"It was a case of looking around at what was going on and seeing a ship being built at the end of the street. It was visually staggering." (Peter Roberts, co-director, 'Launch') Shot in and around Swan Hunter's busy shipyards at Wallsend, North Tyneside, 'Launch' (1974) depicts the building and christening of two ships, the 'World Unicorn' and the 'London Lion'. As members of the Amber Collective and art graduates, Roberts and co-director Murray Martin were struck by the incredible imagery and sculptural quality of the shipyards and the surrounding industrial landscape, and decided to film them. They were given unlimited access to the ships and the yards, and arrived there with no greater ambition, at first, than simply to record what they saw. But having started work on a collective riverside project several years later, they found in the film's rushes an eloquent eulogy to a lost community and to Britain's industrial past. In this short film, the BFI's Poppy Simpson and Gemma Starkey took Peter Roberts back to a very different Wallsend and asked him to reminisce about his experiences of making 'Launch' almost 40 years ago. Extracts from 'Launch' by kind permission of Amber Films: www.amber-online.com Read more about 'Launch' at www.screenonline.org.uk BFI Screenonline's new Shipbuilding tour can be seen at www.screenonline.org.uk 'Launch' is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'Tales from the Shipyard', over five hours of rare documentary footage charting the rise and <b>...</b>