In I Just Knew I was to try to say something significant about the concept of intuition. There are two ways of knowing things: rational and intuitive. The scientific approach, based on reason, has proved so successful in explaining the physical world that it has led to the neglect, or even rejection, of intuition as a way of knowing. For example, our lives seem to be influenced by chance events that reason would have us believe to be random. Yet there are parts of our lives that are so right that they seem to have been pre-ordained. We know intuitively that the events that brought them about are not random. That such knowledge cannot be proven does not make it any less true. As Pascal said “The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know”. I wanted to express this idea in film.

The older couple were neighbours and were filmed at my home. Separate visits were made to London to film each of the younger couple. These parts were acted by my son (who wrote the script) and daughter in law. The film was all shot by my good friend Geoff Addis on his SONY DC130. It was not easy to film from a moving escalator with a hand-held camera and capture a big close up of a person travelling on the opposite escalator. This involved panning diagonally and pulling focus at the same time – quite an achievement.

The main editing problem was in trying to re-create London in the 1950s. After quite a search I found a set of escalators that had not been modernized and, using Adobe After Effects, I removed modern artifacts, such as signs and the yellow lines down Whitehall, and applied a Gaussian blur to the background. Finally, a sepia tint gave the feel of post-war England.

- Phil Martin    August 2004

The Prodigy is one of the UK offical entries to UNICA 2004, Germany. Click here to read more about UNICA 2004 and other UK entries.

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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