Why I Started Making Films After a Lifetime of Building Systems

A different kind of problem

For most of my working life, I have been drawn to systems: the sort that measure, report, alert and, on a good day, quietly get on with their job. There is a particular satisfaction in understanding how parts interact, where a failure might occur, and what must happen when the power drops, a sensor drifts or somebody enters the wrong setting at 4.57 on a Friday afternoon.

Engineering teaches you to respect consequences. A temperature reading is not merely a number if it affects stored medicine, food safety or a critical process. An alarm that does not reach the right person is not an alarm in any useful sense. It is an expensive little electronic ornament with ambitions.

But systems, however interesting, tend to ask a narrow question: does it work as intended?

Films can ask rather more human questions. What did this moment feel like? Why did it matter? Whose perspective have we overlooked? What sits between the facts and the neat version of events we tell ourselves later?

That is why I started making films.

Systems explain the mechanism. Films make room for meaning.

I do not see filmmaking as abandoning engineering. It feels more like using a different instrument to investigate the same world. Both demand curiosity, attention and a willingness to notice the inconvenient detail that spoils an otherwise lovely theory.

In a technical system, a missing data point may indicate a loose connection, poor network coverage, an exhausted battery or an assumption that was never tested properly. In a film, the pause before someone answers can be equally important. It may tell you that the obvious question was not the real one.

The difference is that people are not components, even when organisations sometimes behave as though they might be improved by a firmware update. People are contradictory, funny, guarded, generous and capable of changing the terms of the conversation halfway through it. This makes them difficult to model and worth listening to.

Filmmaking gives that uncertainty some space. It lets an image, a voice, a place or even a stretch of silence do work that a diagram cannot. A good diagram remains a thing of beauty, of course. I am not prepared to start a feud with diagrams. But it cannot always carry the emotional weight of a person telling you what life has actually been like.

The discipline carries over

There is more overlap between engineering and film than might first appear. A film set is still a system, only with more cables, stronger opinions and a greater chance that the weather will become a stakeholder.

You have inputs: sound, light, images, interviews, locations and time. You have constraints: budget, access, energy, equipment, consent and the inconvenient fact that daylight has no interest in your production schedule. You have dependencies too. If the sound is unusable, beautiful footage may be of limited value. If an interview subject does not feel safe or understood, no amount of polished editing will manufacture trust afterwards.

That last point matters particularly. Technical work can create the illusion that enough preparation will remove uncertainty. Preparation is vital, but it cannot eliminate the human element. Nor should it. When making a film, listening properly may mean letting go of the question you arrived with.

That is not a failure of planning. It is the point of doing the work.

Looking beyond the specification

Living with disability has also made me alert to the gap between a system's stated purpose and a person's actual experience of it. Something can technically comply, technically function and technically be available, while still being exhausting, inaccessible or quietly excluding. A ramp that ends at a heavy unassisted door is a small masterclass in how organisations can tick a box and miss the journey entirely.

Film has the potential to show that journey. Not as a sentimental lesson, and not as an invitation for the audience to congratulate itself for feeling briefly moved, but as a way of making everyday realities visible. It can hold complexity without rushing to turn it into a tidy moral.

That is useful far beyond disability. The same applies to work, family, technology, community and cross-cultural life. My marriage to Arrah has made me more aware that people can share a language, a home and a commitment while bringing different assumptions to ordinary things. Those differences are not necessarily dramatic. Often they emerge in the small practical details: what counts as being direct, how hospitality is understood, when family involvement feels supportive, or how a familiar tradition looks from the other side of the room.

A film can be a patient way of attending to those details. It need not announce that it has discovered humanity. Humanity was already doing quite well without the press release.

Making something that can be felt

Engineering often aims for repeatability. Given the same inputs and conditions, the system should behave predictably. That is a sensible ambition when you are dealing with monitoring, control or safety.

A film is different. Its structure may be carefully built, but its effect is personal. Two viewers can watch the same sequence and carry away different memories. One may notice the setting, another the expression on someone's face, another a sentence that seems insignificant until it follows them home. That variability is not a defect to be designed out. It is part of the exchange.

I started making films because I wanted to work with that kind of attention: rigorous enough to respect the subject, but open enough to be changed by what I found. Building systems taught me how important it is to ask whether something works. Making films reminds me to ask who it works for, what it leaves out, and whether we have paused long enough to hear the answer.