Days Like These short film
Directing Last Song in 2023 was one of the highlights of my career. We had such an amazing group of people together. The cast was especially great and with most I ended up doing other creative projects afterwards too.
One of those people is Violet Morris who was the lead actor with Peter Devlin. When I saw her again in her final year performance of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School I knew I wanted to do another project with her before she was off in the wider world.
Violet, Tyler Pringle and I spent a weekend in North Devon in June shooting another short film called Days Like These. Another great experience, just the three of us, in a super-focused couple of days doing what we love doing.
On last Song we often had a full crew. On this project it was just me with Violet and Tyler. I wrote the script, produced the shoot, directed it, shot it, did sound and did all the post production, including creating the music for it.
Days Like These is a quiet portrait of two young people suspended at the edge of change — the final days before adulthood begins, before life speeds up and everything becomes harder to hold onto.
Set in a small coastal town, the film follows Jack and Emily, two recent graduates spending their last few days together in the empty student house they've shared. Their friends have already moved on. Their boxes are nearly packed. But they linger — revisiting the things they used to love, avoiding what’s next, and trying to preserve something that still feels real in a world that increasingly doesn’t.
Their relationship is undefined. Their future uncertain. And the noise of the world always just outside frame: climate anxiety, digital overwhelm, mental health struggles, and the silent pressure to figure it all out.
This generation — Gen Z — is often called the anxious generation, and not without reason. They’re inheriting a world on fire, both literally and figuratively. I’ve seen this first-hand, not just in research, but in my own home — watching my daughters and their friends grow up with more uncertainty than I ever had at their age. There’s a quiet ache in the way they and their friends talk about the future: cautious, cynical, nostalgic for eras they never lived through.
Days Like These is my way of capturing that moment — of slowing it down, holding it in the light, and letting it breathe. It’s about those fleeting, beautiful, uncertain days where nothing is certain except the fact that time is moving on. And for all the noise, all the pressure, sometimes just being still with another person is a quiet act of survival.