In 2009, soon after I met the man who became my husband, he showed me his father’s workshop. Although he had died a few years earlier, Kenwyn’s workshop was still as it must have been when he was alive: full of scratch-built, to-scale models of blimps, dockyards and sailing ships. The room was hot and dusty and MAGIC!
Kenwyn had making models of varying complexity from scratch for many, many years. He worked meticulously with all sorts of different found materials: bobbins, buttons, cardboard, palette sticks, balsa wood and matchboxes. I wanted to make a film about Kenwyn, but Richard was reticent: he didn’t want me to romanticise his parents, nor did he want me fiddling with the models.
After several years, Richard finally gave me the go ahead to make the film. For the first and only time in my career, I decided to just go ahead and make it, rather than spend months and years fundraising. So everyone who worked on the film did so for free. (This is not something that I subscribe to, mind, as as professional folks working in the industry, making is how we all earn a living.)
I knew it would be a short film, but erroneously thought that would make it an ‘easier’ project to complete. Ha! The filming took twelve in early 2011 days! The process was slow and careful, and for me, quite joyous! Richard’s mum, Janet, would make us lunch with sweetdrinks every day of the shoot, and we worked in the sweltering heat of the studio with tungsten lights (!), revealing the layers of magic that had gone into all the pieces Kenwyn made.
In retrospect, I see so many things that I could have done better – most grating for me is the soundtrack, which really deserved a full and layered audio-bed. This said, I’ll always be proud of Smallman. It’s a little film with a huge heart!
The team:
Producer, director and editor: Mariel Brown
Writer: Mariel Brown based on an ebook by Richard Mark Rawlins
Director of photography: Sean Edghill
Composer: Chantal Esdelle
Narrator: Richard Mark Rawlins
Motion graphics: Kriston Chen
