Alec Bowman_Clarke on his Short Film: Never Again

‘Never Again’ is a ‘ is a ‘feel good-ish film, a heartwarming & sometimes funny story about how dreams, kind of, sometimes, maybe, can come a little bit true.’ Written by Alec Bowman_Clarke, filming for this short film will take place in Rothesay on the beautiful Scottish Isle of Bute. Many of you will have come across Alec’s film work on Folk Radio as a number of artist portraits appear in our articles and he’s filmed a number of music videos, most recently, for his life partner Josienne Clarke.

Making a short film is quite a leap, but I’ve complete faith in Alec’s ability to pull this one off; I love his video and photography work, and he’s something of a natural when it comes to capturing a moment or conveying a mood or feeling through the image.

I’d love to see this film come to fruition, so I took the opportunity to catch up with Alec to talk about the film, his work, and his love for film and photography in the hope that you, dear reader, will give him your support.

Alec has launched a Crowdfunder to raise funds necessary to make this short film happen, details of which can be found here – https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/neveragain.

“The billions of tells that lie in a single muscle around a single eye.“

Tell us a little about your roots, upbringing, and how and why you got into photography and film work.

I was born & raised in Mildenhall in deepest, darkest Suffolk, next to an American air force base, to a family of council farmers. My grandad was an organist & photographer & my mum usually had Voigtländer in her bag. I loved music & photography from as young as I can remember, taking pictures of planes, listening to Johnny Cash & being bad at playing the organ. I’ve pursued both music & photography since, in different ways, but it’s been the last five years that I’ve managed to make my creative pursuits make some sense in my life & career.

Do you shoot mainly digital/analogue or both, and what qualities of those mediums attract you?

I shoot digital, 35mm & 120 film. I’m not a snob or a gatekeeper. I enjoy progress, but nothing about it is magic. Anyone can learn, if they like & I’m always happy to share. I enjoy choosing a medium that achieves a known outcome, however vague, rather than letting the medium dictate what I make. There’s no point in that because it would just be a technical exercise. I like to let the requirement inform a brief and then use my technical capabilities to deliver on that brief – if that’s film or digital will depend on what I want the end result to look like. Analogue looks lovely & allows for a nice balance of technical application & unpredictability. The last frame on the roll is a thing I’ve excitedly waited to see for 40 years & I don’t see that getting boring. I also like how film photography slows me down and makes me more careful.

Digital photography is an incredible gift to the world – the sheer possibility, the weight of being able to do anything, you have to be light on your feet and adaptable. I have a tendency to shoot lots with digital, restrained only by the size of my memory card & then brutally edit. There are those who say that’s not correct. Haha. Either way. It’s all photography, and I like to do it my way.

I’ve been loving what people have done with MidJourney too (MidJourney is AI that uses ‘word prompts’ to generate artwork). Imagine, you don’t have to sketch out your storyboard/vision in pencil anymore – you can get MidJourney to imagine it exactly how you want & then make that photograph for real. Is any of that really any less worthy than being Vivian Maier? I dunno. What a time to be alive. No, I don’t see it as a threat; it’s just the relentless march of human progress & being personally/professionally threatened by that, whilst eventually inevitable, I suppose, is a concept I am resisting while I still can – if MidJourney or GPT4 kills us all, well, it was that or comets or diseases or fires or floods, and you can’t write /imagine prompts when you’re dead either way.

What do you find to be the most rewarding aspects of photography?

Either the satisfaction of mastering enough technique to be able to translate a vision in my head into an image on paper or that weird thrill when the thing you planned to do goes completely wrong and what you end up with is twice as interesting, then learning why & how and adding that to my book of tricks.

Is there a particular style of photography you gravitate towards?

Portrait photography is my favourite. The minutiae of a human face. The billions of tells that lie in a single muscle around a single eye. I love gig photography, but it’s technically challenging. Landscapes are great fun to do; it’s endlessly satisfying to capture a mountain or lake, or cloud that makes you feel something. But shooting people, I think, is what I love the most – and you can see how there is a straight line from that into a film – the ability to make up a story that people invest in and perform while I capture, enhance, complement and present is a real thrill. I’m not sure I want to do more than that. I’ll always take portraits and make music videos, but my ambition after this project is to make a full-length feature film. I’ve already started writing it. I think I have an idea people will like. It’s addictive, making things, don’t you find?

