The Pit: A Film About Crowdsurfing
Relentless Short Stories

A short documentary about the strange beauty, danger and collective energy of the mosh pit.

I wanted to make a film about everything that happens around the band rather than the band itself — the fans, the movement of the crowd, the unwritten rules of the pit, and the way hundreds of people can suddenly seem to move and breathe as one.

The film features Gallows playing one of their final shows with Frank Carter — a ferocious, sweat-soaked basement gig in Bournemouth — alongside fans, musicians and security staff trying to make sense of the peculiar mixture of trust, chaos and exhilaration that exists inside a hardcore crowd.

Visually, I wanted to take something violent and frenetic and make it feel unexpectedly beautiful. Much of the film was shot in slow motion, with the crowd treated almost like choreography. Laurent “Lags” Barnard of Gallows composed an original soundtrack specifically for the film, working under my direction to create a score that counterpointed the physicality of the images rather than simply amplifying it.

The Pit was selected for the Relentless Short Stories final shortlist and featured prominently in Metro, which described the film’s ambition to capture the crowd as a “singular, living organism.”

Contemporary music press called it a “kinetic portrait of what it is to be lost in music”, praising the way it captured both the beauty of the energy and the violence of the action.