About Us

Alex Crowton and Bobby Dass met whilst studying film production at university.  Both born and raised in the industrial West Midlands in the mid to late 1970’s, they bonded over a common love of music and film.

‘Right from the off we were always trying to make beautiful images in an unpretentious and human way, industrial processes’ can be brutal, we knew that instinctively growing up where we did and we always wanted to make beautiful things in a simple way.’

 After graduating from university, they went on to work together on numerous projects within the arts including fiction shorts, music documentaries and profiles of artists.  Alex generally self-shoots for their collaborations and Bobby edits.

‘We often floundered and didn’t really know how to interact with the ‘film industry’, so we invented our own practice, one that is on our own terms and that is sustainable., it means it takes a long time to get things done, but we are okay with that as the material we make has a sense of authorship and is made on our own terms’

Drawing from her time with Mark before his untimely passing, songwriter Angela-Faye Martin addressed her survivor’s guilt head-on and threw in behind this film tribute. The long hours she spent with him in his remote studio in western North Carolina found her conducting a delicate and continuous Q&A with Mark sometimes reading parts of it back to him. Little did she know she’d soon be called on to render this content as a basis for the film’s narrative, honouring her friend. With the gentleness of therapists, the filmmakers gave her a medium through which to weld a correction to all that went so terribly wrong for Mark. She still writes and conducts nature and art tours of the southern Appalachians.

THIS IS SPARKLEHORSE has been a labor of love for almost 11 years…

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