Savant Media

🎬 We're Hiring!
SAVANT Media is looking for a part-time Documentary Development Producer to help shape bold, original documentaries with purpose and impact.
📍 Based in Hastings | Mostly remote, with occasional in-person meetings
🗓️ Starts August | £40–45k FTE (2.5 days/week)
Pitch. Fund. Create.
⏰ Application deadline: 29.07.2025
📩 Download the Job Description and apply here 👉 https://savantmedia.tv/?p=6421
OR at the link in our bio 👆📲

Many years ago when I was working at TTT, I discovered a passion for interviewing people. Going out on news stories all around the country, covering – sometimes – people in their most vulnerable moments, I realised that many people just want to be listened to and heard; that if you ask the right questions and you're open, folks will tell you their story.
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This has been one of the most humbling gifts we've received in making 'Six days in 1990', our feature length documentary about the attempted coup of 1990. So many people have given us the access to their personal experiences and memories of the coup. In the photo, I am chatting with trade unionist David Abdulah while the crew puts the finishing touches on our set-up. In many ways, David's interview was revelatory, and I'm so grateful for his openness!
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THE CREW:
Director: Mariel Brown
Producer: Tracy Farrag
DoP: Oliver Milne
Drone video: Kevin Huggins
Sound recordist: Jelani Serette
Gaffer: Marc Loregnard
Second camera: Jonathan Gift
Locations: Lori Antoinettte
Set photographer: Michele Jorsling
PA: Johnny Hussain

Location: The Red House
Huge thanks to @discoverfilmTT and @The Parliament for their support and facilitation!

📸@michej_thestudio

More photos to follow but I had to share some snaps from the last few exhausting, interesting and joyous days! We’ve been filming another round of material for my documentary feature, Six Days in 1990. Ours was the can-do crew and it was brilliant! Energy, enthusiasm, a willingness to give something a try, focus, determination and creativity.
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Huge, huge thanks to everyone who worked so hard to pull these shoots together! Especially to our line and co-producer, Tracy Farrag, our locations coordinator, Lori Antoinette, and Colleen Holder from the Parliament Channel! I’m also so grateful to everyone who gave their time to be interviewed.
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The crew:
Director: Mariel Brown
Producer: Tracy Farrag
DoP: Oliver Milne
Drone video: Kevin Huggins
Sound recordist: Jelani Serette
Gaffer: Marc Loregnard
Second camera: Jonathan Gift
Locations: Lori Antoinettte
Set photographer: Michele Jorsling
PA: Johnny Hussain
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@lori.antoinette_ @jonathan_the_gift @john_l_hussain @marcloregnard @fuji27

🎉🎉It’s Throwback Thursday!
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✍️Today we head back to 2011 when film programmer and critic, Jonathan Ali, reviewed 'The Solitary Alchemist' in the Caribbean Review of Books (CRB) Ali wrote:

“The film’s backbone is the creation of a new piece, Heigh-Ho My Heart!, for an exhibition of work by contemporary artists in Dundee, Scotland, to which Jardine has been invited. This is more of a structuring device than a way to give the film any real narrative impetus... The Solitary Alchemist (first screened in 2009, then re-edited for DVD release in late 2010) is not so much concerned with what’s ultimately going to happen as it is with slowly and gently painting a picture of Jardine’s life and work.

"Much of this is done through observing Jardine at work in her studio in her lovely Port of Spain apartment. That in itself is not remarkable — indeed, it’s what one expects — but it is the way Brown chooses to present these scenes that is compelling. Rather than show Jardine working via hackneyed montage sequences cut to music, she goes instead for lengthy static shots without scoring, the sounds of Jardine’s various tools the only aural accompaniment.

"Such a style — called “contemplative” in the art-house cinema world, and not always positively — has its dangers. There is a risk of lapsing into ponderousness, even pretentiousness. What makes this style appropriate here is Brown’s aim, which is to show just what a laborious, painstaking, and, yes, solitary task artistic endeavour usually is. The crystal-like clarity of cinematographer Eniola Adelekan’s images, particularly the extreme close-ups, also helps make these scenes quietly enthralling."
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📽️ The Solitary Alchemist film was filmed over three years, in Trinidad, England and Scotland. 🏆It has been shown at various festivals including the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival in 2009, and the Caribbean Tales Film Festival in 2010. At TTFF, it was awarded for best Trinidad and Tobago film. It is also held in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
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🔗To read the whole review visit: https://eewn.short.gy/3idQem
🔗To find out more about SAVANT visit: https://savantmedia.tv/

