ephemeris is Ian McGuire, and a small circle of collaborators he has worked with for years.

We have been making film and video for nearly twenty years — documentaries, commercials, narrative work, and the short pieces that live on social. On most projects the person who scouts it is the person who shoots it, cuts it and hands it over.

We are drawn to work that resists a simple explanation. Manufacturing, agriculture, community finance, education — fields where the value is real and spread across a hundred careful decisions that nobody outside the building ever sees.

Our method is documentary. We spend real time on site before we roll, we ask more questions than we need to, and we wait for the moment someone stops explaining and starts talking. That moment is the film.

Small is the default, not a limitation. Most of these films are better made by one or two people in the room — fewer strangers, calmer rooms, and subjects who stop performing by the second hour. When a project genuinely needs more, we bring in collaborators we have worked with for years: a second camera, an aerial day, a composer, a colourist. The crew grows to fit the film, never the other way round.

ephemeris is based in Ancram, in Columbia County, and a good deal of the work sits within an hour of it — Ghent, Hillsdale, Millerton, and the farms, mills and small institutions of the Hudson Valley. The rest has taken us further: a manufacturing campus in Cecil County, Maryland; a mill full of artists and craftspeople in Philadelphia; a college in Manhattan; and a fishing outport in Newfoundland that has lost half its people since the cod fishery collapsed. We work throughout the Northeast — New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are routine — and travel beyond a day's drive is a line on the estimate rather than a surprise.