Director Statement

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You're often told as a beginner filmmaker to "keep things simple" - to "just shoot two guys talking in a room". With The Better World, it's safe to say I did the opposite of that.

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I shot this back in 2018 over the course of a year to teach myself how to film. The core group assisting me with this project were my friends - who played several of the main characters without having ever acted before. Sometimes it was rough: it took five attempts (through a freezing Aberdeen winter) to film a midnight beach shoot, an actor dropped out two days before we were set to film several key scenes and my Canon 1300D's shitty batteries would lose charge after twenty minutes. In spite of all this, I'm extremely glad I did a weird, unconventional film instead of "just shoot two guys talking in a room".

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Some of the camerawork is very flawed; as I said before, this was me teaching myself how to film before I really did any other projects so I was figuring things out as I went along. That being said, I feel like we nailed the immersion even if some of the technical aspects could be better. If The Better World is anything, it's atmospheric.

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In 2019, I edited a version that I was deeply unhappy with (featuring Gregorian chants...wtf was I thinking?) so I deleted it and started again from scratch over lockdown in late 2020. Even with my increased knowledge of editing since the time of filming, it was challenging to outmaneuvre my amateur filming mistakes but I'm actually quite pleased with the results. I feel like the original ideas are expressed well enough to finally share publicly.