About the Film

This light installation documentary film follows FL10s – False Lights Seaham, a piece by artist and composer Ed Carter made for East Durham Creates with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The work moved between two very different settings, a historic church and a working harbour, and my film follows it through both. Filming artist installations across the North East has become a recurring thread in my work, and this light installation documentary film is one of the more atmospheric examples of it.

A Historic Warning, Reimagined

FL10s takes its name and its idea from false lights, signals that sailors sometimes mistook for safe harbour lights, drawing ships dangerously close to shore. Historically, some of these lights were set deliberately by wreckers hoping to lure vessels onto the rocks and salvage their cargo. Carter’s piece reworks that unsettling history into something poetic rather than sinister, using searchlights and sound to explore how technology, history and the sea’s shifting nature still speak to each other.

Inside St John’s Church

The first setting was St John’s Church in Seaham, where searchlights were installed within the building’s architecture, sweeping beams across columns, arches and stained glass while a synchronised score of mechanical pulses and musical textures filled the space. Filming this meant working against a sharp contrast between the intensity of the beams and the deep shadow of the stone interior, holding onto detail in the light without losing the atmosphere of the darkness around it.

Out on Seaham Harbour Marina

The second half of the piece moved outdoors to Seaham Harbour Marina, where Carter combined the same searchlights with a live music performance. The lights swept over the marina water in rhythmic flashes that echoed maritime signalling, their reflections adding another layer of movement to the surface of the harbour. A local crowd gathered for the performance, turning the installation into a shared moment set against the North East’s coastline rather than a piece experienced alone. Moving the same idea from a quiet, enclosed church interior to an open, public harbourside changed the character of the piece considerably, and filming both halves meant adapting to two quite different audiences and atmospheres within the same short film.

Filming Light in the Dark

I shot on a Panasonic AF101 and a GH2 on a slider, which together gave smooth, cinematic tracking shots both inside the church and around the harbour. The AF101 handled the difficult lighting well, and the slider let me follow the searchlights as they traced paths across the darkened spaces. Matching footage from two cameras with slightly different sensor characteristics took careful colour grading in the edit, unifying the cool, crisp atmosphere that runs through both halves of the film and letting the slider shots carry a sense of the installation’s scale. Working in near-darkness for most of both shoots meant constantly rebalancing exposure between the intensity of the beams themselves and the far dimmer surroundings they moved through, a problem that never really goes away when the light is the whole point of what you are filming.

Why This Film Matters

FL10s sits alongside Smoke Signals and ~Flow as another Ed Carter piece that treats a place’s history as raw material rather than simply a backdrop, and it is a distinct project from his earlier False Lights of Durham piece at Durham Cathedral, sharing a theme but built for an entirely different site. This light installation documentary film remains one of the clearer examples of how a temporary, site-specific artwork can be preserved on film well beyond the night it was actually seen.