Once Upon a Time, I was living and working in Malta, making videos for numerous companies in the online and gambling world, many with a football (soccer) theme, one of which was The Longest Journey, a short documentary which you can find here.
That film proved to be a huge learning curve, particularly on the production side of things, battling and juggling a large amount of people I wanted to appear in the film who were scattered all over the UK and the North East of England and the very small team behind the camera and very little money to get it done. It got made, it got seen (at film festivals before being acquired by the popular football channel Copa90) and it, I believe, did for the company who commissioned it what they wanted. However, it wasn’t the only film I set out to make whilst living in Malta.
In fact, there were 2 others, one which got abandoned as the Covid-19 pandemic set in at the beginning and another that did see some action.
It began at the National Pool of Malta, a great pool that I loved swimming in under the (usually) blue Maltese island sky. A friend of mine, the eventual Director of Photography of the film, had been talking to me often about his fascination with underwater photography in recent weeks. My wife had a new camera she wanted to get to know as her career kept growing and she and the DoP had been hanging out a lot, experimenting and wanted to film something. I, of course, wanted to make a short, imagining I would be able to fit in some sort of experiment in between jobs that actually paid the rent. So, with all that in my head I went for a swim to be confronted by something I had only ever seen in passing every four years, televised as part of the Olympics; Synchronized Swimming.
It immediately fascinated me and looked amazing. I saw athletes with incredible grace above the water line and unbelievable endurance and strength below it. I sat on the side and watched for a while before swimming over once they had finished and asking one of the coaches about it. It was then that I started to hear about the sport more and how it established itself in Malta.
A couple of weeks later, a couple of meetings with this person and that person, some emails, phone calls and a little research, I wondered whether this could be something to scratch all of our itches. So, when I told the others about it and what I thought we could do, we decided to go for it, we would try and make a short documentary about it.
I felt we had some interesting characters and a nice little story which I saw as one of friendship and fate as much as the sport itself. Together, we felt that as we had access to what we needed to make a litte film, he had a GH5, we had a Sony A7sII, they could film, I would record sound, we all had enough about us to organise a few things here and there and I could edit at the end.
We also had that other essential ingredient; the will to give it a go.
It all sounded so easy!
What we didn’t have was money or a great deal of time. The money was, we naively felt, not an issue. Where there’s a will, there’s a way and whilst that is absolutely true, there is one thing that money does help with. Time. There are plenty of other things too, but we will get to that.
We first had to co-ordinate ourselves, with three different workloads, at three different companies, doing three different things on top of the schedules of those we wanted to film who were coming and going to the island as their lives started to move on or who were hard to pin down, a victim of time themselves. Doing things without any money is a really romantic idea at the beginning but then you slowly realise why it is needed.
However, we battled on and slowly, a day here, an hour there, we started filming and filmed some really nice stuff. Some of it we instantly thought was ‘gold’ whilst some got old very quickly as people or stories changed. Then, due to the stop/start nature of our production, some of the gold became old or worse - irrelevant. But, we battled on, kept filming here and there and kept chipping away at what we thought could achieve something like what I wanted to do story-wise and they wanted to do in terms of picture. We had grand plans for a beautifully lit, full, grand performance of a routine in an amazing pool over looking an amazing view. We had ideas to film from below the surface and from above and mimic the way this camera tech avoids the problem of air to water refraction.
And then, it all stopped.
There were reasons of course. Time kept on being our enemy, then there was the pandemic which hit Malta just a couple of weeks after it came to Europe via Italy. Everything shut down just as we felt we wee getting somewhere. And when I say shut down, the island locked the gates, closed the airports and we were all banished indoors. Then, there was an impending move back to Germany which my wife & I had decided to do, not to mention a baby on it’s way (for the DoP - not us).
All momentum was lost and with no reason to be making the film other than the sheer will to make something and try some things, bills needed paying and moves needed making. Of course, I never quite let it go but a new country on our side, the new baby on theirs and a pandemic keeping us out didn’t help. That, plus the feature I had been developing, writing and researching since around 2015, Aazadi was starting to gain a little momentum and needed a lot of attention. So, that was that. I feel sure we are not the only filmmakers who have tried, got something in the can but had to leave it there, never to be finished. In fact, I know we are not.
