Friday, 14 March 2014

LHFC Documentary

The group had numerous pre-productive meetings to develop our ideas and what we thought could work. Each member contributed an idea, my idea was to make a similar documentary to Pockets. The idea would be based on peoples' shoes instead of their pockets and would be fairly simple to execute.            After numerous team meetings, the group came to the conclusion of producing a documentary based on memories. The memories were based on peoples' most memorable moments in Liverpool. After careful thought, the group scrapped this idea on the notion that unwilling participants or short answers could jeopardise our project. Upon research me and Emily came across a homeless football club in Liverpool, which we thought was very interested as it was the first we had ever heard of it. As this was on the Thursday before we needed to Liverpool, this mean that we were short for time and may not be able to get in contact with the manager or coach in time. Thankfully the coach and secretary replied within rapid time and we proposed our idea to Dom and he agreed that this was definitely the best idea out of everything else. Our contingency idea was to interview taxi drivers about what they thought about Liverpool, Dom suggested that believing in this idea could sway the group from putting 100 percent effort behind the homeless football club idea, so to press on with the homeless football club.

First Treatment:

The documentary is simply to discover the history of one particular location, how it's changed over time and what it is like as a place now. We will explore this by interviewing people and finding out their memories and stories which have occurred within the location. Our aim is to find out the character of this location, how it has been affected by people and how they have affected it.

The characters involved within the content of the documentary will be a range of different people who have history within this particular location, i.e. they either live at that location, they regularly pass through it, or have resided in it for any multitude of reasons. We will choose which of our interviewee's memories to include in the documentary according to how interesting and unique their stories are and how they relate to one intertwine with one another. We plan to compare and contrast each different memory throughout the documentary. The characters will be interesting because they will be found spontaneously, as we set out to shoot the documentary, this will leave the door open to find a whole range of stories, from any given people.

The focus is going to be on the memories and stories which are told by Liverpudlians in the interviews that we will be taking in the city.  We are going to base our interviews on one main location which is yet to be chosen by researching for places of interest in the city and also asking around on the spot. Through communicating with various people we aim to find out about their lives and the specific location which somehow affected them. The human impact on this particular location is going to reveal not only its history but its atmosphere. So far our thoughts about what type of location we are looking for included:

·         Estates

·         Hostels

·         Monuments

·         Libraries

·         The Liverpool Docks

·         Clubs

·         university

·         Williamson's Tunnels

 

The project is heavily reliant on spontaneity and interviewing subjects that we happen to come across whilst searching in the location. We will spend half the time interviewing the subjects and the other, filming shots of the location which relate to the information that we have gained from the knowledge of the interviewees. We will be using DSLR's to shoot the footage to gain a good quality, crisp image. The documentary will be observational, mainly structured as showing interviews and then cutting away to interesting shots different parts of the location, relating to the interverviewee's spoken content. The film aims to focus on the location as a whole personality - its physical, geographical existence and the people who reside amongst it. We plan not to ever show our interviewee's whole face; more showing certain parts of their face and body whilst they speak. This will promote the lack individuality in the feeling of the documentary, but more focusing on the location as one unified entity. The film was inspired by 'Pockets' and 'The apology line' as these films follow a similar style as ours.

Second Treatment:

Treatment-2nd Idea

 

Interview taxi drivers around Liverpool  and listen to their stories which would be related to the city and hopefully would reveal a lot about the people who ride in their cabs. We can learn a lot about Liverpudlians from these drivers because people from different demographics use cabs so that provides an archive of experience from a taxi driver's point of view. 

By riding in several cabs and having to experience a day in the life of the drivers we aim to get a personal viewpoint on a hard working part of society as well as a general opinion and experience which is specific to the city. Many cab drivers are either overseas or international so we can get an idea of how they integrated within the UK and the challenges and cultural clashes they had to face. Some drivers have lived in the UK for a long time so they have more than enough experience when it comes to observing various types of people and the changes between different generations. The taxi drivers can take us around interesting spots in the city and ones related to their stories if they are comfortable with it. They probably have dangerous and unpleasant experiences on their job and on the other hand they have observed the change in lifestyle for them and their colleagues.

Throughout the documentary, we plan to contradict the idea that 'Cabbies' are just passive driving machines and in fact, are observant people who through their work have had an insight into people's private lives. The cab driver's job is unique in a way because it is hard to think of another job which provides so much interaction with people who are not conscious of the fact that someone might be listening to them and their conversations.

The visual part of our project is about displaying different points of view e.g. the passenger's seat, the driver's mirror(showing his eyes) and a shot which has his face defocused  and the street as a background. The plan is never to show the details of the person's face but an outline of his expression by means of blur or shadow or a over the shoulder shot.