👋 Hi, I am Laney!
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🎓 I am currently studying T-Level Management and Administration at East Sussex College. As part of the course we have to complete a 315 hour work placement. Back in November I got in touch with Mariel to see if completing my placement with her at SAVANT Media would be possible. As you can see, she said yes!
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📝 I started my time with Mariel on February 6th. Over the past couple of months I have been involved with creating posts, going through social media pages, and completing basic finance tasks. This has allowed me to develop on the skills and knowledge that I started to learn from college. I found myself excited to start the placement and learn something new, which has continued throughout the past couple of months. I feel like the time I have spent with Mariel has been very beneficial to me both academically and personally. Whilst working in the office I have had to leave my comfort zone which has helped me feel more confident.
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I am excited to see what other experiences and skills I will learn over the next few months at SAVANT Media.

💙 We're thinking of film lover and critic, BC Pires, today. He wrote on several of our films, including our short, Smallman. Here's an extract of what he wrote:

"You could turn the sound off and still love Mariel Brown’s Smallman because its first success is as a film, and it is overwhelmingly beautiful to look at; to call it “other worldly” is no exaggeration. The sound, though, adds the human dimension to the art as Richard Rawlins remembers his father and the world he made for them both, the one Mariel has remade for us all. This is a small film with a grand scale and a wide sweep. If you don’t remember the best parts of your own childhood – and, indeed, your father – have your humanity levels checked."
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🏅 In 2015, the film won the Best Documentary, Short Film award at the Caribbean Tales International Film Festival.
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🔗To watch Smallman: The World My Father Made visit: https://eewn.short.gy/edXkMK
🔗To find out more about SAVANT visit: https://savantmedia.tv/

⏳The 100th anniversary of the start of the first world war provided the perfect opportunity for me to pitch an idea for a documentary series to Trinidad's Parliament Channel. Luckily - they really liked the idea, so I pulled a team together and we got to work!
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The West Indies at War was a joy to work on! I had a great team working on research, writing etc. And we were able to interview some key historians, who really helped us understand what life would have been like in colonial Trinidad in the early 20th Century. The process of discovery was incredibly rewarding, and we were able to see for ourselves that World War 1 was germane to the creation of the modern, independent Caribbean.
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The West Indies at War is a four part television series that tells the little known story of soldiers from the West Indies who fought and died in World War One. Many of these valiant men were not allowed to enlist because of their race. After months of struggle and with a steadily rising death toll on battlefields across the world, the black men of the Caribbean were finally allowed into the fray. During the war, the men experienced discrimination at the hands of their white counterparts and were forced into menial labour roles. Upon their return to the Caribbean, the embittered soldiers, including Arthur Cipriani, Uriah Butler and Norman Manley, rallied the masses against their colonial oppressors for the right to vote and appoint local men onto the Legislative Council. The First World War shook everything up.
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📺🎥 You can watch the whole series on the Parliament Channel's You Tube here 👉 https://eewn.short.gy/HDw1IG
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Pictured:
Historians Dr. Bridget Brereton and Dr. Rita Pemberton
Writer Olive Senior
The team:
Executive producers: Candice Dubarry and Colleen Holder
Producer, director and editor: Mariel Brown
Writers: Mariel Brown, Lynessa Parks and Dainia Wright
Director of photography: Sean Edghill
Composer: Francesco Emmanuel
Narrator: Patti-Ann Ali
Motion graphics: Richard Mark Rawlins
Animations: Damian Libert
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#savantat20

🎉🎉It’s Throwback Thursday!
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🎥 Today we will look back to the production of ‘Smallman: The World My Father Made’. The award winning short film was created in 2013 and was produced by the talented SAVANT crew. It explores both the real and imagined worlds that Richard Mark Rawlins’s father, Kenwyn, made, in the workshop beneath their house.
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📷 The photo carousel above shows a few moments from production of the short film. In the first two photos, you can see the crew setting up lighting for the different scenes. The third and fourth photo shows the crew creating different sets and capturing the shots required for the film. In the last picture we can see one member of the crew dusting an airship that Kenwyn carefully created from scratch.
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🏅 In 2015, the film was nominated as the Best Documentary, Short Film category at the Caribbean Tales International Film Festival.
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🔗To watch 'Smallman: The World My Father Made' visit: https://eewn.short.gy/edXkMK
🔗To find out more about SAVANT visit: https://savantmedia.tv/