Notes from a Low Orbit

Notes on Notes, by director Mark Lyken

Notes from a Low Orbit was shot over 6 months in Hawick (pronounced Hoyk) in the Scottish Borders while I was filmmaker in residence with Alchemy Film & Arts, part of a larger two-year project of artist residencies and community engagement.

Hawick is a working-class town of roughly 14000 inhabitants located on the River Teviot, now largely deindustrialised but still an active, internationally renowned producer of Cashmere.

My brief was open-ended, the production of a work or series of works that should explore “the borders, boundaries and lines of the town” and would premiere at the 12th edition of Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival in 2022.

I had moved to Hawick for the project and was living just off the High Street, perfectly located to develop a sense of the rhythms of the town. I spent the early days of the residency walking around chatting with the folk I encountered or who had approached me – curious about the camera and fluffy mic windshield, wondering if I was from the telly. I had switched to a new camera for this project and whilst still getting to grips with it, was telling myself I was only shooting test footage and not making a film yet. It kept the anxiety at bay!

Having recently finished the post-production on a previous film I was initially in that solitary, blinds-drawn, edit headspace. Shifting into the more sociable stage of filmmaking took me a while to warm up to and I initially felt I was acting out the role of “chatty filmmaker” until that part of me came back online.

Knowing the film would premiere at an experimental festival that includes screening and installation formats meant it didn’t necessarily have to be a single-channel work that I produced, but as time went on and I started to spot connections in the material I began thinking about the work as a feature-length portrait film and began describing it as such to folk that were involved.

Making this film was the first time that I had the support of an organisation that was embedded in the place I was working. Alchemy was able to introduce me to folk to get the ball rolling and when I met people in the street they had either been to a previous edition of the festival or had heard about it. Having this support allowed me to commission a musical performance from local up-and-coming musicians for the film, pay honorariums and make reciprocal promotional films for some of the grass-roots organisations in the film in exchange for their participation. These elements of the project are invisible in the final film but are of huge importance and made possible what ended up on the screen.

Early on, as I was describing my observational way of working, someone remarked, “Ah, so you just film folk doing what they do” and I adopted that as a shorthand way of describing the work I make. I also like to collaborate with participants to cultivate scenes that present them on their own terms. “Notes..” feels like a nice mix of both approaches.

I had heard whispers of a long-standing Scrabble Club and was keen to try and track them down – but how does one track down a club that has such long-standing members that it has no need to advertise or have any social media presence? It took a bit of detective work, but once we had tracked them down, they invited me to meet the group and allowed me to film 3 or 4 games over the course of an afternoon. I would never have known that a “Gam” was a term for describing a school of whales otherwise.

I had been inviting participants to the film’s premiere when people began to ask semi-jokingly if there would be a red carpet and if they could get dressed up. When I mentioned this to Alchemy they thought it would be loads of fun and so that’s exactly what we did. It still makes me chuckle that a non-competitive, experimental festival had a red-carpet premiere, complete with members of Borders Youth Theatre (several of which appear in the film) posing as paparazzi. Also, The Hawick Saxhorn Band – which features in one of my favourite scenes of the film – performed ahead of the screening and it was truly moving. Sitting at the front of the cinema watching the film with a high-energy home crowd, many of whom were in the film, isn’t an experience I’m likely to forget soon.

There are elements of the film that are specific to Hawick, but I think there are enough universals in there to appeal to an international audience. When the film has screened overseas so far I have been heartened that the humour has travelled well and that the film has been warmly received.

The film doesn’t have a narrative as such but is a collection of vignettes stitched together in a satisfying way that compresses activity collected over a six-month period into a fictional couple of days in Hawick.

It’s not intended as a definitive portrait of the town, but more a series of snapshots of the people and places that I encountered and got to know during the 6 months I was in town. I have a real soft spot for Hawick and find myself back there frequently, and already things have moved on: businesses I filmed have closed; some of the folk I met have sadly passed away; the flood protection works are much further on; and when the Town Hall’s bells ring out the conspicuously missing F# now sounds – the mechanism having been repaired sometime after I moved back home.