“I had this idea to make more than one watch a year. How was I going to do that? How do you take an idea into production and build watches? So that was massive. Again, I was back into working six to seven days a week. I didn’t take holidays, didn’t earn any money. And that went on for ten years. The business just about scraped through every single year. We were teetering on whether we would be able to survive. I just kept focusing on the quality and kept focusing on what I wanted to achieve, then eventually I hoped that everything would come right. And it did.”

This is Roger W. Smith’s Life Story.

Roger W. Smith OBE established his studio in 2001 with an unswerving ethos to craft watches to a peerless standard of horological excellence. His journey has been one of continual discovery. Mastering the Daniels Method, the art of hand-crafting a watch (devised by his mentor, the great George Daniels) was his first great challenge. Since then, Roger has spent the last decade exploring the future of mechanical watchmaking. This has taken him into previously unexplored territory. Ultimately, discovering new worlds of possibility within the microcosm of timekeeping.

Over two months, The Hour Glass has premiered a series of short films on nine of the world’s leading contemporary artists and independent watchmakers. Featuring: Maximilian Büsser (MB&F), Sir David Adjaye OBE RA (Adjaye Associates), Rexhep Rexhepi (Akrivia), Daniel Arsham, Wieki Somers (Studio Wieki Somers), Roger W. Smith, Marc Newson, Oki Sato (nendo), Felix Baumgartner & Martin Frei (URWERK). Commissioned by The Hour Glass, these portraits profile the journey of these cultural wunderkinds and document their dedication to their craft.

• Production: Colonel
• Director: Greenwood
• Cinematographer: Fabrice Parent
• Camera Assistant: Jesper Rey
• Drone: Jan Crommelinck
• Sound: Lucas Colle
• Edit: Frederik Vandewalle
• Sound edit: Gregory Caron
• Grading: Kene Illegems