NightCrawling

For our Documentary on freeganism we felt that capturing a bin dip would be an essential element and would give us the opportunity to include some more exciting footage giving context to the interviews. This would likely require shooting with a hand-held approach, with low lighting conditions as it would in all certainty take place at night, and probably involve a degree of trespassing. As an almost alternative to our poetic documentary, and because i wanted to familiarise myself with the Sony HDV-Z1, I went out and filmed a friend who was doing a photography project on voyeurism as he took pictures of people from high vantage-points such as car-park rooftops.

This was a great emulation of the  scenarios we will likely encounter when we film the eventual bin dip, with low level exposure of light being one obstacle to overcome as well as featuring aspects of someone climbing into places they shouldn't. Despite being hand-held i was surprised with how smooth some of the footage turned out, and very little colour correction had to be applied to the darker shots, mostly only on some over-exposed shots under car-park lighting.
I was partially inspired by Thierry Guetta's early footage from Exit Through the Gift Shop, taken as he pursued graffiti artists at night as they created their street art, his camera glued to the subjects at all times. The artists he followed would often clime onto rooftops as well, and Thierry is constantly present to witness this, even though his participation is minimal.

Secret Garden Sound Design

Originally we had intended for the piece to contain a frenetic build up showing a busy city, quickly cutting between traffic, crowds and construction work and building to a crescendo before revealing a peaceful garden hidden in amongst the chaos. Whilst an element of this was retained in the first fifteen seconds of our final edit, much of it was dropped for several reasons. Whilst we did intend to a show a marked contrast between the two settings, the footage we shot of the city did not blend well with the garden footage and the tracking shots that introduce this. The garden is also situated behind a dual carriageway and this is noticeable in the interview segments, so a wild track of traffic had to be included to make the voice-over blend in more seamlessly.

A wild track of birds in the cemetery was also included but did not quite have the same tranquil effect as originally intended.

The traffic and construction sound build up in the beginning was still included and the crescendo effect was achieved by layering several clips of passing cars whilst gradually increasing the volume and then cutting the volume of suddenly when the acceleration was at its peak. A filter was also on one of the tracks as we were hoping to emulate the 'drop' used in electronic music.

The interview recordings themselves required a lot of editing down. There was around 40 minutes of dialogue that had to be cut down to just two minutes, and to do this I first reduced it to segments covering the different topics discussed and from that removed the most concise sentences that best summarised the story.
The contributors responses to questions were very conversational in nature and there were a lot of 'ands' 'ums' 'sos'  and word repetition which didn't suit the voice over narration we had in mind for our piece. These were removed however some words ran into one-another and it was hard to establish a clean cut off point with some sentences.

The sentences "It really started last year in this form, but getting all the funding and permissions through the council has been a long game' and 'we could do with more cash to actually pay people, otherwise its all voluntary' required several trims to make a concise quote.

A minimalistic score was used consisting solely of notes plucked on an acoustic guitar which compliments the scenic beauty of the garden and the David Altobelli inspired cinematography.

Broomhall Area Research

During the interviews Malcolm and John both mentioned Broomhalls history and affiliation with drug dealing, prostitution and even gun crime. Having lived just round the corner from the secret garden last year myself (without ever noticing it's existence), I was curious to find out more facts about the crime rates there compared with my experience of the area. Whilst a council estate will inevitably always have the problems that arise from low income living conditions I never personally encountered much trouble, on a few occasions i was approached by young Somali males trying to sell me weed but they were never particularly intimidating or harassing, as some people have perceived them to be. A friend of mine was however mugged at knifepoint whilst walking home from mine through the estate onto devonshire green and there were times when I noticed an increased police presence. 

http://www.britishstreets.info/moore-street-broomhall-sheffield-south-yorkshire

Whilst those statistics are high both  John and Malcolm seemed very optimistic about the positive attitudes and efforts of the community working together to overcome the negative aspects within their society and note that much of the more serious drug dealing has moved away from the area thanks to the gardens up-keeping by the locals.

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(Photo by Susan Hogan)  

The gardeners mentioned  the removal of needles from this tree as well as hundreds of others when they cleared out the former wasteland.

In 2009 escalating gang rivalries resulted in a fatal shooting with several others injured

This article encompasses many of the issues surrounding the neighbourhood from the time, and much of its content supports the themes addressed in the interviews we took.

http://www.academia.edu/724171/Images_of_Broomhall_Sheffield._Urban_Violence_and_Using_the_Arts_as_a_Research_Aid

                          

Secret Garden Interview Transcript

In order to make extracting the most concise quotes simpler I edited down the interview into segments which i then typed up to refer back to, rather than attempting to commit to memory. I then highlighted the quotes that i felt had the most relevance and narrative function and used those.

Here is the full interview, when typing it up, the pauses, 'ands' 'ums' and 'sos'  were removed, owing to the conversational nature of the contributors responses, and so some sentences might seem a little unclear.

Secret Garden location shots for storyboard

A few reconnaissance pictures we took to give ourselves an idea of how to go about filming this hidden little gem.