Strictly First Dancing!

At weddings the first dance is usually quite a chore to watch, but the last wedding I filmed was different. The brides brother is a professional dance coach and had taught the bride and groom some moves to make their first dance stand out and wow the guests! They chose Jeff Buckley as their song and it worked great as soundtrack to the montage of the day. Congrats to Steph and Glynn!

Seeking Asylum

I shot this back in 2006 as the final project for my MA in Documentary. It is a short documentary revisiting Whittingham Hospital, a huge derelict asylum. Featuring Ray Gosling, former Granada film-maker retracing his steps with the aid of a former patient and a team of dedicated urban explorers.

The original idea was to make a film about urban exploration, and to follow urban explorers entering abandoned buildings and locations across the country. The idea had to be refined and I chose to tell the story of Whittingham using urban exploration to make the film happen. In any other scenario this film could not have been made.

I had become an urban explorer myself, making new friends online and going on trips to all sorts of locations, such as derelict holiday camps, hotels, huge underground quarries and mysterious underground MOD sites. When exploring you feel like a time traveller, exploring a lost civilisation and trying to make sense of the artifacts left behind.

Through the help of one of the explorers called ‘Ste_Nova’, I managed to track down Ray Gosling giving a public talk in Wales. At the end of the talk we asked him about his film Whittingham and I asked if he would consider going back there for the film. I didnt expect him to be up for it but his enthusiasm for the project was unstoppable.

At 70+ he is full of life and up for adventure, he loved meeting the Urban Explorers, likening them to Urban Guerillas! On the day of the shoot, I was so worried we would get caught by security, would have to shelve the project, deal with the police and try to reassure my tutors what I was doing helping Ray Gosling scale a 6 foot security fence!

Luckily ‘Iansradios’ had the security aspect covered, being a former patient, he knew the place inside out (look out for him him barricading the doors at the start of the film!) With the real prospect of being caught, me and my camera operator Timo carried minimal kit and had to shoot it handheld with little time to stop and give direction, we just had to go with the flow and film the situation unfolding. It could have gone horribly wrong but Ray Gosling, with decades of television and radio presenting under his belt, knew exactly how to engage with the explorers and was not afraid to perform up to the camera when he felt the urge!

The original Granada documentary that features as archive footage in the film was one of Nick Broomfields early works for television, fresh from Film school, Nick and Ray were given a free reign to film whatever they liked while they lived at Whittingham for over a month. I think the approach was brilliant and gives one of the most authentic insights into life inside an institution such as Whittingham.

I always intended to make an unbiased film about the Hospital, so I included interviews with the staff and undertook a lot of research into the background of mental healthcare. I realised it is one of those sensitive topics that cant easily be written off as good or bad. Whittingham was a close-knit self-sufficient community where people were accepted for who they were. Society in those times had very dated views on mental illness, in todays world societies attitudes have improved but there is still some stigma attached to mental illness. That is something I wanted to challenge at the start of the film, to dispel the myths and stereotypes using the archive footage from Ray’s film to show the sort of people who lived there.

I have no doubt of the sincerity of the former staff nurses in the film, they cared for the patients like they were one big family, this is evident in their anger at the patient grave stones being removed from the cemetery. Perhaps it was theft, but it is quite something when graves go missing like that with no explanation. It seems that today’s society is not much more evolved than it was when we stuffed the mentally ill in workhouses and forgot about them. If those graves had belonged to anyone else there would be national uproar! Where are the newspaper headlines on the missing graves?

My commentary in the film is very minimal, so I hope the viewers can reflect on the topics and come to their own conclusions. I agree with Ray when he says it is a time that must not be forgotten. I think today’s society is trying to brush the history of mental health care under the carpet, like many other parts of our history. Anyhow, I will let you watch the film and make up your own mind.

Charity Fundraisers Showreel

Here are some highlights from the numerous Charity Fundraisers that I worked on during my time running Intermission Productions in Lincoln with my excellent colleagues and friends, Timo Schmid, Sam Pegg and Graham Wild.

The first clip on the showreel is from “The Road: A Church with a Difference” which was produced for St Johns and St Stephens Church in Grimsby in 2005. At the time the parish was looking for funding to sustain the Space Project, a fantastic resource for young people out of school and living in a very poor area of Grimsby. Not long after we had made the film, one of the lads we had filmed went on to become a teenage film star! Thomas Turgoose was spotted by film director Shane Meadows at the Space Centre, if you look closely in this clip you can see him jumping backwards laughing at his mates on the go-karts!

We had a great time filming “The Road”, and were totally blown away by Canon John Ellis who has successfully brought the Sunday service into the 20th Century and made it relevant to the local community. I hope the film went some way to secure more funding by being shown in other parishes, I am hoping to get in touch with them to find out if they would like the full film to be uploaded to Youtube.

The Great Comeback?

In January 2008, I set off with my partner Jenny on an epic overland journey of exploration and discovery all the way from London right through to South East Asia. By June we found ourselves over on the other side of the planet on the Island of the Long White Cloud! (officially Aotearoa- aka New Zealand)

We decided it would make a beautiful and exciting place to explore, and so it was that we joined WWOOF and set off to explore the South Island with our trusty Campervan ‘Zulu’ that we picked up for a bargain at a car auction in Christchurch.

We eventually ended up in Dunedin, where after some time living in a former Mental Hospital I picked up work as an Assistant Editor for Natural History New Zealand, formerly the Natural History unit of TVNZ. NHNZ have been going since the early days of television are a highly successful award winning team that produce television for high profile US networks such as Discovery, Animal Planet and National Geographic. It really was a pleasure to be working with such a talented and down to earth team of great people!

All was going well until earlier this year when my working holiday visa came to an end, having spent so long in China before I got to NZ, the authorities wouldn’t let me extend my visas unless I had a very expensive medical examination to prove I wasn’t carrying any diseases! The cheek of it! Yes I admit, China is dirty and polluted in parts, and we did pick up the occasional travel bug but this was just over the top asking me pay a private surgery a lot of money just to prove I was “clean”!

And so it was, in May 2009 Jenny and I packed our bags, sold our beloved touring companion ‘Zulu’, and returned to our native land of the UK. This is a very brief summary of my last 18 months. If I find the time to upload some pictures and more stories then I will add these to my travels blog http://globaltrainsport.wordpress.com

In the meantime I hope to keep this blog updated with clips of video I have been working on and anything else related to documentary and film that interest me. More to come soon, thanks for visiting my blog!

Cheers,
Dave