Oscar Fox’s short film is an ode to Cornwall’s longest living letterboxer

When he’d come up with the idea for the short film, Oscar decided to dig a bit further into this niche Dartmoor-ish interest to see if something might come of it. Reaching out on Facebook groups, the filmmaker got a response (amongst many others) from someone called Richard Elliott, a man who turned out to be Cornwall’s longest living letterboxer – finding his first letterbox in the 1960s. Richard shared that he had been “doing it the longest and still going strong”, Oscar says. “With a statement like this, I knew that the project had to centre around Richard’s commitment to his lifelong hobby.”

So with an interview with Richard already underway Oscar planned to shoot his short documentary Where the hand of man hath never trod the following weekend. Travelling to Richard’s home in St Austell, in just one day he was able to archive his entire stamp collection – documentation that would become a seminal part of two publications that the designer later crafted to accompany the film. The next day the pair were up and out in the early hours of the morning to reach Dartmoor, where they were then joined by Richard’s friend Linda for a day of letterboxing. “Before we started, I said to them, ‘just pretend I am not here!’”, he says. “I was a little worried that they might have been wary with the camera following them all day, but they just cracked on with their walk like every other week. It was great.”

The following shots capture Richard and Linda moving across a vast empty landscape in search of hidden boxes, punctuated by Richard’s spoken reflections on this lifelong hobby. For a final day of shooting on the Sunday, Oscar travelled back up to the Moors, this time a focus on simply “capturing the magnificent landscape”, finding a number of still and slow moments through the lens that would become integral to the meditative pace of the film’s final cut. As a backdrop for the shoot, the designer describes the landscape as “a complete escape and a step back from day-to-day life”. Through these longer takes on the moors Oscar wanted to connote the sense of quiet that completely “engulfs” the two walkers. “The low contrast colour grading and stripping the audio to a minimum, further added to a calming tone,” he says.