Here it is, The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.
This one has been a long time coming but here it is, my first film for network Television. A trailer will follow very soon with the premiere for all those in Germany on the 8th October 2025 and following that, on the ARD Mediathek for all those who can access it.
It’s a (documentary) film about a brother and sister, music and how we consume music, nostalgia for the 1980’s, how the way we connect to each other has changed in the age of the internet, and an obsessive global search for a song.
Below I will write a little about the story of how the film came together but I’d prefer you spent your time watching it so here again is the link and I’m sure I will be posting updates on my blog anyway.
And now, the story of how it got from script to screen:
It began, as all good ideas do, in a toilet. It was late 2019 or early 2020 and the world was pretty much in lockdown at the time or at least approaching it. I hadn’t long been on Reddit at the time, using it mostly for inspiration for a Judo class I was teaching it at the time when a French judoka sent me a link to a subreddit, r/themysterioussong. From there I followed a few links and found myself reading an article in Rolling Stone. I was hooked.
It also coincided with me moving to Berlin and that little voice in the back of my head that whispers, ‘good idea’ kept getting louder and I started thinking this was something I could develop. The story begins in Germany or West Germany as it was back in 1984 and I started seeing it as a wider story of how the world (and Germany) has changed in the 4 decades since then, framed by the search for this song. The idea stayed with me and wouldn’t let go. I started writing and then various other things happened. Aazadi was slowly getting off the ground (and will hit your screens as soon as possible, I promise). I was doing quite a lot of commercial work and trying to establish myself in my new home.
After a while though, I met a great friend and great writer who, after a particularly problematic commercial project we were both working on, I whispered the idea to her. I told her I wanted to make a fun, energetic, music loaded doc about this search and we ended up talking in the office long after everybody else had left and the cleaners were doing their thing. I showed her my notes, my treatments and my mess of ideas over the next days and weeks and slowly realised that I had found somebody who could help me organise the spiders web of ideas into something I could take to a production company. I will gloss over the part in which we tried (and failed) to make it ourselves, writing countless grant applications for funding from the likes of Sundance and Catapult. However, as disheartening as the rejections sometimes were, I will always say that the process of writing them made our story sharper and it’s always useful.
As a story full of coincidences and strange twists and turns (and here is the link to again see that for yourself) a real life one happened which formed the partnership that would ultimately get it to your screens. Out of nowhere, I was invited to an event during an edition of the Berlin Film Festival concentrating on films about music and the arts. Once I signed up, I received a directory of attendees and my intention was to meet every German based production company and possibly even one or two British and Canadian companies. I thought I would write to each one before the event and try to set up a meeting. The first one I wrote to wrote back just a few hours after seeing my one paragraph little synopsis and invited me to their office a week or so before what they told me would be a very busy event (and they were right).
Armed with what Alissa and I had written, some photos, all my research and connections to the characters (I had been befriending those involved for over a year by this time) I went to meet 3B Produktion. A couple of hours later I felt good about the meeting, especially as by the end of it, the brother and sister who run the company felt it was something they could make happen and I felt they were a great fit.
What I didn’t realise was that it would be a couple of years in between that day and the day where we would start filming, and longer again until I would be writing this. I will fast-forward through countless meetings with many interested parties, streamers, broadcasters, distributors. Many were interested but nobody would put that mythical bag of money down on the table. At one stage a possible multi-country co-production partnership was exciting yet the trigger never quite got squeezed. The same Avant Premiere event came around again and I was asked if I could create a trailer. It was Christmas 2023 and I had about a week. We had no visuals. No footage. All I had was a song nobody knew anything about, one photograph of the central characters in the 80’s, a bunch of faceless people on Reddit and a will to tell the story. So I went home for Christmas and put together some archive and some animation I made in After Effects and, as a placeholder some very dodgy self filmed images from my phone of my hand on a cassette player.
