Alex Browning

I read BA Politics, Philosophy and Economics at university. My reasoning, at the time, was to get a rigorous and worldly education. I looked at undergrad film courses, but they weren’t for me and there were more theoretical film studies courses that I didn’t feel were for me either.

Whilst I was at university in Manchester I was exposed to many points of view, political stances and opinions from peers on my course. And by the end of my second year of university most of my circle were Mancunians and locals from the arts / film / music / theatre scene. Whilst I was in Manchester the different circles all cross-over and in comparison to London, it wasn’t as pocketed and divided, in terms of the different creative scenes. 

I spent time in the contemporary theatre scene in Manchester and that led to me meeting various moving image artists and directors who dipped in and out of theatre and screen. I ended up being a runner and a production assistant for a music video director based there and made a name for myself as someone who could make stuff happen on productions, this of course was showing my producing skills more than anything. A director I was helping out had a music video for a local band he was due to pitch on and said I should do it instead. I pitched for it, won the brief and it became my first ‘film’. It ended up getting selected to play on a BBC BigScreen in the city centre of Manchester every day for a year. This was part of a series championing local screen talent, it was quite surreal. 

By the time I graduated I had made a number of music videos and fashion films of my own and made my first short in the summer after I graduated. I managed to convince a budding DoP friend of mine to shoot it (he had shot my music videos to date) and he had a mate, a gaffer, who had built his own jib/crane and I managed to have that on my first short. It was an ambitious film and showed huge scale, but the script and story needed work. And so, I was addicted to making more short films. 

I made plans to shoot three short films the next year all self-funded. I needed to get a job though to pay the bills and to be in London. Initially was commuting from my home town in Bedford to London. I got a job at Saatchi & Saatchi (advertising agency) as a production assistant and I learned loads about commercials as well as the creative execution. I listened closely to all the directors. 

After a few years in commercials production, at various advertising agencies, whilst making short films on the side, I ‘broke out’ and said to the then agencies I’d been working at (and had contacts at), that I was now a director. It was a ‘right place right time’ kind of thing. I took advantage of the explosion of branded content and in-house production companies who needed agile directors to make content but who understood production and how agencies ran. So, I was this director running around London (or biking actually) to different shoots, and had projects in various stages of development and post. I did bits of production too and had a fairly regular team. I got a lot of work, and put the monies made from these back into my films. After a year or so of doing that I realised I didn’t want to eventually have my own production company so focused on being an independent director of commercials.