My coastal journey began a few years ago where I started to develop a number of projects around the subject of the sea, which began to gain momentum when I talked to Tom Freshwater from Trust New Art. He mentioned there was the 50th anniversary of the Neptune Coastline Campaign in 2015. Tom brought on board experienced producers SoundUK and I brought on board the fantastic digital producers the Swarm as the team that would bring this ambitious digital project to life. The project finally reached production in May 2015.

Tom always said that he wanted to commission an exhibition where the actual artwork existed online to reach as wide an audience as possible, rather than choosing individual places to host physical works of art. So the online project idea was born. He wanted to commission three artists and it was established that a poet, a sound artist and a visual artist would be most complimentary to a collaboration between myself and the Swarm. I would then work with the artists to visualise their final works. I have been influenced by the work of the National Film Boards of Canada Interactive for some time now, and using inspiration from a number of projects I had seen in the past, I proposed a virtual coastal walk made up from real coastal locations. At the end of each walk the user would come across an artist's commission. Three quality artists were selected, visual artist Tania Kovats, soundscape artist and musician Martyn Ware, and poet Owen Sheers. I created a mood trailer/sketch using many layers of imagery including 16mmm hand processed, HD, digital stills and experimental audio recordings from previous projects, so the artists could see the creative approach I would make, and whether they wanted to use that approach. They did, which meant I had my work cut out for me. My role was to produce the audio-visual content and the narrative for the immersive journey online, to create the film and sound for Owen's poem, to create the visual content for Martyn's beautiful soundscape, to produce the making of documentaries for each artist, while the Swarm built Tania Kovats digital drawing mapping the tide around the UK coastline. For the exhibition at Somerset House I would make a film for Tania and then create the all projections for each room.

I realised from our Kickstarter campaign with my feature film Paa Joe and the Lion, the importance of having an event in the real world that brings people to an online digital space. Tom suggested a real world exhibition of the artwork at Somerset House. Tom brought on board the exhibition designers Andres Ros Soto and Michael Montgomery and while I began my tour of some of England and Wales most beautiful coastlines, from Seaham to Land’s End, from Worms Head to the Golden Cap.