I’ll be honest, I’ve had a really nice two days to bookend my weekend.It’s been a mad rollercoaster of three weeks, and it was about time (apart from my weekends of course) that I was spared a day where I wasn’t tearing through the news or the traffic on the M4 to get to Wales.
Anyway, day 15. Friday. The end of the week. It showed. Both me and Tim were fairly drained and prepping ourselves for a relaxed day. It started off by watching some of Tim’s previous documentaries in an attempt to stir the creative juices for the current doc. One of the docs was entitled ‘The Essex Factor’ (I thought I’d be a good judge on this one) and it was a 30 minute piece designed to predict where Britain would be in five years time by using Essex as a microcosm. It was really nicely done, with loads of awesome helicopter shots, showing my home county in the best light possible. Tim also showed me another half hour doc he’d done which focused on the psyche of Ipswich prostitute-hunter Steve Wright. It was super stylised and it looked epic. I know I’m probably quite biased but it was kind of a news version of the film ‘Se7en’. And that’s a pretty reasonable compliment. So after watching those and realising we couldn’t incorporate any of the kick-ass tricks into our current doc, we went back to the drawing board and attempted to bash out some ideas for tricks and style ideas to use on our infernal shithole, Merthyr. Unfortunately, apart from making it look more bleak than Chernobyl (which was not the idea), we were up shit creek without a paddle. So we turned in for lunch.
Our second assignment was to track down someone we’d seen in a British Pathé newsreel about Merthyr from 1946. Hollywood makes tracking people down seem ridiculously easy. Next time Jason Bourne has to track down an 88-year old pensioner who doesn’t have broadband or mobile to trace, and has probably changed their last name after marriage, then I can call him a true spy. Anyway, we pinpointed our elusive old lady to an address in Potter’s Bar. It took us about an hour to get there from West London, thanks to rush hour traffic (at 1 in the afternoon). Incase she wasn’t in, we’d prepped a letter explaining we’d like an interview and for her to talk about Merthyr. When she didn’t answer the door, the letter was looking like our best method of communication. We tried her neighbours, one was a particularly frail old lady who must have thought we were trying to fit a dish on her house when we said we we from ‘Sky News’. Nevertheless, she revealed the lady we were looking for had passed on about a year ago. It was a real possibility that a lady of her age could have died, so with disappointment in our hearts, Tim and I headed in home.
My final Monday morning commute was far less eventful than similar ventures. Apart from the fact the Central Line was abnormally busy. And apart from the fact an Asian teen was pressed against me for the whole journey, even when the train emptied out. It was surreal, scary, and a bit smelly. Anyway, I’d been set a series of tasks while Tim was out of the office, and they were all finished a bit quicker than I’d expected. So I did some more research on Merthyr, which didn’t turn out to be research at all, rather just continual views of the Newport Alicia Keys parody . Once Tim had returned, we set about establishing a schedule of filming and a useable structure for the doc. He also set me to work on the script for the intro, which I thought was pretty cool. Having a mind more bonkers and obscure than Tim Burton’s certainly helps when trying to come up with ideas for stuff, and fingers crossed, some of my ideas will make the final piece. The final task of the day was to find some kind of title sequence which we could relay to the graphics department to make our own title sequence. Cue an hour of scouring some of YouTube’s darkest corners, until I found this. I saw it, loved it. Showed to Tim, he loved it. Again, it’s a little something I’ve done that may just end up in the doc.