Is there a photographer whose work deeply inspires you?

There are lots. In 2023, there’s really no excuse not to be deeply connected to artists whose work inspires you, and I think we should all be working hard to champion & celebrate our contemporaries. There is an infinite amount of love & support to go around, and I think it’s critical to see your own work in a broader context, so if I don’t know what anyone else is doing, how do I know if my work is any good?

So, here’s a list of great photographers, with the disclaimer that there are thousands more. These are just artists whose work I’ve been enjoying this week. If there’s a common thread, it is I suppose that these photographers all find a way to show me their subject from what feels like an honest, insightful point of view. When you edit, sometimes, you have ten apparently identical images but look carefully enough and listen to your gut – there’s always one that makes your heart beat a little faster than the others, and these people all know exactly how to choose that one.

You live on the Isle of Bute; what attracted you to that location?

It’s far away from everywhere else. You need to use a ferry to get here, so it’s isolated & distant. When the last boat leaves around 20:00, that’s it. Nothing’s going wrong until the morning. Imagine needing that. I hope you don’t, but I felt like I did, and now I have it. Josienne’s family have lived here for 20 years, so it’s not a wild move. Mine live further away, but I work as hard as I can to stay connected to the things I want to be connected to. I lived in Glasgow for a year a while back, and I loved that city. Anything could happen there and frequently does. I love living in Scotland. It suits me. My heart always sinks a little when I have to return to England. Why is probably a story for another day, maybe a story for never, but that’s how I feel, and although I will always be a stranger here, I’m more at home in Rothesay than anywhere else.

How long have you lived there?

Coming up on two years now. I get asked once a week if I’m on holiday. And when I say, no, I live here, folks want to know what I do, and my answer never makes any sense.

With the internet, is your location a hindrance or a positive with your work and lifestyle?

It’s fine. A faster connection would be great for some things, but I consider myself lucky to have this place to exist. There’s so much to work with, so many great people & locations.

Have you made short films before? Can you tell us about them?

Yes. I worked with Andrew Leach and made a short film called ‘Massive Overheads’. Andrew wrote it, and it was my first time trying to record dialogue. A real technical challenge, but I think the results are pretty good. It certainly gave me a taste of what it was like to do that and made me hungry to do it again. I’ve always written screenplays, too, just for fun. Imaginary stories. Which is all any of them are, I suppose, but it’s only recently I’ve been brave enough to push myself into sharing with a view to realising these silly little flights of fancy. Music videos are really short films but without some of the technical restraints. So they’re both easier & harder, a medium I adore. I hope to make many more.

How long has the story this film is based upon been brewing?

Not long. I made two videos for Josienne in January of this year, my two most ambitious filming projects to date. They’ve not been released yet. They will be soon. And when I had finished editing them, I showed a few friends who liked them. When one of my music videos got selected for a couple of film festivals, I knew what I had to do next. I knew I wanted to make a film of a story that was set right here, in Rothesay, where I live. And I knew how I wanted people who watched it to feel. And the story appeared, pretty fully formed, in front of my eyes. So, I wrote the script over the course of a few weeks in January this year, and now we have a working draft. It started from the feeling. I think that’s best.

The film is described as a coming-of-age romance based around a working-class family from Port Glasgow and their holiday on the Isle of Bute. Is this inspired by your own life?

Yes. Everything everyone does always is, whether they are prepared to admit it or not. Blake, our hero in my film, is a boy trying to strike out on his own with an admirable sense of independent purpose from a family who have no frame of reference with which to understand his ambitions. It’s not that they don’t support him because they do. They just don’t have a way to understand what he wants to be because it is nothing like they ever saw before. And yet here he is, determined to make his life what he wants, not what other people want for themselves. Is that about me? Well, I grew up years ago and miles away, but this is absolutely a case of me re-writing the script of my own life, changing the bits that I would have done differently, giving myself the ending I would have wanted, which is, in so many ways, exactly where I am now. I’ve tried to give Blake a simpler path to redemption than I had, so I suppose he won’t have the ‘it doesn’t count for anything if you don’t have to fight for it’ lesson. Maybe I can address the integrity of that sentiment in another film.

What pushed you to take the leap with this short film?