But, I can’t let it go, I don’t want to leave something unfinished, not when there are some really lovely shots, some lovely moments and the building blocks of something that really shows the three main characters as really great ambassadors to their sport and to each other and their lasting, oddly coincidental but enduring friendship. I also feel I owe it to them, my wife, our DoP and to our time on the island to do something with it.
So, I took a look at the rushes and loaded up the Premiere project I had started organising in as we shot. I had a couple of interview sequences synced and marked up which I had forgotten and a timeline of bits and pieces I had thrown together that I felt could lead us somewhere (in actual fact I remember exactly what it was for - it was supposed to lead us in to our big, gorgeous, amazing set-piece as mentioned above). I also found one of what I call a ‘text cut’ which is a sequence I often make at various stages - often just before post begins or during production. What that generally is is a bunch of text cards put together as a sequence, outlining scenes that have been shot (and if so I put a representative frame underneath), are going to be shot (where I sometimes draw something to represent it) or should be shot (something I feel is missing or is needed or going to be shot). If I can, I put a few sounds in there, music if I have it and any soundbites I know could spark a scene or moment. Pretty rudimentary but I like it and it often helps communicate the ideas and directions to others. Sadly, as I went through the sequence, there was a fair amount of strange stick figure drawings and what felt like cryptic text clues to what we never got.
I also realised that part of the problem was going to be the sound. Malta is often a noisy place with half a million people crammed on to a little island with most of them in the area in which we were always shooting - the National Pool Complex. Add to that a swimming pool with whistles, water polo religiously practised and a general mass of people and traffic and borrowed sound equipment that I hadn’t had a chance to use often if we had it to use at all, it made for a challenge.
But, I started so I thought I would try and finish and so here we are. If this blog has felt a little like a battle between the past tense and the present tense at times, then I apologise for any confusion but, having decided not to give up on the project we are calling Synchronised (the jury is out on whether to go with an s as in the British spelling or a z as the Americans use), it lives both in the past and the present for me.
I then had a weekend free, alone with nothing to do on a wet wintery German weekend. I decided to take my new mac (with M1 max chips) for a spin. I soon remembered that we shot a lot (but not all) in 4K and with three different cameras (I had forgotten we had a couple of sessions using a Blackmagic pocket 4K). What resulted was a re-worked, not as originally intended but not altogether terrible assembly cut of around 35 minutes, admittedly missing what I felt were a couple of shots of the island of Malta for context here and there and some sort of key ‘action’ scene I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Then I slept on it. And then slept on it again and then again as other things got in the way until this last weekend, I found myself alone, free, needing a break from making a new pitch deck and an urge to do something constructive. Or maybe it was just another wet, miserable day outside and the (mostly) blue sky of Malta felt like the thing to look at.
The timeline coming together
35 minutes became 30 as I trimmed and constructed something resembling a through thread, then it became 25 as the path got a little clearer. Some temp music helped trim another 2 minutes and the big black hole of whatever it is I am missing shrank before I knew that there is a 15-20 minute short, just waiting to get out. We never intended to make anything other than a short under 40 minute film in the first place so I feel good that despite everything, we have something approaching a film as I write this blog at the end of that weekend.
So, what now? As I wrote above, I feel like I owe it to those involved, and myself, to finish what we started. It might not be as grand a vision as we had but there is something I think we can be proud of starting to form. The big question is, how to finish it? Firstly, it needs some time. Secondly, even if I find the time to finish it, it probably does need some money. There is, ideally, a little archive to buy which would really help what was originally a black screen with ‘archive goes here’ written across it and stick figures which are supposed to be swimmers dancing in the water drawn on it. It will need a really good audio mix (and some fixing) when done as well and a couple of music tracks, though let’s see how the usual suspects of royalty free music suppliers can serve up.
So, this is the first of what I expect to be a few blogs on how the project comes together. We set out to make a short documentary that celebrates these three women in Malta who met and made something happen in their sport and I’m determined to finish it, one way or another and finish it. The aim is to find a way to create something that doesn’t need an asterisk next to it explaining why it isn’t better. It is what it is. Whoever might read this will know that it isn’t what I originally wanted to do but then, what film ever truly is?
In the words of the great Werner Herzog, “day one is the point of no return” and that, “there is never an excuse not to finish a film”.
Quite right. No excuses.
Now I just need to find some more wet and miserable weekends with nothing else to do…