Theo Williams | Director

Theo Williams | Director

It is prophetic that Theo Williams’s winning credit for BAFTA Breakthrough should be a documentary about emerging stars, albeit in a different discipline. His film, Terms & Conditions: Deeper Than Drill (2022), made for YouTube Originals, gave voice to young talent in the UK’s drill scene, expressing their opinions on their music, their experiences and frustrations with modern Britain. Theo’s own growing pains were not too dissimilar: grafting in a variety of odd jobs at a young age before a timely offer to work at indie production company Lemonade Money came in to save him from taking a job at M&M’s World. He’s never looked back.

In their own words:

“I dropped out of college when I was 16 after my dad passed away. I just needed to get into work... I was 19 when I wound up at Lemonade Money. It was a small independent, so I got to try my hand at a million different things... I taught myself Final Cut Pro in evening classes and used that to get a full-time job at the company [as an editor]... I thought my future was in post-production and got pretty good at editing, but then I got a bit bored fixing other people’s problems. I was doing some short documentaries, none of them finished. But I made a lot of trailers that I showed to visiting executive producers...

“SB.TV creator Jamal Edwards gave me a massive break, to direct the 10-year anniversary video of Ed Sheeran as a live performance. That attracted a lot of attention... It just sort of snowballed from there...

“Factual is a big love of mine and is something I’ll always do... I’ve never really done narrative, other than to edit other people’s work, so that would be really exciting...

“Breakthrough is an opportunity for me to meet more people... All of my films have been through the YouTube ecosystem, so it’s not the traditional film and television world. It’s not that I’m not connected, but this is a really exciting opportunity to meet people I wouldn’t necessarily meet.”

Theo’s Breakthrough credit is documentary Terms & Conditions: Deeper Than Drill

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