Those two recent music videos that I made for Josienne Clarke. I can’t say their names because they aren’t released yet, but you’ll have seen them both by the end of April 2023; then, I think you’ll see what I mean. Also, working with John Gray (producer & auteur) & Connor McCausland (actor) on those projects – they seemed to think I was a person who could achieve things and whose vision was worth something. Which is always good & I never take it for granted. Josienne Clarke, too – she has this fascinating perspective on things – she’s an enabler. Everyone feels cooler when she’s in the room. Sometimes that makes people resentful, though. If she believes in a thing, then that thing suddenly becomes real. You have to watch yourself; she could bring the dead back to life with the flick of her wrist if you’re not careful. She believes in me & I believe in her. When you realise you maybe inspire more confidence in others than you think, it counts for something. Those things all occurred, and at that point, it was obvious that I had to try to make this film.

What are the biggest hurdles?

Making a film is a vast, multifaceted thing, expensive to do and with many interrelated moving parts and dependencies. Even for a short, local film like this one, it can seem daunting & I think it’s maybe that sense is the biggest hurdle. As I said earlier, I try to be led by the thing I’m making, not the technical or organisational requirements of it, and so everything you arrange, from actors to lenses, from cables & batteries to bonfires on beaches, they’re all in the service of the thing, which is to tell the story of this nice normal family trying to get on with their lives. We’ll have to compromise on some things, and other things we won’t, but there’s no doubt that unless I believed in what I was doing & was brave enough to lay words I wrote in front of an actor to read out to anyone who cared to listen, this whole project would crumble into dust. I enjoy the web of complexity; I thrive on the chaos. I delight in conjuring a facial expression with a gesture or a word, capturing it on tape and knowing just when to fade to black. It’s a power, and it’s all mine. It’s free, too – I can do it anytime, anywhere, for nothing. It doesn’t matter where it goes; what comes next is irrelevant because I know what I want to do. The thrill of plucking a thing from nothing but thin air is a wonderful privilege, and so it’s only a hurdle if you don’t believe you’re allowed to have that freedom, which is a thing that people who can’t do it for free, for themselves, will tell you in order to get you to do it for them, instead. Don’t listen to them. Do it for yourself. And learn how to use timecode.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the film?

It’s all about the crowdfunder right now. I can’t do this one alone because I need a cast & crew. With a music video, I write a treatment, film it & edit under the guidance of the artist, but with a film, I need a crew & I need actors. We’re thinking the shoot will take 5/6 days, and it’s 90% on an island – so we need to bring people over, they need hotels, food, costumes, and coffee. It’s important to me to pay people. The creative industries are in crisis right now, and this project is a nice little example. This isn’t a blockbuster. It won’t make money. Art doesn’t do that anymore at this level. You hope to break even, but even that is unlikely, so you have to invest. I’m paying to make this; ultimately, it’s a vanity project. If enough people like it, somewhere up the food chain, maybe the cash side will make more sense, but I’m not doing this for the money. The crowdfunder will help pay the talent. I’m doing it because I want to; I think it’s important to keep making stuff. It’s a passion project, and I’m very lucky to know other people who think so too. So, if you have a little spare cash and want to be an angel, please – donate to our crowdfunder.

What does it mean to you to get this film out there and hopefully shown at Film Festivals?

It takes so much to achieve this stuff, effort, resource, and capability – so the results are incredibly satisfying. If I can pull it off. It’s been a journey – the path from being a nobody without a right to even try to make a film to someone whose music videos are showing at film festivals all over the world. That’s a real headspinner. You know how the perceived worth of an artist rises and falls like a silent human stock market, based on current perceptions of how important or otherwise their work is that has nothing to do with the actual content of their work? Well, it feels very nice to have a sense of external validation, but I refuse to allow that external validation to be the main thing. More importantly, I do it because it’s a beautiful test of my own capability – everything I know & can do is on the line; it all coalesces in pre-production; principle photography will be a crazy fight, then post-production will be a journey of finding the beauty I planned for in the first place in those terabytes of chaos. Every component has to be just right, each expression from each actor, directed by me, must land in just the way I intended, or it will fall apart and be a meaningless mess. And it’s there where I get my validation – from knowing what I can do and then doing it. The rest is noise.

You can help make ‘Never Again’ happen by going here and pledging your support: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/neveragain

Find out more about Alec’s work here.

Mr Alec Bowman

Interview: Alec Bowman_Clarke on ‘Never Again’…a melancholy & timeless coming-of-age tale

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