The trailer for the East End Film Festival 2010

Inspired by the collection of images from East End Heritage by local photographer Phil Maxwell,
filmmaker Alan Miles teamed up with graphics editor John Brown to produce this year’s festival trailer. Alan Miles explains the process behind the piece;
“Thinking about the lines from Jan Noble’s poem, I spent some time on Google ‘Street View’
matching up the original pictures with Cheshire Street, Brick Lane and Spitalfields as it is now. That gave me the idea of actually mixing the old with the new. I wanted characters from the photos come to life.

I spent a day in the area with Steadicam operator Eric Young matching the shots to the original photographs. John cut out characters from Phil Maxwell’s original pictures and using camera tracking software was able to bring the characters to life as we move through the new footage. Objects and people from the original photos appear to be in the same place now as they were all those years ago. I edited the best shots using sound recordings from the East End. We placed lines from the poem in the picture in After Effects and the last shot is a composite of the East End skyline from the River Thames.

I think the piece fits nicely with the last line of Jan Noble’s poem... “this is not
where the east ends but where it begins..."

Alan Miles: madinertia.co.uk
John Brown: thepopularsociety.co.uk