My early work was heavily shaped by my mentor at the time, Nick Knight. I worked with Nick for 5 years after film school, and his studio-driven, graphic, technically avant-garde style heavily influenced my own work at the time. I started working with novel uses of lighting, projections and moving lights. I applied heavy post production, manipulating the source image into new visual languages, crafting very abstract and surreal imagery. Back then I was a much better editor than I was a director and my films benefited from that - my work was heavily cut, using editing as a stylistic driving force, and I pretty much explored every single trick in the FCP7 effects library.  I approached film from the editing backwards, hiding the fact that I wasn't a very good director. Instead of going into a shoot with a sense of structure or narrative in mind, I very much had a 'fix it in post' mentality and was only concerned with capturing visually beautiful and exciting stuff on the day. 

Once I left SHOWstudio and Nick's mentorship, I started exploring my own practice and find my own style. It took years, and close to 100 films, to gain a conceptual understanding of what I actually like and believe in, and how I am able to communicate this with the medium of film. Back in the days I had a technique I named 'accidental editing', where I took a clip and literally chopped it up by random. I'd then rearrange the bits to create a choppy edit that would jump back and forth and inject dynamic and energy into the edit. When I started thinking more intensely about the structure and cinematic flow of my own films, I had to seriously adjust my approach to editing. I made a rule for myself to never cut unless the cut was needed. How does this film actually benefit from this cut? Do I need to cut, or am I only doing it to hide the fact that my material doesn't have the energy or doesn't hold the interest of its audience without a choppy edit? 

This new approach led to a chain of pretty boring films at first, but then forced me to become a better director and seriously address my sense of storytelling. I moved away from heavy post production and became much more raw and intimate in my work. I started working with narrative and dialogue and made use of the elements that make film unique and differ to photography. I questioned every decision I took as a director: Is this idea original? Do my casting choices represent the world as I see it? Does this make sense? What am I trying to say? Most of what I am trying to do still fails, but with every film I do continue to become a better director.