News
A filmmaker with a vision for the future
Victoria Rhodes 09/01/2009 14:07:00
A BAFTA award-winning editor and writer has made Orkney his home and is hoping to bring more film work to the county.
Mark Jenkins, 42, moved here in January 2007 when his wife, photographer Rebecca Marr, was appointed as artist in residence for the Art and Agriculture project.
Originally Mark and Rebecca only intended to be here for a year, but they both soon realised a year wasn't long enough.
"That's us here now, for good," said Mark. "I think we decided after a
couple of weeks. I remember we were in driving rain on the fourth
barrier beach, we could hardly hear each other but we both looked at
each other and just thought 'this is great'."
Mark has worked on a number of festival films and one-off programmes
for TV and was one of the editors on children's TV series Shoebox Zoo.
He also worked on the 'Yappy Dog' adverts made by Waste Aware Grampian,
one of which won a Green Award in 2007.
He has won six Scottish BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television
Arts) awards since he started working in the film business. Most
recently, a documentary which Mark edited in Burray collected the award
for Best Short Film at the 2008 ceremony, held in Glasgow last November.
Ma Bar, about an enigmatic 73-year-old Bench Press Champion on a quest
to break a new world record. The film is now due to be shown at
Sundance, the world's most prestigious independent film festival, in
Utah later this month.
Ma Bar's Edinburgh-based producer and director, Adrian McDowall and
Finlay Pretsell, came to Orkney to work with Mark on a series of films
last year. Mark is continuing to work with them as well as with other
directors and hopes to use the success of Ma Bar to bring more film
post-production work to Orkney.
"It's a team that I really enjoy working with," he said. "I have worked
with Adrian a few times. He is going places, I have no doubt about
that, and he will be coming to Orkney to edit. The fact that we edited
Ma Bar here in Orkney shows that it can be done. I'm really hopeful for
the future."
The two awards Mark is most proud of is a 1996 Best Technician BAFTA
for Arch Enemy, and a Best Short Film BAFTA in 2000, for a film he
wrote and edited called What Do Busy People Do all Day?. This has now
been shown 17 times on TV, 4 on the BBC and 13 in Europe. Films he's
worked on have also won more than 20 other awards at festivals.
"I'm very lucky in that sense," said Mark, who admits he is choosy when
picking projects. "Knowing a good script and a good team is a must but
the story is the main thing; you can have the best costumes, lighting
and cameras, but if the story is not good you don't have a good film."
He continued: "My main worry about moving to Orkney was being able to
find work, but it's actually been OK. I've worked in so many
post-production facilities in Glasgow and Edinburgh and many of them
very uncreative places, like rabbit hutches with nothing to see out of
the window, that being up here is great."
When they first came here, Mark and Rebecca lived in Burray and they
moved to Stromness last year. They eventually intend to buy a house in
Orkney, with long-term plans to build an edit suite with accommodation
beside it where directors could come and stay while Mark is editing
their films.
"I really like this way of working," he said. "I like to work from home
but still feel like I am going to work so I need to find somewhere that
we could do up.
"I wanted a place to be creative, and the view I have out of my window
in Stromness is fantastic. I really want to bring people here, I'm
hoping to bring a couple of directors up from Edinburgh and Glasgow in
the New Year. Half of editing is not about editing, it's about team
work and building a good relationship with your director. If you don't
get on you can't make a good film.
"More people need to know about Orkney. If I had known what was here
before, I would have been up long ago! The people are wonderful, it's
so easy to get them involved in things and get things going. It's
fantastic."
Mark was born in London and moved to Chester when he was three. Films
and music have always played a big part in his life, he was influenced
by watching musicals with his mum when he was a child, and two of his
brothers are DJs.
Mark, who also once worked as a DJ in a jazz and soul club in
Edinburgh, said: "I guess my first editing job was putting tracks
together to make an hour-long set - I liked to take people through an
arc."
He trained as a projectionist at the Odeon Cinema in Chester and, aged
24, became the Odeon's youngest chief projectionist. Shortly
afterwards, Mark decided to leave Chester and move to Edinburgh.
"I had only ever been to Scotland once, when I was a kid, but Edinburgh
seemed to be calling me," he explained. "I worked at the Cameo Cinema,
a lovely little art house cinema, and it was there I started to see
what film was all about. During festival time we'd be running 30 to 40
films a day but as a projectionist I never got to see whole films, just
bits. Seeing all those bits of images and sound collected in my
subconscious. Also, a lot of the people I worked with were students
studying photography and film, so it was a good way to meet like-minded
people."
In the early 90s, Mark started helping out on local movie sets, where
they were still shooting and editing on film rather than digital. "I
was very fortunate to catch the end of film but I never did take to
tape editing, it's quite restrictive and I found it very frustrating.
Digital editing has brought so many advances - you can almost finish a
film with digital editing now."
Mark went on to do a post-graduate diploma in camera and script writing
at Napier University. Towards the end of his course Mark had the
opportunity to edit a film.
"The director was a friend and I had to teach myself as I missed the
editing workshop," said Mark. "It took about two months to cut a
20-minute film, the result was Arch Enemy. That film got into the
Edinburgh Film Festival in 1996, then made it into the 'best of the
fest' and went on to win a Scottish BAFTA for its editing. I thought I
must be doing something right, so I carried on being an editor!"
Mark went on to work for the BBC, where he was lucky to become an
assistant editor under Bert Eeles. "I learned a lot from him, just
observing. That's what you do as an assistant editor; observe and give
your opinion when asked for it, never before!
"After a while I got the confidence to do it for myself and for the
past 12 years I've been a freelance film editor. I also teach."
Mark explains that he stands up to edit: "A few years ago I hurt my
back, but once I started doing that it felt right. I like the freedom
to move about or look out of the window. I say to students that editing
is like dancing, you can get much more of a rhythm with the material
when you're editing standing up. And I haven't had a bad back since!"
Mark is now working on a lyrical documentary about Orkney, which he is writing, shooting and editing himself.
"I'm really enjoying being this one man band," he said, explaining he
has a three-year plan. He is in year one now, which is about shooting
as many scenes as possible.
So far, he has filmed the Ba', Shopping Week and the Dounby and County
shows, and made a series of short films which has received positive
comments.
Year Two will be a workshop year and Mark wants to get local people
making films and building up a library of archive footage. He also
wants to put new images together with existing audio archive footage.
In year three he wants to secure funding to employ himself as a
director/editor and take on a research assistant and a camera
operator/director of photography, to pull the whole project together.
"After that, I can imagine it'll be another year of editing!" Mark
said. "I remember how blown away I was when I first came here and want
to blow someone else's mind that way!"
He added that he would be really interested in starting up a
post-production film company in Orkney. He would also like to bring
students here.
"Orkney could really do well. It's got a lot to offer, it's a nice
place to come to and would allow filmmakers to look at things
differently. Orkney has never had a film and sound studio, it would be
a whole new industry.
"I'm not saying it will be Hollywood, but it's amazing how these things
can grow. It can be done, it just needs that bit of incentive to get
going."
Anyone interested in finding out more about Mark's projects, or editing
in general, can contact him by e-mail on: mjedit@btinternet.com.