There is something that happens when you point a 16mm camera at a person who is truly absorbed in their work. The grain does the rest. It closes the distance between the viewer and the subject in a way that feels less like observation and more like memory, like you have always known this person and their hands and their particular understanding of light in their creative processes.

That feeling was the starting point for this film.

Shaun Daniel Allen, Sarah Ellison, Heidi Middleton and Margot McKinney were not directed so much as witnessed. The camera followed attention rather than action, dwelling in the moments between gestures, in the pause before a decision is made, in the quiet that surrounds people who have spent years becoming very good at something. 

What interested me was not the finished work but the thinking that precedes it. The values that are so deeply held they have become invisible to the person who holds them.

16mm was never a stylistic choice. It was an ethical one. The format demands slowness from everyone involved. It is unforgiving of anything false. And there is an inherent honesty to the way it renders a face, a texture, a shaft of afternoon light across a workbench or studio floor. It felt true to the people we were filming and the life they have chosen.

Although a script was developed I pushed to treat the voice the same way. Unscripted, unhurried, returned to until it found its own shape.