Production

Production for this project began before the brief was handed out to us, I wanted to do this project before I the unit was handed as it is personal to me as the drummer of the band is my uncle. He messaged me one day and told me that someone was interviewing them for her PhD in Music and he asked if I wanted to come down to the Shed and film the interview and any B-roll I could get of the Shed itself, the band playing etc. That was on the 19th of February and the brief was not given to us until the 4th of March.

On the 22nd of February I was invited to my uncles house to interview him and Jon King, who is the bassist of the band, we filmed the interview in my uncles living room and it was great, I got a lot of questions answered, they discussed their upbringing with music and how they all got into it together and individually. They also talked about the music around Aberdare at the time, with covers bands, genres and Stereophonics for example, they also talked about the drug scene at the time and how a lot of them had to move limiting their time to be able to make music. They also talked about how the band TUN was formed, where the name came from, bands they had previosuly been in and more.

In March then, on the 23rd, just minutes before finding out that the Lockdown had been issued, I left my uncles house after filming an interview with him as my original plan was to fill a group interview with the members of the band, individual interviews and then interviews with family members. I asked mainly the same questions that I asked in the previous interview, however I also added more personal questions to him himself and expand on his childhood and his interest in music, his progession to becoming a drummer, how he met Ian and Jon, the other bands he was with previously and more. Even though I didn’t take note and document the production process of this interview, with it being many days since the brief was given, I was more focused on the research part and creating all the paperwork and tools needed before production begun. It is wrong that I began production before completing all the steps needed before hand, however if I hadn’t I would not have the footage I have now and I would have given up on this Unit entirely.

Now even though this project still won’t be a full documentary as promised, it is better than nothing. Due to the lockdown lasting longer than expected, I have not been able to get the footage that I originally planned. At a time I was considering filming a interview over an online video call using Zoom as seen in my research, however I want this project to be how I envisioned it, and as I have said before this is not just for college and to get a diploma, it is personal to me also and I do not want it to be some half baked piece of work. So because of this, as noted in my journal I will be creating a trailer for the documentary to be handed in for the Unit and will continue the production of the documentary after the lockdown and pandemic is over in my own free time.

As of writing this (22nd of May 2020) I have already created a trailer, which was going to be used for promotional material, however I have decided to create another trailer, compare the two and then from there decide which I prefer and I may have a select few view each trailer and see their opinion on which they belive to be better.