Then I got back to Berlin to hear that Kriti, who would go on to shoot the final film as cinematographer (and whose name you may recognise as being my partner in Aazadi) was working on a set that was, essentially a teenage boys bedroom. Perfect! Fast forwarding again, we stole a lunchtime hour of the lights, camera and set to shoot enough to make the trailer work and got lucky when a young man who looked the part just randomly walked in on it happening. He was in and, later that day, nearly every single frame we managed to shoot was in the trailer and I was back at the production office showing what I had come up with. A few days later we were recording me doing a voiceover and sweetening up the sound with Cornelius, another friend of the project. As the 2024 Berlinale came around, we had a trailer and a hope that this would be our year.
The trailer proved quite popular. It was never made for public consumption and did the rounds of pretty much every major European broadcaster, production company and distributor but now we are at the end of the journey and the film is done - you can see it and read all about it here.
After a while, it felt like the international co-production could be on again and I got very excited about the idea of doing some of the project in Canada, especially as it would mean with working with more friends of the project who I look forward to seeing every year at the Berlinale. But that wasn’t to be (hopefully another project at another time) and a major broadcaster then showed an interest. We were asked to re-write as a mini-series. First three episodes, then four, then could we manage five? Then we were back down to four (five didn’t quite work) and then three.
And then…
In late 2024 the story of The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet hit the news (no spoilers - see the film to know why). Almost overnight things changed. The story changed. The direction changed and those possibilities changed. Possibly because of it’s presence in the public eye, some of the previous interest fell away. The possible Canadian element of the story made less sense, so too a Swedish angle that had been planned. As things moved quickly, it was decided that Kriti and I would travel to Munich in December 2024 to shoot a little and provide our interested parties a little proof of concept (armed with a Sony FX6 and the same vintage Leica lenses that we would shoot the entire film with, rented from our friends at 25p in Berlin).
A couple of weeks then went by. I spent the time rewriting and then on December 23rd, I went home for Christmas. Stood in a line at Birmingham airport, I turned my phone back on after the flight to find I had had 7 missed calls from Bernhard & Maria at 3B. About 30 minutes later, we agreed we would make the film for the lovely people at ARD Kultur who wanted to commission the film, co-producing with NDR. We were on!
And so we landed in 2025 and my birthday in late January. There were a few little wrinkles in what would need to happen in making it with ARD. In a move that had started to make sense since the late 2024 revelation that changed so much, the film would need to be made mostly in German. We would also probably not receive any money to start filming until the Spring. And, it would need to be on air in the Autumn. Added to that, Alissa was about to have a baby and having helped me take the story as far as here, wouldn’t be able to continue as things developed and changed during production. I was also asked to edit which meant I was going to be spread very thinly in a language which I am not exactly perfect with and trying to write, direct, edit, animate and recording sound. I needed a partner, someone with a storytelling flair, intrigued about the story, fluent in German to help conduct interviews together, a proven track record and - perhaps most importantly someone who would be good company as we travelled around Europe and spent day after day working together. So, on my birthday, I met Andreas.
We started by spending a few days deconstructing what I had re-written, re-ordering parts of it, taking away what no longer worked, adding bits that we thought could work, listing potential characters to have on-screen and others who could support the story. The treatment was always to base the story on interviews with various characters, centrally framed, giving each contributor the opportunity to narrate their own story.
January turned to February and then March. Things bounced backwards and forwards between the mess of post-it notes on my wall, written treatments and scripts, emails, back to the wall which became laminated before a digital version I made to try and avoid having to repaint it one day. I have to admit to having thought on more than one occasion that things would all fall through but the executives at ARD and NDR were always constructive and stayed with it - and us - all the way. I learned a lot about how TV productions work having only ever been involved at the post-production stage with Television. I recognise that a film about a largely faceless Reddit community searching for a song made by a Welshman (in German) wanting to make a fast paced film with many, many more cuts than the average documentary is in itself a bit of a risk. So I thank them for that. (take a look at the result for yourself here).
