I’ve been working on this documentary for nearly two weeks now, and it feels like I’ve set up, researched, found out, investigated and fixed so much. It’s been a project I never thought I’d undertake during my time at Sky, but I’m so grateful for the opportunity of being able to do it.
I’ll share a secret with you. When I went through that ‘Hollywood stage’ of deciding what career I wanted to follow (where it was actor or footballer), I always had aspirations of being a film director. I used to sit and write stories on my computer when I was 9 and 10 years old, anything that would spring to the imagination would get turned into some weird and warped story/screenplay. I guess I saw myself as a younger and more British Spielberg. By helping with the production of this documentary, I think I’ve rediscovered that little 9 or 10 year old Daniel who let his ridiculous imagination run wild. As a result, some of my more ridiculous ideas have made it into the documentary, and its just a fantastic feeling. When I said talk about the budget cuts with Celtic wrestling going on in the background as some kind of metaphor for ‘struggling’ with lots of visceral and gritty up close shots of the wrestlers, I never expected Tim to turn around and say ‘I really like that idea, go and get permission for us to film at this wrestling event’. Marvellous!
Other than that, today has been spent doing more planning and investigating. Finding different statistics to use in the script, writing the intro to the script, writing letters to old people so we can interview with them. It’s all so different, it’s all so fun, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that makes journalism a career path that I want to follow.
Sky's armada of satellite trucks. Of course most of them are around the country somewhere.
The last part of the day was spent in ‘the garage’. It’s a building round the back of Sky’s complex that from the way the cameraman all talk about it, you’d think it was some kind of Holy Grail. And it didn’t disappoint. We drove into this huge hangar to find the walls lined with Volvo estates, vans with editing suites in the back and several massive satellite trucks on a similar scale to that of the Death Star. Elsewhere in this hangar were aisles upon aisles of really high end gadgets. It was a nerd’s wet dream, and I was having a similar crisis. We collected our new little toy from its designated spot on aisle 3,429 and headed back to the car to have a play. It’s called a lipstick camera, because its a video camera in a case no bigger than a lipstick container. It’s what Top Gear use for their in-car shots, and we were going to be using it for exactly the same thing. Using the high-tech adhesive known as gaffer tape, we stuck our lipstick cam on the dashboard and voila, we had ourselves an interesting little shot for the doc. One more day of planning, fixing and all that jazz, and then it’s permanent home time for Daniel. And I’m gutted I’m not going to see this doc through to the end, especially as I’ve worked so hard on the damn thing. Still, when they play it on Sky at the end of August, I think I’ll feel pretty darn proud.
