NOVA  Formula

eco-social films, sound-art works and experiments

see also: https://vimeo.com/novadada










  1. ✤NATURAL FLOOD MANAGEMENT                            [eco-social documentary films; 2016, 2024]

  2. ✤presenting the story of people, water, nature, ecology and eco-innovation

The Stroud Rural SuDS Project is an innovative Natural Flood Management project working to reduce flood risk and restore biodiversity throughout the catchment of the River Frome

The project works with local community flood groups, land owners, farmers and partner organisations to implement a range of measures that will reduce flood risk but also improve water quality and enhance the biodiversity of the streams, brooks and the wider River Frome catchment.

Commissioned by Stroud District Council & the Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire

Produced by Antony Lyons (NOVA Creative Lab)

"To create a river catchment where water management is fully integrated into land management practices. Where public bodies, private companies and local communities work together to manage water within the landscape, creating valuable habitat for wildlife and people, and limiting flood risk downstream"

Link to 2016 films

Link to 2024 films

















  1. ✤WATER + COMMUNITY + LAND + ECOLOGY          [eco-social documentary film; 2017]

  2. ✤'Wild Works' a film for the WILD (Water & Integrated Local Delivery Project

The WILD Project has brought local communities and landowners together in understanding and getting  involved in the management of local water courses. With local community input it also devised and delivered a plan of enhancements over a three year period. The project was actively supported by Natural England and the Environment Agency, and is part of a wider programme of implementing the catchment-based approach.

The project is called WILD for short which stands for Water and Integrated Local Delivery. It's a collaborative project including the Gloucestershire Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI), Cotswold Water Park Trust (CWPT) and Gloucestershire Rural Community Council (GRCC) and is funded by the Environment Agency (EA)

Produced by Antony Lyons (NOVA Creative Lab) with FWAG and CCRI

Context: The key driver in this is the government’s responsibility to meet its commitments under the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Under WFD legislation UK rivers and streams are assessed according to how close they are to a natural state on a number of parameters: Hydrology ;Ecology ;Chemistry (pollution)






















  1. ✤WATER + EELS          [eco-documentary; 2018]

  2. ✤'Across All Boundaries' a film for the Sustainable Eel Group

Produced originally for a special event at the European Parliament in Brussels on June 20, 2018.

Action is needed to tackle the smuggling that is threatening the survival of eels, Europe’s most common freshwater fish, experts said at the event.

The Save the European Eel event gathered MEPs, EU officials, eel scientists and representatives from Europol and the Spanish enforcement authorities to look at the illegal eel trade and the impact of trafficking on European stocks.

The event was moderated by Andrew Kerr, Chairman of the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG), the alliance of European-wide conservation, industry and science representatives working to help eel stocks recover. “The illegal eel trade is like a modern-day ivory market: secretive, big-money smuggling that threatens the very survival of the species,” he said. “The situation now is a big, tragic mess.”

Film Produced by Antony Lyons (NOVA Creative Lab), in association with ECOFACT (Ireland)






















  1. ✤LAYERS OF TIME + SOUND + PLACE                            [in development]

  2. ✤deep-time ecologies/ sonic maps/walks|strolls/ installations/ live improvised music

A creative project exploring themes of ‘nature+culture' and places in transition.

Creative atmospheric sound-works and listening explorations can help us develop new ways-of-knowing, founded on both rational and emotional connections to place and natural processes.

An imaginative window into the layers of the past will be used as a lens to engage with activities of the present and visions for the future of water+land peripheral landscapes.

Using participatory sound-capturing methods to reveal some deeper layers of place and underlying ecological narratives.

The project will culminate in a live public performance event

The creative material will also be placed online.

Context: Bristol was built on a ridge of high ground amid the marshlands that were the floodplains of the Rivers Frome and Avon. Before the Floating Harbour was developed just over 200 years ago, the western periphery of the city was still a tidally-dominated marshland. This ecosystem-type is the underlying ‘natural’ ecological state - reflected in many of the local place-names (e.g. Canons Marsh, St Augustine's Marsh, Marsh St, and the former ‘Town Marsh’). Developing understanding of these deeper ecological realities is not just important as part of the heritage narrative, but potentially central to city as a whole, as it embraces ideas of resilient adaptation and ‘the biophilic city of the future’.

Connected image slideshow



  1. ✤ SOUNDS UNLIKELY   [ misc experiments ]

  2. ✤urban sound/media-scapes; sonic maps/walks; experimental assemblages, voices, stories


LINK: a page with test pieces




  1. ✤ EXPOSURE         [ in development]

  2. ✤landscape | movement |  light-scape | sound-scape

Imagine moving through the city by night

The light-scape to which you are exposed is instantly translated into a personal sound-scape.

There is a swapping of senses.

Follow the light. Stand still. Close your eyes.

The ever-changing environment still washes over you as a sonic experience.

Light is refracted into sound.


Translating light to sound, enabling new perceptions of place and a re-enchanted experience of transiting and inhabiting a city/space

A hybrid aesthetic, straddling the archaeological and the contemporary

Revitalising the ‘photophone’ vision of Alexander Graham Bell

Presenting a poetic essence of the visual world, via sound





" I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing !

...I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk."

Alexander Graham Bell