The Inspiration behind CAUGHT ON CAMERA...

Squawker's latest project is CAUGHT ON CAMERA, a short film, (a drama, around 10 minutes long). Aimed at the festival circuit, this is a challenging project that will stretch both crew and cast to producing hard hitting, innovative and thought provoking work.

Sandy Newham, is a normal, average law abiding citizen, with a loving fiancé and regular job. We follow her daily life over a few weeks through black and white CCTV-like long shots and colour mid to extreme close ups, which catch the details and humanity (or lack of) that CCTV misses. Every step of the way Sandy is let down by the system that has supposedly been put in place to protect her. Everything is caught in the CCTV's rewind, but this is too late for Sandy...

On average, in the UK's urban areas you are filmed on surveillancee cameras/close circuit television (CCTV) over 300 times a day, with statistics on the number of cameras in operation varying - a 2002 working paper by Michael McCahill and Clive Norris of UrbanEye based on a small sample in Putney High Street, London, "guesstimated" the number of surveillance cameras in private premises in London as around 400,000 and the total number of cameras in the UK as around 4,000,000). For a quick, but informative (non-political) summary on the history of CCTV in the UK check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television

The short film aims to highlight: how for the average law abiding citizen, (not the yobs looking for a punch up on a Friday and Saturday night or the gangland drug dealers/terrorists etc who are heavily watched through CCTV surveillance squads in highly organized police operations) CCTV let us normal folk down.

The argument of the film: CCTV cameras are still only silent impotent witnesses. They do not make the average people feel safer as surveillance cameras only view crime, not stop it. Crimes are committed and watched in the rewind, if we are lucky the criminal may be caught, but it's all too late for the victim.

A nightmarish big brother state, where someone is watching every camera everywhere all the time, is not only totally impractical, but does not solve the root problem: the deterioration of self respect and decency in society.