The film was,
I think, a success. At the beginning we had no idea of the story behind the
building, shop and those who worked there, and managed to translate their
current image and their hopes for the future into our film. I think the film is
successful in how it balances being a personal story of Bally, a story about
the shop and the clothing industry, and a story about the building and it’s
role in the community and it’s recent neglect.
As a team
of 3, we were only half the recommended group size for the project. However, I
think we worked well as a team, balancing the roles of camera operator, sound mixer
and interviewer between us. The size of the group meant we only had one camera
operator during unrepeatable shoots such as the tour around the building which
was filmed in a narrow window on the only day he was available to film that
with us. However, the footage was good, and we went to get static pickup shots
of details mentioned in the tour for cutaways, which also broke up the repetitive
continuous shot. Being in a small group was a perk for organising shoots, and
the easily accessible middle-of-town location of the shop also made going to
shoot easy and quick, so we could quickly arrange to go back for pickup shots.
We kept in communication with the shop via social media, allowing us to quickly
contact them and keep up to date on possible events worth filming at the shop.
I was inspired by Sean Dunne’s The Archive (2009) as it used fairly similar subject matter and was a similar length to ours. The film used interviews and cutaways to tell the story of a man and his collection, whilst we used a similar style in the first 2 minutes (and last 30 seconds), using an interview with Bally and others in the shop and cutaways to different details in the area that link to their speech.
I was inspired by Sean Dunne’s The Archive (2009) as it used fairly similar subject matter and was a similar length to ours. The film used interviews and cutaways to tell the story of a man and his collection, whilst we used a similar style in the first 2 minutes (and last 30 seconds), using an interview with Bally and others in the shop and cutaways to different details in the area that link to their speech.
We knew
the style would have to change to document the other abandoned areas of the
building, so we donned a shoulder rig, wide angle lens (16-35mm f2.8) and a
Sony HVL-LBP hot-shoe light to allow us to illuminate just the subject. I was
inspired by Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2000),
which often harshly illuminated the foreground with the background being kept
in complete darkness.
I liked how in James Marsh’s Man on Wire (2008), most of the film was made up of interviews, and
the events of 1974 could be told through interviews and photographs, requiring
little footage. We included interview audio over almost the entirety of our
film, as this made it personal and you could impose his vision for the building
onto it’s current state.
I learnt a lot about making a documentary, as I never had done so before. I
learnt a great deal about interviewing subjects, such as getting them to
include the question. I learnt a lot about editing documentaries too, such as
using the interview audio with cutaways to create meaning. If we were to make
it again a slightly larger group would be preferable so as to get more
coverage.
