Revolution Watch Joe and Christine's 2005 short, part of the Civic Life series.

What are the greatest single take tracking shots in movie history? Orson Welles' opening sequence for Touch Of Evil and Robert Altman's The Player intro would be on most lists. Then there's Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, remarkable for featuring just one single Steadicam shot for its 90-minute entirety. Add to that list the work of Desperate Optimists - film and real-life partners Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor. After winning the best short film at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2004 with Who Killed Brown Owl?, they've gone on to shoot six more shorts under the collective banner Civic Life.

"You would never hold it up as a model of filmmaking in film school," admits Joe, from the couple's office/home in North London. "The main thing is to find this balance between being control freaks and letting the chaos reign." The Civic Life shorts - Who Killed Brown Owl?; Moore Street; Revolution; Town Hall; Twilight; Leisure Centre; and Now We Are Grown Up - were all filmed in one day and feature hundreds of members of the public from communities across the UK and Ireland. "It makes it more interesting for us if you can't really predict how things are going to work out," Joe says, adding that the technique they've developed allows "performance to just happen". He downplays the scale of their endeavours, noting, "We'd organised very big events before, so there was nothing very complicated about this really."

Unlike the cameras mounted on the numerous crane and dolly shots, Civic Life almost failed to get off the ground. "We thought we'd blown Brown Owl," Joe reveals, "thought we'd made a real mess of it. We thought, 'OK, we'll never do that again, and we'll never go back to Enfield either! [The Borough Council commissioned the short to celebrate the reopening of the New River.] But we saw the footage and it was good, so we got a lot of confidence from that. We realised that a lot could be achieved in one day with the right degree of preparation and choreography. And it organically grew from one hunch into what is dangerously becoming a tried and tested formula now."

In the video Christine and Joe talk about making the Civic Life shorts, living and working together, and their future plans for a feature film.

Christine and Joe present Civic Life at the Curzon Soho on Wednesday 12th July as part of the Short Film Summer School. The sfss runs from 12-15 July 2006. The Civic Life DVD is out now.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 29 June 06

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