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Edie Amos is a documentary maker whose work sits powerfully at the venn between performance and community. A veteran, even at 31, of live concert films for the likes of Ed Sheeran, Little Simz and Coldplay, she also makes videos for the internet about teens, the digital age and social media. Indeed, one of her first projects involved documenting her 14-year-old brother as he navigated lockdown during Covid 19. As a freelance director, Amos works with brands such Tommee Tippee, JD Sports and Spotify, but her most recent piece is a passion project called Just A Boy.
How it started
Last year, Amos’ 21-year-old sister sent her a TikTok of up-and-coming performance poet Sam Browne’s work, Silly Billy. The piece had gone viral and although Amos was on the social platform, her algorithm hadn’t served her the video. She knew immediately Browne was the person she’d been looking for.
Like the rest of the world, Amos had been moved by Netflix’s Adolescence, a series which tracked the worst possible impact of the manosphere’s toxicity. The series has been (rightly) garlanded and, as Amos says, this “created change and opened up a conversation. But it also scared a lot of people.” She was interested in the possibility of hope being discussed online, and saw it instantly in Browne.
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Browne is a young man who once fully subscribed to the politics of the manosphere, unwittingly allowing it to steal his own adolescence before a poetic awakening changed his life. He discusses his entanglement with toxic online education in casual misogyny and the aggressive selling of supplements and other tools of the patriarchy; with the pull of ideas such as the “CEO mindset”. His poems receive millions of views and the 21-year-old is currently on a sell-out tour. But as Amos notes, he had been invisible to her.
She says: “I thought that was interesting. He’s got this very active audience, is slipping into people’s algorithms in a really positive way, but there are still so many people that he’s not reached yet.” She wanted to spotlight someone “making a real difference”, but also creating conversation. She says: “I was reading the comments on his videos, and there were powerful ones, people saying ‘I thought I was going to hate this, but I love it. You’ve changed my mind on this.’ But then there were also negative comments, and that was really interesting to me”.
She was struck by the fact that she “hadn’t really seen much content from people actually integrated into the conversation.” But here, in Browne, was a first-person experience. She tracked down his email and over several months of meetings and cups of tea hatched a plan to film him in his hometown of Southend-on-Sea.
More than just a boy
Amos’s film is a powerful piece of storytelling, mesmerisingly lit and filmed in 16mm. Her background of concert filming, where she relishes recording the fan experience, means it is both performance-led but also profoundly human. She says of fan narratives: “That’s the bit that you watch and go, ‘Oh my God. I felt like that’”. This sensitivity is evident in Amos’ work on Just A Boy – it is the context and texture of the piece that gives it momentum.
And really does havemomentum, with 100,000s of views across all social platforms in just one week. Just A Boy is produced by After Party Studios, the dynamic production company behind a wide range of creator-led projects, including Sidemen’s charity football match, Sky’s Scenes and Channel 4’s Hear Me Out.
The creative team has a heightened community-first lens, and is championing the work. Amos says she is planning to collaborate with Browne again: “We felt that documentary was the right place to start; we are fleshing out new ideas about how we can continue working together.” She has also discovered performance poetry is a largely untapped space, with fantastic creatives whose work lends itself powerfully to short-form video.
Shifts in the market
Her own film aside, Amos has noticed a rise in briefs from brands that want to platform serious messages or highlight communities and conversations. She has just done a series of films with baby brand Tommee Tippee, where the team were only interested in hearing parents’ stories, with no marketing script in sight. The most successful collaborations are creator-first or subject-first, she says. When brands want to “work with a creator who is making waves in the space, they need to make sure it’s a piece of work that person would make regardless of whether the brand was involved or not.”
Meanwhile, Amos is aware she has to walk a nuanced path. She says knowingly: “I’ll keep making films for the internet and keep encouraging people to go to live events.” There is something so hopeful about the message in Just A Boy, with its elegance and immediacy. Perhaps even just in the possibility of turning the dial on the scary things in the social media sphere and instead, “amplifying the amazing parts of it.” But mostly, says Amos simply, “If we can get young boys watching Sam Browne rather than a toxic male influencer then fantastic”.
By Emilie McMeekan, insights director for CORQ.
