Today I met George

I have now attended the Sheffield Tea Dance at the Sheffield City Hall three times. Having quietly sat on my own and observed for the first two dances, jotting notes and drawing little images of shots that came to mind, I decided to approach a few people and start conversation. I spoke to Irene and Brian an elderly couple who took an interest in my note-taking (they approached me), they told me to go and try to chat with a man named George, pointing him out on the dance floor. After waiting about fifteen minutes (the guy never stopped dancing) he finally took a breather. I asked him a few questions about the dances and he told me about how he dances 4-5 times a week at various locations throughout Sheffield. 'twice here, once at Meadowhall, once at Sheffield Lane Top and when its on in Chapel Town, but that's old time dancing' he said his dance partner for the day, Margaret then leaned over stating he was '94 years old'. After our brief conversation he stood up asked Margaret if she wanted to dance and off they were again.

Pitch Notes

Im looking to make a documentary focused around an elderly couple who attend tea dances. The main ideas I want to explore within the film are to do with love and relationships the staging being the tea dances that the couple attends.

Documentary – direct cinema/cinema verite/observational

Albert maysles – grey gardens – iris

Envisage it as being slow paced and gathering a small amount of momentum nothing overtly quick

Soft pastille style color temperature

Potentially working on my own/with one other person due to the intrusive nature of the film. As I want to film in their house and spend a lot of time with them mostly using lightweight portable equipment (natural lighting, without tripods etc.) this is in hope of trying to allow them to be as comfortable and uninterrupted as possible.

I want to explore their relationship, how they met, where they met, how they’ve stayed together over such a long period of time.

 Essentially the film will be a love story about a real couple. Aiming to understand the struggles of age whilst not taking that into focus.

Locations

Sheffield town hall

On Tuesdays we welcome Alf Evans who will play LIVE MUSIC, on Thursdays Aubrey Robinson brings his LIVE MUSIC Sheffield.

Appealing due to the use of live music which will allow for further footage and a nice scale to work into the film.

Saturdays the biggest dance with highest attendance no live music but also no breaks.

Rochdale tea dance hosted by Neil gibbons who I spoke to and interviewed previously as part of my r&d unit is incredibly helpful and during conversations has mentioned that he believes he is aware of a few couples who a) might be interested and b) are quite interesting characters.

I am going to be attending one or two of these a week starting by attending with my grandma who used to go regularly and then start begin to go by myself with a camera once I have attained the necessary permissions. Following this I aim to start talking to and building a friendship with some of the participants then hopefully some of them will be willing to get involved.

The film isn’t about the spectacular or anything incredible just a nice slow honest film about growing old together.

These are some of the notes i have made for the pitch we have coming up.

film pitch

These are screenshots from the Film Pitch done earlier today to the rest of my course. I feel that the presentation went fairly well despite a slightly nervous start from myself.

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL

As part of the course our tutors organised a trip to the Rotterdam Film Festival. The trip was a fantastic experience as it differed greatly from the trip during second year to Berlinale; with a large amount of experimental and short films to available to go see over a much smaller city. I feel that due to this festival being much smaller we were able to go see more films as the screenings were less geographically spread out. I focused on trying to see as many short films as possible attending three separate short film collections this was a great way of fitting in a wide variety of films in a short space of time. 

Chris Daniels also informed us of a night called Throwing Shadows, which was a night of Japanese Expanded Cinema, in a really interesting underground bar called Worm (which had the most bizarre toilets you've ever seen.) It was an incredible experience as it was something I had never really come across and live it was extremely impressive, although it probably wont directly influence any of my work this year I found that it gave me some really strong ideas for shorts that I intend to make post-graduation and in the years to come.

The selections of shorts varied massively from experimental to narrative films, with an even wider variation of themes from the Syrian war to a girls struggle between masturbation and religion. Some I enjoyed less than others but many of them resonated firmly with how I would like my films to come across.

 We also went a viewed a documentary called ‘Night and Fog in Zona’ by Jung Sung-il. This was a four-hour documentary that was as much a test of resolve as it was a film. There were some good moments and interesting shots however I seriously struggled with it as it was a fairly slow paced portrait. Having said this there were parts and sections that I will take into consideration as I plan on also making quite a slowly paced film so it could help in doing that. Below is a description of the film as provided by the IFFR website.