People In Order is a series of 4 shorts commissioned by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2006. The concept behind our films was simple: we asked ourselves if you can reveal something about life by simply arranging people according to scales. Three minutes is a very short time to communicate something so we made this series by setting ourselves some very straightforward rules, and then following them through over a long trip in a campervan driving round Britain, filming as many people as we could over 4 weeks in a cold but sunny February.

The experience was exhausting but life affirming. In our whole trip we were struck by how happy people were to help. Only a handful of our shoots were arranged in advance. We relied instead on the kindness of strangers - and we found that everywhere, from deprived urban estates to rural aristocrats.

The resulting films are like a list of government statistics where the citizens have broken out from behind the figures. The people on the screen stop us from seeing them as numbers. Even in single second bursts there are worlds of personality stretching out in front of us. The films are really about our awe at how big life is, infinite in its variety, even when it seems just normal to each of us living it.

© Lenka Clayton & James Price 2006
Directed / Produced & Edited by James Price & Lenka Clayton
Camera by James Price
Sound by Lenka Clayton