Ellen Evans

0:04[Applause]

0:13hello just gonna leave it here. And so I'm Ellen and I'm a documentary filmmaker and I make short character documentaries about people that I find interesting and I make shorts because no one's funded me to make a feature yet and there's something about the short form which I find interesting you know it has obvious limitations so you have to respond kind of creatively to that and experimentally and I graduated from an MA in documentary filmmaking back in 2016 and I've been working on my own documentaries and other people's ever since so I'm gonna stop rambling and I'm gonna show you the film which is why I'm here today if I can make the slide work my eyes are always on the job my mind never shuts off.

1:12And I'm sitting in the doctor's surgery and he's getting ready to do an injection or whatever. And I'm looking around them could I'm at that in miniature ♪

1:43my mum does the food mainly business started off at her house very quickly it got too too big for the kitchen table so we ended up building a an extension usually start off with the actual thing that you make in front of you take the color and the shape make some track look out stamp trap myself thought of it went to the butchers and got a pace and Nepal thing back on the nest to get the color out in the texture people assume that the mum of the house would have made all this stuff no mm oh man don't do yeah usually presented and I was at skills my teacher described my workers clinical ♪

2:50although straight A's and everything sort of like the University but friends that I had coming back they just ended up with a big bill and it didn't necessarily lead to a job. And I thought I've got a job here I like doing it I might as well ♪

3:13I get my inspiration from around me we do a hairdressing range because I got a part-time job sweeping up and doing the shampoo you know my shampoo girl it's creating a world some people create replicas of things some people create things that they could never afford in reality this is me me condiment packet originally ordered by a lady as a joke for her son-in-law wasn't giving the details it can be a welcome the miniatures world people can be like I do that.

3:56And now she started doing it they've copied my idea all over but we're all copy in real life the period stuff that other people make it's all feels that looking at a museum to me it doesn't do anything for me why we're still doing miniatures of George analysis Victorian houses Tudor houses we don't live like Victorians the palaces were originally meant for people in palaces and the people who can afford I'm still living in palaces let's face it ♪

4:33I want to submit my rod my people I like to represent now the error I live in if we don't do miniatures of what we do now how will it be represented in the future I'd like people to come across my things and think that's what hath Oldham is that's what she did of her time you know of what she saw ♪

5:42[Applause]

5:50okay great I'm glad you enjoyed her.

5:54And so I need to apologize about how terrible my slide presentation is I got really nervous about doing anything sort of graphic see in front of a roomful of creatives so this is my keynote and I'm afraid you're gonna have to look at this picture of Cass so the necks of five minutes and so I met I made the film because I was on this short film scheme. That's run by the indie Training Fund and you get six weeks and 5,000 pounds to make a short film a three-minute film for the Sheffield documentary festival and basically and that was actually the director's cut so that's four minutes that the original was three and because I had this really constrained brief I thought I'd make a short film about small things and you know.

6:44That's basically where.

6:46I got the idea from so when I first started researching the world of miniatures I was looking at stories of women who had built dolls houses which were like exact replicas of homes that they'd lived in or houses they'd grown up in I also sort of looked at people that built like an entire fictional story lines around their dolls houses so you know like they had sort of family histories and dramas for this of imagined inhabitants and all this kind of thing and but none of these people were quite right and by this what I mean is that to find someone interesting for a film what you're looking for is character and it doesn't necessarily mean that they've done like the most spectacular or strange thing it's just that they're able to kind of tell you why they do what they do and you know like another distinction I could draw is between a hobbyist and an obsessive so I think I spoke to a lot of hobbyists but casts and obsessive and I think that's kind of what made her stand out me.

7:51So I thought I found Kass because I drew up this like huge database of everybody that worked in the world of miniatures it was a mixture of people that I found on Google and then.

8:02I also just like contacted lots of people that builds dolls houses and asked them you know like who makes your tiny fruit bowls and like who makes your tiny chairs and all this kind of thing and tell me their phone numbers and I'm going to talk to them.

8:16And I talked to so many people before I met Kass and you know she she just like stood out to me straightaway because not only does she have an incredibly deadpan sense of humor as you can tell from the film but she's really open and she's really honest about like why she does what she does you know if you come back to this idea of character being about somebody being able to express their motivation to use and like cath was definitely able to do that for me and you know she kind of sees herself on this social project like you know if she personally doesn't document the world as it is now then it's gonna be lost in the sounds of time or whatever but you know also more seriously it's that she's kind of chronic chronicling her own experience of the world and what she's seen and to me that kind of like raised all these questions about art and like why we make art and posterity and all these kind of like lofty themes which I know a really lofty but I kind of hope her in the film somewhere.

9:20So yeah like how did we make this little film it was actually shot over two days so it's just like I went down to Bradford and which is where her and her mum live and it's just me and the DP and we just basically shot it in her mum's house and then we did another day of filming at the Kensington doll's house fair so I got I knew already that like we needed to include a wider sense of the miniatures world.

9:51But also by this point I'd already actually done the audio interview so it's not that I have you know I don't script things. And I never asked my contributors to kind of like deliver lines but from an audio and if you are kind of like build the narrative so that when I got to the dollhouse Fair I kind of had a good idea of what it was that I wanted to fill them and that kind of thing.

10:18So yeah it was you know it wasn't it wasn't a particularly hard film to make and I wasn't sure how to end this little speech but I thought I'd end with some thoughts on like the meaning of miniatures and because I think miniatures are like a weird gift for a filmmaker you know they're sort of storytelling devices in themselves and I think that's why you get so many films with miniatures in them you know like when I tell people about this film they haven't seen it they often talk about hereditary which is a little you know a little bit unsettling and unfair on kathas all but you know it's cast says in the film miniatures are basically a way of people representing a world so either one either one that they can't afford in reality or the world that they themselves have experienced and it wasn't that like I wanted to make a film about the craft of making miniatures but it's like I just wanted to try and tell the story of someone's life through these little objects and as someone that makes character portraits you know.

11:27That's basically kind of what is important to me to be able to tell the story of someone's life and not the details of like what they do but why they do it and on that note I'm gonna start talking about the details of what I do and allow us to move on to Olivia you