It's probably worth reading my longer post on my approach, but in essence I teach the ability to have an accurate and intuitive understanding of the structure of stories and the arguments they are making. With control over a story's structure it becomes straightforward to control the meaning of the story and how you want it to impact your audience.

One of the most common questions I am asked is if there is a checklist approach to making a story work - and of course there isn’t. But at the same time you should never have to feel unmoored, waiting for instinct to strike and having to go on hunches to get you where you want to be with your film.

Like any skill, it takes time and practice to acquire the techniques, but within a few hours of learning these methods, you will start seeing all stories in a new light. From then on it is about practising the techniques in as many ways as you can to refine your ability to understand and recognise the weakness in a story.

When viewing an edit that isn’t working, and the production is worried (which is when I’m often called in) then it would be dangerous to rely solely on my innate talent as a writer and director to find the solutions to what is on the screens. That can be very elusive, and can be harder to find when the pressure is on.

It does. My experience with these methods includes history and science documentary, feature documentary in music, art and history as well as sports, entertainment and natural history. There are blog posts (Jack of All Trades, Hard Science ) where I talk about how using these methods has opened me up to working on stories in any genre.