Liverpool Production

Upon arriving in Liverpool we were a little apprehensive as we only had one solid meeting arranged and our entire idea hinged upon it. Luckily John Finigan and Steve Barton of the Liverpool Homeless Football Club were fully on board with our idea after hearing it in more detail from us by the end of the meeting we had a full schedule of interviews and appointments, we had also acquired permission to any online footage that they featured in as they held all rights to it.

During the actual filming process I was resigned to an assistant role as I was the group’s editor so I didn’t have a crucial role in this part of the project. When we were on location I helped to set up the equipment and set for the interviews, I tended to spend more time helping out the people who were working on sound as most of them weren’t well practised in that area. So for the most part I took a backseat in the production phase as there was little for me to do, one role I did find myself in multiple times while we were in Liverpool was as the group organiser because besides from Emily Spokes our Producer my group were a bit of a rabble at times and needed a forceful hand to get them to appointments on time.

Liverpool Documentary - Pre-production meetings

Over the last two weeks my group and I have had several meetings in which we discussed ideas, approaches and attempted to make contact with people relating to our ideas. After several discussions we have decided upon the idea of making a documentary on Liverpool’s homeless football club, this idea stemmed from one our earlier ideas where we though to find a homeless person staying at a local hostel and get their life story due to difficulties with making contacts and uncertainties in the contacts we had made we decided to change the idea after Tyrese found a news story on a homeless football club in Liverpool. We’ve made initial contact with the manager of the club and he has given us his full support in making the documentary and has kept in contact during the lead up to our residential trip to Liverpool, the only condition that they set on the filming was that we weren’t going to design the documentary to put a negative spin on the story, we reassured them that we had no intentions of doing so and that they could have a copy of the documentary when it was finished to use as promotion material if they wished.

We have discussed the idea of our documentary to our tutor and he agrees that this new idea is a much stronger idea to the ones we had previously pitched and encouraged us to fully commit to this approach. We discussed some ideas on the visual approach to this film and I believe one such idea that we are strongly considering going with is to not initially bring up the situation of the players in the club, instead we plan to reveal it later in the film so the audience can see just how strong the positive impact this club has on the players life as well as acting as a hook to get the audience’s attention. In the lead up to the trip a seventh member was added to our group (Marcus) who has opted to help out in the sound department so he will mostly be working with Tyrese and Ryan.

After multiple talks with the chairman of the club we have come to the mutual decision of spending the 17^th getting to know the players and staff in a meeting, before conducting interviews and getting footage on the 18^th and 19^th. This was decided so that both parties feel comfortable with each other before cameras are introduced, this benefits us as if the players feel more comfortable with us it’ll make it easier for them to talk about their stories on camera and overall the documentary will be of better quality because of it.

Quick look at Shelter

http://vimeo.com/45260069

The above link is to a documentary that Victor showed the rest of us during one of our group meetings. The documentary involves several interviews with homeless people, rough sleepers, in Manchester, it has a fairly standard style to it unlike the other documentary I looked at previously yet the standard more polished style has its own merits which work well with this sort of documentary. The documentary features some pretty impressive cinematography it even has some tracking shots as they are shown where these people sleep It is a very powerful and emotional piece that tackles a similar issue to one of our ideas for our documentary. The close up face shots during the interviews with side shot cut aways really help to get across the emotions of this piece and helps focus the audience on what is being said rather than being distracted by the background. If we end up going with the homeless idea we are currently discussing, I’d like to emulate a similar style to this film I particularly like the use of name titles before each new interviewee is introduced to establish the character with the audience.