What my grandad taught me about film-making

I’m sitting in a cafe in east London sifting through photos and trying to piece together a eulogy. My grandad was a keen documentarian, and the problem is not scarcity of material but abundance. Stuck with where to begin, I Google “How to write a eulogy”. I’m presented the length (500-700 words) and the duration (between five and seven minutes). Not much help.

I could start with the story of how he met my grandma, how they danced to Moon River in Clapham and how that story relates to my own experience of moving to the big city in my twenties. Clapham is now more Fred Again than Frank Sinatra. In spite of this, I find it amusing that I’m now spending my nights on the same dancefloors that were the springboard of their life together.  

After they were married, they moved to Manchester. Grandad was obsessive about a lot of things, from crystallography to cinema. He was also a loyal reader of The Observer, particularly the cultural commentary. I found out after he died that he had run a printing press in his basement, creating flyers for the Liberal Democrats on an industrial scale. In Manchester he started his image transfer business converting slides and cine film to videotape. He helped many other families restore and archive their memories – and would also create films of his own. One of his proudest works was a series of training videos for the Co-op. Not quite Hitchcock (who he venerated) but seminal all the same. 

By the time I entered the world, the digital camcorder was an honorary member of our family. It came with us for all major life events. Each year was commemorated with a theatrical screening of a showreel that grandad had created: vignettes of trips out, birthdays and Christmases. 

I absorbed his passion for film-making by osmosis. He would talk at length about all the greats, from Chaplin to Miyazaki. When I was old enough, we would sit together at his computer and pause and rewind footage, editing and cutting out the bits that made us laugh the most. The highlights were mostly slapstick: chase scenes around the kitchen, messy baking incidents, the Christmas tree toppling on to my brother due to a gratuitous volume of tinsel. But they also included quiet moments: train rides, chatter at the dinner table. The best way to understand a person is to look at what they pay attention to, and in my grandad’s case it was our family.

Encouraged by my curiosity, he bought me a green screen for Christmas. The first epic we directed involved footage he’d taken of my grandma on the London Eye. I superimposed myself trapped on the spokes of the wheel. At one point, I lose my grip and fall. Then the camera pans to my three-year-old brother donning his batman suit (a costume he refused to take off for weeks and which eventually gave him a skin rash) and swooping in to save me from the icy waters of the Thames. I’d like to see Christopher Nolan top that.

This fascination with storytelling went on to inform everything in my life. When I got my job as a designer at The Observer, my grandad would often joke that it was those hours of sitting together at the computer stitching together clips that got me here. He was not far off. 

As we were clearing out his house, we found a cupboard filled with camcorders, cameras, tapes and film footage. When you’re grieving, it is easy to focus on the emptiness the person leaves. But I don’t see blank frames laid out in front of me as I try to decide how to tell the story of his life. I see lots of colour.

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Illustration Oscar Ingham