The sound part is going to compliment the visual aspect of the documentary, we plan to use shots related to the narration of the documentary and plan to record cutaways of liverpool from the point of view from a taxi passenger. It is inspired by Taxi Driver directed by Martin Scorsese. Anything related to taxis' journeys will be recorded and used as cutaways.

Final Treatment:

Documentary Treatment

Synopsis:

The purpose of the documentary is to follow the personal account of a homeless person and to document their story creatively as the structure of our film.

The crew will contact hostels to make contact with a homeless person who is willing to give their account to the crew.

The crew will utilise the interview with the homeless person to create the main segment of the film. Cutaways relatable to the story will be used to create a better visualisation of the story. Only a day and a half is provided for shooting, which means the crew are required to have secured contact with the subject person. The crew will interview as many subjects as possible to provide a lot of information for the crew to utilise.

The documentary is inspired by King of Laughter (2008) and will deploy similar conventions to successfully establish the person and the story.

Ideally, a disastrous or emotionally invoking story would be used, as this would provide our documentary with an advantage.

In the case that more than one account is used, the form will follow from account to account, however this would go against group intentions of basing on it on one account. The possibility may lead to a very similar form, which can be seen in the Shelter (link available in the “Other Important Information” section).

 

Cast:

A homeless person (people) who is willing to come forward to give their story on camera. We have made contact with numerous homeless people and hope to have somebody who is willing to give a personal account. One concern is that it is really difficult to get in contact with homeless people and difficult to maintain certainty with homeless people as they tend to move from location to location

 

Crew:

Sebastian Wray - Director

Emily Spokes - Producer

Victor Mihaylov - Camera Operator

Kieran Woodhall - Editor

Ryan Wroe - Sound Recordist

Tyrese Thomas - Sound Editor

Marcus Owramenko – 2nd Sound Editor

 

Schedule:

Pre-production:

All available time before the 17th February

 

Production days:

17th - 19th February

 

Post-production:

All available time after the 19th February

 

Deadline:

7th March

 

Technical Requirements:

To achieve the DSLR film look we are trying to reproduce, we will be using the following DSLR cameras; Nikon D800, Canon 70D, Canon 60D and Nikon D300.

Our lenses include; Canon 50mm, Canon 85mm, Canon EF 24mm and Canon 18 – 135mm

Our camera accessories include; 2 portable lights and 2 shoulder rigs for DSLR shooting.

For sound recording, the group have booked out; 2 Zoom recorders, a shotgun microphone and a boom pole

The group will be bringing along spare batteries and chargers in case any of the recording devices lose battery whilst recording.

 

 

Other Important Information:

·         Terry, is a homeless person who resides in HomelessUK who has agreed to come forward (hostel / 55 Seel street, L1 4AZ)


·         Inspirations: Shelter by Mike Staniforth (http://vimeo.com/45260069)

·         Homelessness by Muhammed Ibrahim (http://vimeo.com/55848931)

·         Pockets by James Lee (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ysKv9ubXU)

·         King of Laughter by 3 Minute Wonder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMq7NrgE8AA)

 

Due to my deadline being extended, the document holds the original deadline date of the assignment, also with our idea constantly changing, treatments quickly became outdated.

My original role was to be sound editor, however due to me having to part from the production for a while, I was unable to design the sound for the documentary. Thankfully Marcus joined our group and done the sound design.

Days of production went well thankfully.

The first day in Liverpool, we met with the chairman and club secretary, John Finnigan and Steve Barton. The group explained what our aim was and what we proposed to do. Both John and Steve were impressed with our idea and gave us the go ahead to work with them on the production. They gave us times and people we could interview and record for the time the group was there. Steve hoped we could of started recording that very day, however the contact he had contacted got back to him later on during the day and unfortunately could not permit him to record.

The following day was quite busy. We set off to go to a women's hostel to meet women who had either previous history with football or had an interest in the team. The group recorded Steve speaking with the ladies of the hostel and got to ask some questions. This was successful and after that the group went to interview some players of Liverpool Homeless Football Club. These interviews really helped to provide insight for our documentary as this gives the players' perspectives, after the group headed to record a training session. This helped the group with coverage of the homeless football club.

The final day, john had arranged for the group to meet up with a couple of members from the FA. This helped as it gave the documentary insight into who supports the LHFC and how that body helps out.

In conclusion, the documentary had a really good outcome. I think sound could have been utilised a bit more, especially certain sound effects. Visually the documentary is a success and it achieves the aims the group had set out to achieve. With more time, the documentary could have included more information, however the edit is smooth enough to keep a pace.

 

Ty

No comments:

Post a Comment