Filming Artist Installations: Capturing Ed Carter’s FL10s – False Lights Seaham in North East England
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new video montage, filming artist installations in North East England, featuring the remarkable piece FL10s – False Lights Seaham by the artist and composer Ed Carter.
As a documentary videographer, I’m always drawn to projects that fuse art, place, and innovative technology, and FL10s – False Lights Seaham is a perfect example of how light and sound can transform our understanding of a landscape. Filming artist installations in North East England connects my work deeply with the region’s industrial and maritime heritage, making projects like this particularly rewarding.
FL10s – False Lights Seaham was developed by Ed Carter in 2021 for East Durham Creates, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The work was first installed inside St John’s Church in Seaham, transforming the historic building into a mesmerising space filled with light and sound. The piece draws inspiration from the phenomenon of “false lights”—optical illusions or signals that sailors sometimes mistook for safe harbour lights, leading them dangerously close to the shore. In history, such lights were sometimes created intentionally by wreckers hoping to lure ships to disaster and salvage their cargo. Carter’s work reinterprets this narrative, transforming it into a poetic exploration of technology, history, and the shifting nature of the sea.
My video montage of FL10s – False Lights Seaham reflects the dual structure of Ed Carter’s project. The first segment features the installation inside St John’s Church, where powerful searchlights were set up within the church’s architecture, sending beams of light sweeping across the columns, arches, and stained glass. The synchronised audio composition, a mixture of rhythmic mechanical pulses and musical textures, filled the church interior, creating a powerful sensory experience. Filming artist installations like this often presents unique challenges—the intense beams of light contrasted sharply with the shadows of the stone architecture, requiring careful exposure control and selective focus to capture the essence of the piece.
The second half of my film documents a live performance in Seaham Harbour Marina. For this event, Ed Carter brought the light installation outdoors and combined it with live music. The searchlights projected rhythmic flashes over the marina waters, echoing the visual language of maritime signals. The reflections of the lights on the surface of the sea added another layer of movement and depth, transforming the harbour into a living canvas. The live performance drew a local crowd, turning the installation into a shared communal experience set against the rugged backdrop of North East England’s coastline.
I shot the footage using my Panasonic AF101 and the GH2 mounted on a slider, which allowed me to create smooth, cinematic tracking shots both inside the church and around the harbour. The AF101 provided excellent depth of field and coped well with the challenging lighting conditions, while the GH2, paired with the slider, helped me capture dynamic shots of the searchlights as they traced paths across the darkened spaces. Shooting in low light demanded precise adjustments to maintain detail in the bright beams without losing the atmosphere of the surrounding darkness, particularly within St John’s Church where the shifting light played dramatically across the textured surfaces of stone and stained glass.
One of the significant technical challenges in post-production was matching footage from the two cameras, as they have slightly different sensor characteristics and colour profiles. Colour grading became essential, allowing me to unify the look of the film and emphasise the cool, crisp atmosphere that characterises both the indoor and outdoor segments. The slider shots contributed a cinematic fluidity, gently moving the viewer through beams of light and helping convey the installation’s scale and sculptural quality.
As I filmed, I was struck by how deeply FL10s resonates with Seaham’s maritime past. Local audiences gathered to watch both the indoor and outdoor installations, many of them intrigued by the idea of false lights and their connection to the history of shipwrecks and coastal deception. Ed Carter’s ability to intertwine art, technology, and place is one of the reasons I’m so inspired by filming artist installations. His work reveals hidden layers of meaning, turning contemporary art into a lens through which we can reconsider familiar landscapes and local histories in North East England.
Filming artist installations like FL10s – False Lights Seaham is a reminder of why I love working as a documentary videographer. There’s something profoundly satisfying in preserving site-specific, temporary artworks in film so that they can reach audiences far beyond the time and place where they first appeared. It’s about more than simply documenting what happened—it’s about capturing the energy, atmosphere, and creative intention behind each piece.
I look forward to sharing my video montage of Ed Carter’s FL10s – False Lights Seaham soon. For anyone fascinated by how contemporary art can reinterpret the rich industrial and maritime heritage of North East England, this installation is a striking example of creative storytelling through light, sound, and landscape.
Explore more of my films about artists and their work here: https://alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/artist-films/