This film is part of Free

A Few Days

Superbly produced amateur short about a brief romantic encounter by Howard Blake, composer of the score for The Snowman.

Amateur film 1963 15 mins


A bright young woman meets a man at a London party. They are quickly infatuated with each other and, after a few days, elope to the seaside - but they soon tire of each other and part ways. A Few Days was made in 1963, while amateur filmmaker Howard Blake was a projectionist at the BFI. His well-crafted short film tells a simple story with a deft visual sensibility that only occasionally betrays its amateur roots with the odd cliché - such as a lovemaking scene which uses the type of coy iconography that would later be wonderfully sent up by Monty Python.

Howard Blake would go on to become one of the UK's leading composers of the 1970s and 1980s, writing numerous works including the score for The Snowman (1982) and Flash Gordon (1980).