Nichola Bruce

Nichola Bruce (born 1953) is a British avant garde film director, cinematographer, screenwriter, and artist. Bruce uses an artistic approach to filmmaking alongside the use of digital technologies. Her use of digital film is accredited to the speed, creativity, and multi-layering that can be accessed through the technology. ''Daily Variety'' featured Bruce in their article "10 Digital Directors To Watch"(2000) and noted that Bruce takes her inspiration from the surrealists, Andrei Tarkovsky, and painting.

Biography

Nichola Bruce was born in 1953 in Bromley, England. She was raised in Kent and London throughout her childhood. She began working with film, photography, art during her attendance at Hornsey College of Art and at Middlesex Polytechnic, beginning with super eight and 16mm.

Career

Bruce founded Muscle Films with Michael Coulson a film and television company, producing offbeat programming for British TV and cinema and part of a new wave of graphic artists and punk filmmakers in London. Bruce and Coulson created paintings as the starting point for their films and later developed scripts from the images. Bruce also founded a design company Kruddart with Michael Coulson, producing anarchic, collage-based material for publishers Faber and Faber and New Scientist as well as working with many leading British film directors including Peter Greenaway, John Boorman, Neil Jordan

1984 film-maker Neil Jordan worked for several weeks in pre-production with artist filmmakers Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson to create hundreds of detailed storyboard drawings for the feature ''The Company of Wolves''. The film's visuals were of particular importance, as Jordan explains: ''The visual design was an integral part of the script. It was written and imagined with a heightened sense of reality in mind.''

Bruce's 1985 short horror/drama ''Wings of Death (BFI)'' which she co-directed with Mike Coulson, featuring Dexter Fletcher and Kate Hardie, explored addiction. It was reviewed in ''Monthly Film Bulletin'' in 1986 by Mark Finch who described the film as "...certainly a curiosity--a modern morality tale, too long to be a commercial, too short to be a feature, but with a surer visual sense than many recent British films."

Bruce collaborated with Coulson on many projects, including ''The Human Face'' with Laurie Andersen and the music video ''The Blood of Eden'' for Peter Gabriel featuring vocals by Sinead O'Connor. Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson were employed as visual co-ordinators by Peter Gabriel's Real World working on a number of projects including an innovative approach to the marketing of the ''Us'' album, commissioning contemporary artists such as Helen Chadwick, Rebecca Horn, Nils-Udo, Andy Goldsworthy, David Mach and Yayoi Kusama to create original artworks for each of the 11 songs on the multi-million-selling CD. Coulson and Bruce also documented the process on Hi-8 video and film.

Bruce was selected to create one of eight short films to be attached to the band Queen's album ''Made in Heaven''.

''Britain's Club X (Channel 4)'' was co-created by Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson.

Her documentary feature ''The Monument'' on the artist Rachel Whiteread and the difficulties she faced to create the Holocaust memorial in Vienna provided an insight into the challenges that face artists making public works.

Bruce's first feature film ''I Could Read the Sky'' (2000) featuring Dermot Healy, Maria Doyle-Kennedy, Brendan Coyle and Stephen Rea was inspired by the photographic novel by writer Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke