New Director: Christopher Watson-Wood

Taking a Canon 7D camera to a music gig could be a recipe for disaster. But when new directing talent Christopher Watson-Wood went to his first In The Woods Festival in 2011, packing the piece of kit proved to be the start of something special.

“I ended up shooting a bunch of footage and having an awesome time,” he recalls of the experience. “I got introduced to the organisers through a mutual friend and they wanted to use my edit to promote the festival the following year.”

Watson-Wood got into filmmaking via a VFX house before going freelance as an FX artist, editor and cameraman, teaching himself many tricks along the way. “I had a range of skills and started thinking about directing as a way to put them all into one place and have the freedom to create whatever it is I wanted,” he says. “I love learning, and though I’m sure I’ll always be a director and continue to make films, I’m pretty sure I’ll be many other things, too.”

Having taken a liking to his first-year footage captured at their event, In The Woods founders Laurel Collective has commissioned Watson-Woods to create the official promo for this year’s 10th anniversary celebrations, and the resulting film is the key campaign driver housed on the event’s website.

The film captures highlights that include musicians at the peak of their performance, attendees gathered for the party in the forest and a mid-air stage-dive expressing the passion of the independent artists who have appeared, including the likes of alt-J and Jack Garratt. The piece also features a twist of stylised VFX that underscores Watson-Wood’s technical experience as well as complementing the live-action images.

“My idea was to create a frozen world where the camera could float through the festival space, fully immersing the viewer in the emotional charge of each scene,” he explains. “We achieved this by capturing isolated moments through still photography live at the festival for authenticity, then painstakingly modelling all the elements and people in the photos to create 3D scenes. I really wanted to capture what it felt like to be there.”

Since his first encounter with the festival five years ago, Watson-Wood has started his own production company with his wife. Mad Ruffian opened in 2014 and specialises in animation, production and post (Ruffian Post), boasting a collective of creative people with varied talents.

“No one is really ‘the director’, instead we all contribute wherever our skills are suited. It’s really cool and it means that now, if I want to direct something like this, I can do and still have the support of a bunch of other really talented people to help make it happen,” he concludes. “Likewise, if someone else in the company has a project he/she wants to make happen, we’ll all be there to lend our talents to it as well.”