The Unique approach we are using to shoot our doc for C5/BBC- 10 November 2014

 



Executive Producer/Director Liz Tudker explains about the innovative approach used to make
Filming My Father: In Life and Death


When Verve was commissioned to make a documentary for Channel 5, following the story of Steve Isaac, who has motor neurone disease, as executive producer and director,  I knew I wanted to tell this story differently.

But the question was how?


I decided to find an approach to telling Steve and his family's story in which nothing would be contrived or reconstructed, so that viewers would experience the action, as the family did, the moment it happened.

So I asked Steve's son, Fraser if we could be prepared to become a camera operator on the film. Then we would have someone in the family home 24/7 capturing those critical unrepeatable moments. 

So that is what we have done, which has resulted in a slightly eccentric filming set-up that has been a really interesting learning curve for me (and I hope for Fraser). He and I  talk constantly about what is going on in the family home and the different issues that are emerging, and discuss how, where and what he should shoot.

While I  come down regularly, both to shoot the main narrative of the documentary, and to review and give further direction to the material Fraser is filming. 

This is clearly not an approach that would work for every film.  It would be far more straight forward and certainly much less labour intensive to make a conventional documentary, but I don’t think we could  capture quite the same intimacy and rawnesswhich I hope audiences will respond to, both in the UK and abroad.

 



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