There's a version of "photo restoration" that's become very fast and very easy: type a prompt, ask an AI to "improve" the image, and it will invent a smile, sharpen an eye that was never in focus, smooth a face into something that never quite existed.

The film is the extension of that: breathing life into these stories for a new generation, so that they may live on. It's exactly what Mike has been doing with the village for me. This time, for once, it was his own work coming to life, and he was the one watching.

A five-minute churchyard film with Mike Laslett, Honorary Archivist at The Grange, in which one Rottingdean headstone opens onto a much wider village story.

They are the same children. Different names, a different era, the same age, the same fair — the same churchyard doing what churchyards do: holding still while life carries on around it.

The churchyard felt like the right place to start. It's where the village keeps its memory in stone — some of the same names I've been finding in the archive boxes at The Grange. But it turned out the churchyard had something to teach me too.

It was hot in there too, but the history was palpable the moment you walked in — pews lined up in rows, and along the back wall, old sepia portraits of men in uniform: former pupils who, I was told, once sat in these very pews as schoolboys, including Rudyard Kipling's son among the decorated officers gazing down from the wall.

Seeing those children stare out of the black-and-white plates, knowing most of them are long gone, is a powerful thing. If anything it sharpened the urgency I already feel to record the people who are still here, while they still are.

It was immediately clear that Mike knew everyone. We sat at a small café in the village centre, and before the coffee had arrived I'd heard all about the server's failure to quit smoking, how the postman who'd just walked by had once sat for a famous artist, and how the beautiful old tree above us used to be the centrepiece of the playground of the local primary school, now long gone.