Work in Progress / Men's Sheds - Part 01
Our in-house director Danny takes us behind the curtain of his new work in progress mini-doc.
It feels like an absolute age ago that I discovered our local Men’s Shed and I couldn’t help but stick my nose in to see what was going on. In case, like me, you’d never hear of it before, it’s a self-sufficient, community-based workshop set up to combat men over 50 feeling isolated from society.
Since I joined the 3angrymen team I’d been looking around for a side-project to get off the ground (it’s something we can all do with the company’s support) but nothing had taken my fancy. The minute I started chatting with Shed Chairperson, Ray (top bloke), my mind started whirring and I knew I had to make a film about this project. It felt inevitable, all I needed was a plan of action.
My first port of call was to convince my fellow-Angry, Kezia, that she too needed to make this film (after taking her on a guided tour of the shed, she didn’t need much convincing). With her on-board, we started plotting how the film could play out and the themes we wanted to hit. After hours of back and fourth in The Victory next door, we came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to be a film about loneliness. Instead we wanted to focus on telling a story of discovery, of finding that place, that group of people, that makes you feel at home, whatever’s going on at work or wherever.
That’s the beautiful thing I could feel as soon as I entered that workshop - there’s a spirit present like I’ve never experienced, a connection between former strangers that feels so warm and effortless.
Stage one of the production was recording audio interviews, choosing to get stories away from the camera so we could capture as authentic a voice for the film as possible. It’s not rocket science, take the massive, expensive looking camera rig away and suddenly the conversation flows unhindered. And as we chatted to various members of the shed, we were blown away by their hospitality, generosity and honesty.
Having put a super-rough audio edit together, we headed out to capture the visuals. I’ve worked with (Director of Photography) Charles Mori quite a few times and had unashamedly pestered him to join us for this project. Thankfully, it didn’t take too much begging before he was fully on board. It’s a side-project so we kept things like kit and crew to a minimum, our only real embellishment being an 8mm film camera that we wanted to use to capture some of the more fun, nostalgia tinged moments.
We’re right in the middle of ingesting and arranging all of the footage right now (and waiting for actual film to be processed in a lab - pretty cool for someone like me, who started making films during the DSLR revolution!) so I’ll update again in a few weeks, to talk a bit more about how the filming went. Here’s some bts shots in the meantime.
