Short Film Called Dad’s Dog | A Poetic Journey Through Teesdale
I made my Short Film called Dad’s Dog for the 1st Witham Film & Animation Festival in Barnard Castle, Teesdale.
The film runs at just under 8 minutes and emerged from an urge to capture the strange, beautiful places I’ve discovered since moving from London to the rural North East.
Before I became a filmmaker, I was a playwright and a successful DJ. My plays were performed on the London Fringe and also at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which gave me a grounding in storytelling, dialogue, and the rhythm of words. Meanwhile, years spent as a DJ taught me about pacing, atmosphere, and how sound can transform a space or an experience. Moving north, I found myself wanting to explore writing in a completely different medium. Dad’s Dog was an opportunity to try transferring some of those narrative instincts from theatre—and the sense of rhythm from DJing—into film, to see how images, voice, and sound could carry a story in ways that dialogue and stagecraft never could.
The film has a loose narrative. Rather than writing a script first, I started with the footage I’d collected over time: landscapes and oddities that had caught my eye as someone still getting to know this part of the world. As I edited, I realised I needed extra shots to bridge ideas or suggest connections between places and memories, so I set out again with my camera to gather missing pieces.
The title, Dad’s Dog, refers to the protagonist’s father’s pet, though the film isn’t strictly about a dog at all. It’s a kind of narrative red herring. The narrators are unreliable—blending memory, invention, and observation in ways that keep the viewer guessing. I wanted the film to feel as though you can’t entirely trust what you’re hearing, even though the visuals remain rooted in real landscapes. That playful tension between fact and fiction was inspired partly by my love of Patrick Keiller’s films, especially how he mixes documentary imagery with fictional voiceover and dry, poetic commentary.
Many of the “oddities” in Dad’s Dog are places rather than objects—new corners of the North East that I’d never have encountered if I’d stayed in London. The film became a quiet record of my shifting relationship with my surroundings. One of my favourite shots is of Tan Hill, the highest point in the Yorkshire Dales and home to the Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in Britain at 1,732 feet (528 metres) above sea level. The moorland there is stark and windswept, full of a rugged bleakness that feels both beautiful and desolate. It’s exactly the kind of setting that matches the mood I wanted for the film—remote and slightly unreal.
Another favourite shot happened entirely by chance while driving to Redcar to visit my photographer friend Keith Moss. I’d never seen melted snow cascading from the tip of cliffs into the sea—it was one of those fleeting sights that feels both ordinary and extraordinary. Capturing that moment felt like the perfect expression of what Dad’s Dog is about: noticing the surreal lurking inside everyday landscapes.
The voiceover in the film is performed by Scot Patrick, whose tone and delivery added the perfect touch of wry detachment and quiet curiosity. His narration helps keep the balance between observational and unreliable, inviting the viewer into a space where fact and fiction gently blur.
Sound is crucial in Dad’s Dog. The soundtrack features music from artists who’ve released records on my own label, WIDER Records. I’ve always been fascinated by how music can change the meaning or mood of an image, and working with sounds already connected to my creative world made the film feel even more personal. It was a way of bringing together two parts of my life—filmmaking and music—in a single piece.
Making this short film changed how I look at the North East. I’m far more attuned now to odd corners and half-forgotten places, and I’d love to keep working in this style—blending the personal with the observational, mixing real places with invented stories.
Ultimately, Dad’s Dog is about how places shape the stories we tell—and how sometimes, even our own memories can’t be trusted.
For more films capturing the beauty of landscapes, visit my collection of Landscape Films.