Eventually, after all the back and forth, it was April and our first shoot was arranged. Kriti and I were at 25p collecting equipment one day and the next, we were shooting an interview at a University in Berlin. During the next 2 months, we (and when I say we, sometimes it was just Kriti, Andreas and I) found ourselves in Hamburg, Munich, Tblisi, Georgia, Krems-An-Der-Donau, Austria back in Berlin and then a one-dayer in Paris. As we went, I was editing as much as I could, deciding on an Adobe pipeline knowing I would make all or at least most of the graphics using After Effects and occasionally Photoshop. In the background to all this we were also working with our main characters who - for reasons I encourage you to see the film for - declined to appear in front of camera.
This was an expected development and I had planned on using actors to play their roles a long time before I had even made that trailer. What was important however, is that what an actor would say was their own words, spoken verbatim. So we conducted multiple interviews with them, recorded on tape to base their parts on. Unfortunately, we also had a few other characters who declined to be in the film. On seeing the film, you may understand their reasons but it did take some thinking about at times but I have often found that when the easy or obvious option disappears, a creative solution can be found and make things stronger.
Somehow, by the end of June, we had an assembly edit of what we had filmed so far plus giant black holes with just the original audio of our characters not wanting to be on-camera. We had scheduled 3 days of shooting to capture these elements plus recreate the 1980’s in mid-July which was approaching fast. I was also desperately trying to organise a sequence with a very key group of characters which would provide something unique at the end of the film and something I know the entire online community who have spent so many hours, days, hours, weeks and years involved in this search, will be very keen to see. Just before we gave that edit for the good people at ARD & NDR, we made it happen and Kriti, Andreas and I were in a car packed with cameras/lenses/microphones, lights and a great deal of hope on our way to Kiel in the North of Germany.
So far, so good. Well, almost. As we approached the moment in which we handed in a first rough cut (minus what was to be filmed about 10 days later), I found myself working from a hospital bed. Good timing! But I was out in 48 hours and carrying lights and tripods up 6 flights of stairs the next day as we filmed the most crucial elements of the film (sorry, doctor).
It was July and the production and set design team were transforming a Berlin AirBnB into a 1984 teenage boys bedroom. Casting went right down to the wire. We had an audition tape from our lead actress that was amazing but did she match who we had chosen as the lead actor? Could they be brother and sister? The correct age? Could we find younger actors who could play them nearly 40 years earlier? For a while it was a game of musical chairs trying to match up what was essentially a family. We decided on one, then the other didn’t work. Things went backwards and forwards until, it all came together. Lilly was who had sent that tape in and was always the benchmark. It meant we had to change tactics again to cast her brother but then he was found and Andreas stepped in, doing a great job in a really short amount of time. Then it was their younger selves. Jona always stood out, his curly hair matching and his presence in a role which would be largely silent important and then Alessia just fit and as soon as we talked to her via videocall, it made perfect sense.
And then, very late at night in mid July, copying the files from that last shoot to my RAID, getting ready to edit it all into the next version (which I needed to get out in around three days) I realised that that was it, there was nothing else to be filmed and what we had was what I was going to have to make work. A few nights without a lot of sleep later, we had what we could officially call a rough cut, black holes everywhere animated graphics would go and very very unfinished. It took a week for feedback to come in. A long long week of waiting which various holidays for others made it feel longer. I spent the week making some graphics on After Effects, nothing flashy or gimmicky with the treatment always having been to let the story do the work. Then a pretty fair list of feedback and questions came. I have had worse but there’s a part of you that’s always hoping that they see it and decide that it is perfect and no further conversation is needed. There were a few things in there that gave me a couple of sleepless nights but we made them work.
August rolled around and step by step and very long week after very long week, new cuts and versions emerged, each one more developed and complete than the other until we were able to say we had a fine cut. I found myself editing, animating, directing, talking, planning
But not picture lock! Another round of comments, requests, feedback and questions. A look at the calendar was enough at that point to know things were going to get a little tight. This wasn’t a project that could be delivered the day before broadcast. Our finish date was set. Sound post-production was booked. Colour grading was booked and trailers and various social media excerpts required to be made (the results of which can be seen on blah blah).