Before Quiet Eye I spent more than ten years in athlete management and event delivery, representing more than twenty elite athletes across rugby, cricket, golf and athletics and directing operations for events with thousands of participants. That work is mostly commercial and logistical. It also teaches you to read pressure in a person, which is the job on every shoot.
What did ten years of athlete management actually involve?
Contracts, mostly, and the commercial partnerships built on top of them. I managed more than twenty elite athletes across rugby, cricket, golf and athletics, including testimonial years for Dawid Malan and Richard Wigglesworth. A testimonial year is a benefit season granted to a long serving player, and running one properly means negotiating on their behalf while they are still playing the sport that pays for it. You learn fast that the person in front of you is usually managing two things at once, their career and the noise around it. Most of the job is keeping the second one quiet enough that the first one can happen.
What does directing operations for 1,250 people teach you that managing one athlete does not?
Scale changes the question. In 2024 I was project lead for the Cateran Yomp, the 54 mile Highland endurance challenge that raised close to £600,000 for the Army Benevolent Fund. Directing operations for 1,250 participants and 150 staff is not really about any one person’s pressure. It is about building a structure that holds when hundreds of individual days start going wrong at once, on a hill, in weather nobody controls. Athlete management teaches you to read one person closely. Running an event that size teaches you to plan for the version of the day where you cannot.
Does that experience show up in the films, if you are not the one behind the camera?
It shows up before the camera is ever switched on. My role at Quiet Eye is Executive Producer and Commercial Lead, the path behind the scenes rather than behind the lens, and most of what I bring is the same instinct from the athlete work: knowing what a subject actually needs from the people around them, and what a partner or a charity needs the finished film to do. Stefan built Quiet Eye theory into the way we film, the held focus before the effort. Read where that idea comes from on The Quiet Eye. I did not need the research to recognise it. I had spent a decade watching it happen pitchside and at the start line.
The Cateran Yomp itself is a case in point, and worth being precise about. The 2026 film documents the same annual event I ran operations for two years earlier, made by Stefan alone as one of his own commissions from the Army Benevolent Fund rather than a Quiet Eye project. I had no part in that film. But I know exactly what that hillside asks of the people on it, because I spent 2024 making sure 1,250 of them got up it.
Why does this matter for clients?
Because a broadcaster, a federation or a brand is not just hiring a camera. They are trusting us with an athlete’s story, a charity’s event or a season’s worth of commercial relationships, and that only works if someone on the team has sat on the other side of that table. Two decades of filmmaking and a research scientist’s eye meet a decade of athlete management and event delivery in the same company. See how the two paths work together in our story and in the work itself.