LOS ANGELES — Canadian filmmaker Paul Almond was working in London in the early 1960s when he and producer Tim Hewitt came up with an idea for a documentary that would examine class and society through the eyes of children. “Over a couple of pints in a pub,” Almond told the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto in 2004, “we decided to choose a group of 7-year-olds from both sides of the class divide and explore what their attitudes were.” The resulting, groundbreaking film was “Seven Up!” the first in a heralded series of what came to be known as the “Up” documentaries tracing the lives of the same children as they grew older. Almond, 83, who directed only the initial film and felt that his role in sparking the popular series was unjustly forgotten, died April 9 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.Almond was a prolific television director whose work in the 1950s and early 1960s consisted mostly of dramas, several of which featured appearances by actors who went on to be famous.