DOC UNIT: SLOW PROGRESS

We have not been with out our fair share of issues this unit I thought I should express them and say what I might have learned.

With the Director of Rugby at Sutton Valence Mark Howell and fellow staff member Mr. Farrell we have had some problems in that we wrote a slightly badly worded email to Mr. Farrell that he took the wrong way. This ended up causing both of them to pull out of doing any filming with us. They said they would answer some questions, but we decided in the end not to do it with them as they were being very uncooperative. Instead we moved to our next option which was Director of Rugby at Sevenoaks Rugby club who was very helpful and even took time out of his day off to film with us.

At the moment we are having some minor difficulties with the main subject of our film Sam Noss who being a teenager at school finds numerous reasons to be somewhere else when we need him. We should be filming with him tomorrow afternoon starting with some actuality with him and a some of his friends, then moving onto an interview with just him.

We will also be filming Jordan's Dad today who as a former rugby player can have a good input into our doc.

MONTY PYTHON: ALMOST THE TRUTH (LAWYERS CUT) (2009)

Six part television documentary series with interviews with the 5 remaining members of Monty Python John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin. The film also includes archive interviews with the late Graham Chapman as well as many modern comedians and friends of the of Python. Brilliantly satisfying tribute to the Python's work throughout their original television show on the BBC onto their films and further onto what they are doing now. The first 2 episodes talking about the television show and how they begun and the other four episodes talking about each of the 4 films they made through the time as Python.

What this documentary did was really bring back memories of all the Python I have seen even so much as for me to go back and watch The Holy Grail again (so good even for the umpteenth time) and to watch innumerable sketches and interviews online. Even after finishing the 6 episodes I have wanted to research and know more about them than I already do. What I really liked especially was the insight they gave me into the filmmaking process when on set of their films. It was interesting to see what they went through in making arguably some of the best comedy ever made. They talked in the interviews about what they perceived to be the meaning of there films. The Life of Brian for instance they saw not as taking the piss out of Jesus, but merely taking the piss about the people on the side and what could have happened on the sidelines.

From a documentary making stand point I can also appreciate greatly the way they linked questions together sometimes even getting one Python member to finish another's sentence in a completely separate interview. This is something I could see that I could I could take on for when I edit together our film, although slightly different in content.

 Even though this documentary was about something I already loved in the first place I can still see the power of a documentary made so well. I mean if I can make a documentary that keeps people talking for weeks on end I will be very pleased. It helped that they had almost 6 hours of doc time to work with as that was what allowed so much time for more insight. These men are utter geniuses and this documentary explains this fact in the best way I think it could have done.

All six members of Python

DOC UNIT: TOTAL HEADCASE

A term that has arisen through our time filming has been 'Total Headcase'. This is the term used for an initiative started by the Rugby Football Union (RFU) to make more and more people aware of what they should do in instances of concussion.

The goal of the RFU is to make people aware that even if someone says they want to continue doesn't necessarily mean they should. Both Dr. Harris and Roger talked about it in their respective interviews with positive feelings about the initiative.

The website provides interactive education for coaches, players and match officials to spread awareness.

The link to the website: http://www.englandrugby.com/my-rugby/players/player-health/concussion-headcase/

The poster placed next to many rugby clubs in England

We filmed a shot of the sign on a our first days shooting on a fence beside the rugby pitch:

DOC UNIT: SHOOTING DAY 3

Slowly but surely we are making progress. Today myself and Jordan visited Jordan's old rugby club Sevenoaks. We were there to meet director of rugby Roger Mckerlie who has known Jordan since he was about 6 years old playing in the under 7's. We ended up spending a good chunk of the afternoon chatting to Roger about rugby at the club and in general. At some point during the afternoon we did sit down to do a proper interview with him talking about concussion.

The phrase now associated with the club 'Mighty Oaks'

I have to say Roger was hugely helpful and nice to us providing us with the time during his day off to help us with our film. As a former rugby player himself and a person who generally knows about the game he was very good with his answers. Not only were they good answers, but they were delivered with confidence as well to really provide our film with a powerful knowledgable voice to cut to when needed. 

Roger Mckerlie

According to Jordan who has the camera, the footage is looking good and we got a lot of coverage.

Our next stage is to film an interview with Sam Noss who will be the main character of our story, who should tie our film together to make it into a channel 4 style documentary. This should hopefully happen tomorrow or within the next few days.

Starting Transcripts:

I have personally begun writing up the transcripts for our documentary. I have already completed the transcript for our first interview with Dr. Harris. It is quite a pain staking process, but I found once you got into a rhythm it was fairly plain sailing.

I am not entirely sure how you do transcripts but I gave it my best shot by naming each section with the number of the clip. I have also put for each new paragraph the time in and out so as to know where I am when I come to edit, once I have got all the footage.

NEXT GOAL WINS (2014)

The true underdog story of the worlds worst football team American Samoa.

Although on the face of it this film seems like like just another football movie with some heroic story of an underdog winning against all odds this film is far from that. Sure there are many of the similar things you might see in one of those cheesy sports films, but with this there is a reality and a depth to the story that you would not see in fictional depictions of football.

The film begins by harking back to the famous event in 2001 where the American Samoa team lost 31-0 the biggest loosing margin in an international match. This is the incident that drives the whole team to do better not least the one man who was present in the team on that day Nicky Salapu (the goalkeeper).

