Stephen
“it was just bizarre when faced with your own mortality, initially we all thought it was for a couple of weeks”.
“I've tried to represent it as (obviously) physical damage, but also mental, spiritual, you name it. We have doubted what the hell we're doing in on every possible level.”
Instructions for short film (for full version click here)
Stephen sent me photographs that she wanted me to use to make a film to represent an end-of-life situation. Due to a knee injury, she hadn’t been able to create this on her holiday, as walking on the uneven beach was risky, I asked if I could help, as she had clearly spent time and effort thinking about it and it was a beautiful scene that she described. She created a mini version at home, with pebbles and sent me 4 different images of the same scene. She told me that:
“The cluster of stones at the top represent the patient and family, and those at the bottom are the healthcare staff”
The reason that she wanted to create this on the beach was because the sea would represent where the spirit of the person was taken after they had died:
“ It might not go over completely, the wave would just come gently around that patient section and then go with the patient's soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it. So you would want that. In an ideal world. If we could control the sea. You would want this sea to take the patient with it when it goes back. I would have had the patient bit nearer the waves, so that the staff are not in the waves. Does that make sense? The sea would come in just gently over or through, where the patient stones are, and then drift back out.”
When I finally decided it was a good time to go and make this film, many months later and after spending time reading and re-reading the transcripts of our conversation, it couldn’t have gone better. The gentle tide provided the rhythm and force needed to move the stones and the light was perfectly highlighting the stones aswell as offering an ethereal quality to the scene. Both I and my friend Laura who was helping me, found the experience of doing this film from Stephen’s instructions incredibly peaceful and hypnotic.