Travel The World

I put this film together in 2016, though the footage inside it goes back much further. It's a postcard of a thing, built almost entirely on matching cuts, one place dissolving into the next so that the whole world starts to feel like one continuous journey rather than a series of separate trips.

The honest origin of it is less romantic than the film looks. I had been shooting while traveling for years, with whatever camera I happened to be carrying at the time. Some of it was on a proper cinema camera, some on a GoPro, some on a phone, some from a drone. The plan was to cut it all into a cinematography showreel, the kind of thing you send around to show you can hold a frame.

What surprised me was what happened once the shots were sitting next to each other. The variation in gear, the different resolutions, the years between clips, all of it should have shown. It didn't. The moment there was a thread running through the images, a sense of movement and wonder carrying you from one to the next, nobody was looking at the pixels anymore. The story simply overpowered the equipment.

That sounds like a small technical observation. Looking back, I think it was the beginning of how I understand my whole craft now. I spent years believing the work lived in the camera, in the resolution, in the specs. This film was the first time I watched a story quietly win that argument. Once you've seen it happen, you can't unsee it. The tools matter, but only up to the point where the story takes over, and after that they more or less disappear.

I made it hoping it might nudge someone to go and see the world for themselves. That hope is still in there. But the thing I actually carried away from it was for me: a small, early proof that what you're really doing is never capturing shots. It's finding the line that runs through them.