The screening of Faces (1957) at the Edinburgh International Film Festival launched the film career of Edward McConnell, following his studies at the Glasgow School of Art. For this first film, he was inspired by the innovative work of many European filmmakers who he came into contact with at the 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Festival.  Also known as EXPRMNTL, this festival was to enjoy only five editions and the films featured were largely unseen in Great Britain.

Encouraged by John Grierson (1898-1972), McConnell, along with another young filmmaker Laurence Henson, co-founded International Film Associates (Scotland).  This new company was highly regarded for its shorts and documentaries, with commissions from the Films of Scotland Committee, British Transport Films and television (including Channel 4).

Over the following decades, McConnell enjoyed great freedom of expression as a maker of short films.  Six of these take up the theme of "sight", as in A Kind of Seeing, which he directs in 1967. In this film, over and beyond the naturalist images which he inventories like a taxonomist, Edward McConnell delivered his impressions of Scottish nature, as beautiful as it was intimidating.  Thus, the score by composer Frank Spedding (1902 - 1984) accompanies to often contradict the stereotype of Scotland as a romantic subject.

Described by his peers as one of the best documentary cameramen of his generation, Edward McConnell, whose collection of works is preserved at the Scottish Screen Archive at the National Library of Scotland, has an aesthetic approach to images in movement. We thus see water portrayed in the film for itself and not as a mere element of the wider landscape.