About the Film

Witness is a music documentary film I filmed, edited and produced about a project conceived by the electronic composer Scanner for Durham International Brass Festival 2012, in collaboration with Sound and Music.

On 23 June 2012, the one and only performance of an original piece of music by Scanner was given at Victor Pasmore’s iconic Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee. The piece was witnessed by a classical quartet, who immediately took their memories of it away and rehearsed a new performance in front of further witnesses.

Passing a Piece Through Memory

This process repeated over the course of a month, with each new witness passing the piece on in turn. It was done without manuscript or recording technology of any kind, relying purely on memory.

As the chain of witnesses continued, the project explored ideas of memory and interpretation, and how information is translated, transformed and processed through personality, history and identity. Local singers and musicians, brass bands, young people and visiting international street bands all took part in helping the piece migrate across County Durham.

Filming Witness

I was commissioned to document the entire project, filming interviews, performances and rehearsals as the piece travelled between witnesses across the county. The film was made within a single month, and I edited and produced it myself, working with a Panasonic AF101, a GH2, a Sony Z5 and an iPhone.

Witness was also my first project edited entirely in Adobe Prelude and Adobe Premiere CS6, on a MacBook Pro, an early step in a workflow I’ve built on ever since.

Witness sits alongside a broader body of music documentary film work I have made across the North East, following composers, brass bands and community musicians as they build something together over time. My approach on projects like this is observational rather than directed. I try to be present for the parts that rarely make it into press coverage, the quiet rehearsal in a cold hall, the moment a phrase is misremembered slightly and becomes something new, the nervousness before a first performance in front of strangers. That patience matters more on a project like Witness than on almost anything else I have filmed, since the entire idea depended on imperfect transmission rather than accuracy.

Making a music documentary film about a process this fragile meant resisting the urge to tidy it up in the edit, letting hesitation and uncertainty stay in the finished cut rather than smoothing them away.

About Durham International Brass Festival and Sound and Music

Durham International Brass Festival, known as BRASS, brings brass bands, street music and international performers to venues across County Durham. The 2012 edition commissioned new work exploring the relationship between brass traditions and contemporary composition, of which Witness was one strand.

Sound and Music is the UK’s national charity for new music, supporting composers and the creation and performance of new work across the country. Their partnership on Witness helped bring Scanner’s concept to life across multiple communities in County Durham.