The things that could never be anticipated can often become the most powerful scenes in the final version of a documentary, he adds.

Clarke describes the country as "a gold mine" for documentary filmmakers and he says he plans to shoot two new features in the coming months.

After helping Chinese director Lu Chunqiao with her directorial debut－a film on some teenage survivors of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, he has used the true stories of the survivors as the inspiration for a film, which will be set in Sichuan province, during the disaster.

His second project will be a docudrama based upon the 2009 book, The Man Who Loved China, about British scientist Joseph Needham, who chronicled China's scientific achievements over the millennia in his masterpiece, Science and Civilisation in China