The Miracle of Crowdfunding / A Miracle Mockumentary – Documentary

This project started out as an ambitious crowdfunding campaign for a master’s degree that I ultimately did not undertake.

I became enamored with the idea of building my own postgraduate education, which is how my MTA Portfolio came about, so I withdrew from my original master’s degree and abandoned The Miracle of Crowdfunding campaign before all the footage had been filmed for it.

However, I didn’t want to leave four months of footage unused, which is how I hit upon the idea of The Miracle Mockumentary, a film about me trying and struggling to crowdfund the tuition fee for my master’s degree.

The real focus of the film would have been about the hardships of surviving and thriving as a young person in today’s complicated world… based upon the real life struggles that me and George, my colleague who helped me create The Miracle of Crowdfunding, had experienced while filming the original crowdfunding material in 2014.

Ultimately, this project was abandoned because the building of my MTA Portfolio kept getting in the way of writing a script for the new material that would have integrated with the material filmed for The Miracle of Crowdfunding.

Additionally, George became increasingly uncomfortable with portraying himself and his private life on-screen.

Some of the material filmed for The Miracle of Crowdfunding may yet find its way into my Outside the Box Inside the Box documentary project.

Find out more about the Miracle projects >>>

 

Breaking Cinema – Podcast

Breaking Cinema was a documentary storytelling podcast about our relationships with cinema and multimedia that I started developing in 2014.

A considerable amount of work went into developing the format of the podcast. I recorded hours of content for it and even had some theme music made before I abandoned the project in 2016.

Breaking Cinema mainly developed out of my frustration with the dominant complacent thinking of film theory; as well as my dissatisfaction with the lack of film podcasts that went deep into analyzing the workings of cinema and our relationships with multimedia.

I didn’t want to listen to yet another film podcast where a group of people sat around discussing topics and ideas that have been discussed before.

I recorded sixteen test episodes, varying between 30 minutes all the way up to 90 minutes in length. Some episodes I did solo and others I recorded with colleagues who I thought would bring insight and differing perspectives to the focus of the discussion. I recorded the test episodes to help me figure out what form I wanted the podcast to take.

The format I decided on was an experimental documentary storytelling podcast that would constructively explored cinema, multimedia and human psychology from a lucid and lateral, but highly entertaining and quirky perspective.

This meant each episode would have a different focus with each episode being a constructed presentation – some episodes would be documentaries, others would be audio dramas and a few would be self-reflections on the podcast and other projects I was working on.

You can read more about the development of the podcast and read my detailed outlines for the first ten episodes on my film blog.

Find out more about Breaking Cinema >>>

 

Living With Hammy – Documentary

Envisioned as something of a sequel to Down A Word: The Story of NEXT FRIDAY, Living With Hammy chronicles a week I spent living with my friend Nick Hammond, a.k.a. Hammy, during my university summer holidays in 2010.

I never got round to editing the final documentary, but I did edit together a short teaser trailer to make my friends laugh.

In the footage I portrayed a very annoying version of myself who was constantly winding Hammy up, so the documentary would have edged into being something of a mockumentary.

I was annoying because that is how I could be, but also as revenge for how annoying Hammy had been to me over the years and because I knew it would provoke some amusing responses from him.

Ultimately, I didn’t edit the footage together because it got buried under all my other university commitments and, after viewing all the footage, I didn’t think what I had filmed was all that interesting.

Find out more about Living With Hammy >>>