

I’ve always loved to travel.
The beauty of this job is that I get to travel A LOT for work and often to places I ordinarily wouldn’t think to visit.

Naturally, when NME asked us to visit the Isle of White to shoot a documentary for Squarespace, I put my name down straight away.

A 5am start, a 3 hour drive and a 30 minute ferry later and we were there.

The brief was to meet up with Silas Gregory, a young entrepreneur who’d taken his love of music and set up his own record label - Chalkpit Records, as well as a subscription service where members receive cassette tapes of new bands and artists every month.

After a short drive across the island, we arrived at Golden Hill Fort, a 19th century military fortification that had since been converted to homes. This is where we first met Silus.

Now, with any documentary shoot, you’re often restricted to the locations within the story you’re trying to tell. Some locations are naturally better than others when it comes to cameras - whether due to space, light or simply the character of the location. To say Golden Hill was a film makers dream was an understatement. Textured stone walls weathered by years of salt in the air, natural light through the industrial black window frames, original hardwood floors.

Can you tell I used to be an estate agent?
In short, we knew we’d struck gold with our location.

After getting to know Silus over a coffee whilst we set up our cameras, microphones and lights, we started to began talking him through the plan for the day and the questions we were going to be asking him. It’s always best to have a casual ‘pre-intervew’ before the cameras turn on as it helps both sides to get comfortable with one another, as well as getting a sense of which questions you’re going to ask.

More often than not when it comes to interviews, it takes a while for the subject to relax and get comfortable. Believe me, it’s easier said than done when the red light comes on and you have 3 people staring at you hoping what you’re going to say will make the cut.
Fortunately for us Silus came across as natural on camera as he did over coffee prior. This meant the interview was more of a conversation than a series of questions which always makes for a more natural piece in my opinion.

Silus’ desk had a personality of it’s own. An old Panasonic cassette player atop a tower of cassette tapes. A sleek white turntable overlooking a large collection of LP’s from all eras.

We chose a simple two-camera setup. A Sony 20mm f2 for our wide shot and a Sony 50mm f1.8 as our main closeup.

This allowed us to show off most of his office space and lean into the natural light coming through the window behind Silus, essentially acting as our key light for this shot.

Once we’d got all we needed from the main interview, we knew we needed some B-roll to place underneath Silus’ voice throughout the edit. With one simple question - what does an average day look like in your life, we proceeded to capture our subject as he packaged up this months collection of cassette tapes ready for dispatch, checked his squarespace built website for any new orders and because we’re super artsy - we also had him walk along the beach because every good documentary needs a slow beach walk.

We finally wrapped filming on the windy pebble beach and before pausing for some last minute behind-the-scenes photos, we jumped back in the van and set off on the 5 hour journey home which was only briefly interrupted by mild sea-sickness as we crossed the Solent.

If I had to choose one thing to film, it would be documentary.
I love trying to find the story surrounding real people.
That’s also the best part about editing - finding the narrative and telling a story.