A scientist’s eye brings observation before opinion. I trained as a geomorphologist, with a PhD from the University of St Andrews, and I spent years as a performance analyst on the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup circuit. Both jobs teach one discipline. Watch closely, record honestly, and let the pattern show itself. That is how you make an honest film.
What does a research background teach a filmmaker?
It teaches you to look before you decide. In science you do not arrive with the answer and bend the data to fit. You gather what is in front of you and you let it speak. A landslide does not care what you expected. Neither does an athlete on a bad day.
As a consultant geomorphologist I mapped landslides across Scotland and Ireland and led river restoration projects. That is not the usual road into a camera department. It gave me project discipline, patience and an eye trained to read a scene for what it is, not for what would be convenient. Fieldwork also teaches you that there is rarely a second visit. You record it properly the first time, because the conditions that produced it will not come back on request. Sport works the same way.
What does a geomorphologist see in a location?
Ground, first. Slope, exposure, the line a person will actually take across it, and how long the walk in really is. I read ground for a living for years and the habit has not gone anywhere. When we look at a location now, the first questions are the old ones: where the light falls at that hour and that time of year, what the wind does there, and where a camera can stand that the ground will allow. How that plays out across the places we work is set out in Where in Scotland do we film sport and adventure documentary?
How does performance analysis change where the camera goes?
It changes what you watch. As an analyst on the mountain bike World Cup I studied riders for the small things that decide a race. Line choice, body position, the fraction of a second where a run is won or lost. You learn that the decisive moment is rarely the loud one. It is a quiet adjustment most people miss, and the head usually shows it before the bike does.
That has a direct consequence for the camera. Coverage is positioned for the result: the finish line, the ball leaving the putter face, the reaction. An analyst wants the moment before, and wants the athlete and their target in the same frame, because that is the only way to see where the athlete is looking. Most of our camera decisions follow from that. The reasoning is set out in full in What quiet eye looks like from behind the camera.
How did that shape Chasing Light?
Chasing Light is the clearest example. We built the whole film around one measurable constraint, the few hours of usable light the far north of Scotland gets on the winter solstice. On 21 December 2025 Harry Whiteley and I set off up Ben Hope, the most northerly Munro in the UK, at six in the morning by head torch. We reached the summit just after half past eight, in cloud and a continuous 40 to 50 mile an hour wind, then drove to Durness and played nine holes before the light was gone.
Treating the light as the fixed variable made most of the decisions before the day began. There was no staging and no second attempt, and the edit runs in the order the day happened, because the clock was the structure. The full account is in How we made Chasing Light in a single day of failing light.
The analyst’s habit decided the frame most worth having. On the ninth green at Durness, Harry putted by head torch with almost no light left. We filmed it wide and side on, from a camera that did not move. Wherever Harry looked, the beam went, so the end of his quiet eye showed as the moment the light left the ball. A tight shot on the hands would have read the stroke and missed that entirely. The frame is taken apart in Durness, and what a tight shot would have missed.
Why does the science matter to the athletes we film?
Because it keeps the film honest about what happened. An athlete knows their own performance better than anyone watching it. If a film invents a turning point, they see it at once, and so does anyone who has done the sport. Watching before deciding, and recording before interpreting, is how you avoid that.
The craft sits on top. For more than two decades I have worked as a cinematographer, editor and colourist. I have worked on BBC documentaries, and worked with British Cycling and Scottish Rugby. The rest of that background is on our story. The craft makes it cinematic. The science keeps it honest.
Where does quiet eye theory come in?
It is the same idea in research form. Joan Vickers, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Calgary, named the quiet eye in 1996. It is the final steady fixation on a single target, within three degrees of visual angle, held for at least 100 milliseconds before a decisive movement. Experts hold it longer than less skilled performers, and it sits exactly where an analyst learns to look. We took the company name from it.
The research, and how it shows up across sports, is on The Quiet Eye. How long a golfer holds it over a putt is in How long does a golfer hold their quiet eye before a putt?, and the films it shapes are on our work page.