I really like the way this film was made there was a mixture of set up interviews combined with actuality footage of the practices and matches. This all lead to an enthralling piece of documentary filmmaking which really tugged at the heart strings for me. When they won there first match (the first win in their history) I really felt like this film had got to me, because I knew about the pain they had to go through after losing so many times and especially against Australia.

I have to say in the end I really treated it more like a fictional movie than a real documentary as its such a great story to be told that you would think this would be something out of a Hollywood movie script. A film all about the strength of the human character as well as the power of one little nations heart.

Goalkeeper Nicky, who had to toil through the biggest loss in International football history

DOC UNIT: FIRST SHOOTS

I am just using this blog to reflect on the filming myself and Jordan did last Wednesday and Thursday. We spent Wednesday filming at a rugby club near Jordan's house so we could get some shots on what was a very nice day. We used a rugby ball and some rugby posts to get some filler shots for the film, and I have to say they turned out quite nicely. With the help of my slider and the tripod we managed to get some very nice looking shots so that we could have some in the bank for when we get to the edit. Here is just one of those shots from Wednesday:

On Thursday we had a somewhat more fruitful day of filming, going to visit Dr. Harris a young newly licensed GP. He was a very willing interviewee who answered all of our questions, was very patient and also was a good talker in front of camera. Dr. Harris is a rugby player himself who has also been concussed on quite a few occasions. So that was very useful to be able to talk about and explore more than the questions we provided. I wrote out some questions prior to the interview which we altered slightly on an ad lib basis due to the information we got about his own concussions. Here are the questions I wrote:

QUESTIONS FOR DOCTOR
1.Can you describe concussion for us in your best words?
2.What are the procedures to take when someone on a sports field has a head injury?
3.What is the current way of diagnosing concussion? 4.If concussion is the diagnosis what is the next step? 5.Have you ever personally had to deal with an on field
head injury?
6.If so can you tell us about a memorable incident
whether for good or bad? 

Here is also a little bit of footage from that day where we got interview footage as well as actuality and the odd bit from his office:

SUPERMENSCH: THE LEGEND OF SHEP GORDON (2014)

Wonderful documentary made by Mike Myers and starring a whole heap of Hollywood stars as the interviewees.

I had never heard of Shep Gordon prior to viewing this documentary on Netflix. I have to say that this documentary makes him out to be one of the nicest people in show-business. This documentary directed by a close friend of Shep's Mike Myers of Austin Powers and Wayne's World fame is a real insight into the life of Shep Gordon who stumbled upon the career of being a manager.

There are interviews with Alice Cooper who worked with Gordon throughout his career and with such stars as Michael Douglas and Sylvester Stallone each giving telling their own stories of the legend that is.

In a way I think this film is like a thank you letter from Myers to Gordon to thank him for all the friendship he showed him during his time of need. Because Myers was at one point in a really bad way and rung Gordon up to ask if he could come and stay for a week, he ended up staying for two months.

This sums up his life pretty well

I think this film was so enjoyable and really just made me want to get into films more and more. I love the way this film also kind of laughs at the fact that Gordon got into being a manager by bumping into Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at a motel were he gave them drugs and just hung out. That really shows that the saying is true its not what you know its who you know.

Myers and Gordon

DOC UNIT: EDITING WORKSHOP

Spent today working on editing interviews and cutting them together with actuality clips. It was the first time I have used the transcript edit technique and I have to say although quite useful not really what I prefer personally.

I see the edit as another chance for myself to explore what I have got in my footage, but then again I haven't exactly edited an interview together before. In truth I haven't even really done very much dialogue work until my last film in Directions.

This was a learning experience though and I did try and use the hammering to link the interview and make it seem less like I was using jump cuts, however the hammering turned out to be too prominent and distracted from the interview.

Here is the final product:

DOCUMENTARY UNIT: POST EASTER UPDATE

Things are progressing, all be it fairly slowly myself and Jordan have now got our first confirmed interview on Thursday at 2pm with a Doctor. We will be talking to them about head injuries in general and the risks associated.

As well as this we will hopefully go to Sutton Valence to get some coverage shots of the school this Wednesday. This will be more likely as they are on holiday so there will be no pupils around.

So we have these 2 things at coming soon and there is much in the pipeline to some afterwords:

1. First of all we have an interview with Mark Howell Director of Rugby at Sutton Valence on the 22nd of April.
2. We have the possibility of talking to the schools headmaster.
3. We were going to try and film on Sam Noss and some of his friends playing rugby today, but we have had to reschedule this because of other priorities for Sam. We should be able to do this in a week or so. 
4. As well as all this we have the option of interviewing Jordan's dad who played rugby himself. Our idea here is to get a view on concussion from someone who played when concussion wasn't something people worried about.

Although everything seems fairly rosy at the moment we did encounter some minor issues over the break. Jordan sent an email to a member of school staff who was supposedly involved in the decision not to allow pupil Sam Noss to play in the last game of the season. However we got quite a strong reply back stating we hadn't got our facts right and that they would not be participating in the film. In the email he also stated that even if he were to be interviewed he would not talk about individual pupils.

Very soon after this reply we got an email from Mr. Howell who said he would also not be talking about any individual in particular, but would still talk to us in a general sense about rugby and concussion. I did think at this point that we may have hit a wall and be knocked back by all the members of the school, but so far we are ok thus far.

So yes to conclude this update I think we are in the right place to go forward and make an interesting film that is relevant and informative especially to people who may not know much about the subject.