The Documentary that nearly didn’t happen

I created a Documentary in the 11 days that showcase and immortalized how Salisbury felt about late queen Elizabeth passing away on the 8th of September 2022. 

This would have also been the second multi-documentary that would have been created. The first being for one of my first clients in London. 

The Moment the queen died I was only watching the news as I wanted to see what happened in regards to the cost of living cities that we are all living in at the moment. 

Thursday night - I was in two minds about if I should create something or not. 

My mum came into my room to ask me if I was thinking about creating something or not and to be honest I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to share something that was meaningful and be able to tell this story with care. 

But I did find it really hard to just go to work as normal when it came to posting or video editing or even writing like I am now. 

I ended started work at 10:50 or so and I was making my daily post of content when I looked outside my office window ( that overlooks the market space. ) 

See a few photographer friends of mine stood just outside the guildhall, so I thought why not pop down and say hello, as I was explaining to one of them if I should or shouldn’t create something for the queen’s passing, they told me that Tom and Carlione were going to be out in the next 10 mins to lay some flowers for the queens. 

After hearing this, my instinct kicked in, and I thought to myself… If I film it I can choose how it is used after, but if I don’t then of course I can’t. 

So that of course led to me, running back up to my office to get my gear ( this is one of the pros of always having your gear ready to go ) ad ended up filming, and then I drop a copy-writing good friend of mine a message, as I didn’t just want this to be another “social media” video. 

Due to what had happened and how people had felt I knew that I needed to be very careful if I was going to do something and make sure that was done in the right way. Therefore and he ended up jumping on a call, where he gave me the idea to interview some of the “people of Salisbury” and get them to tell the story. 

Of course, I did like this idea, but it wasn’t going to be easy to pull off, because normally to “interview” people would just set up in a public place and Radom would stop people who were just going about their day if they would like to take part. This is not easy to do normally, never mind when we had just lost our queen. 

So I put a post out on my personal Facebook to see if anyone has been to one of the three events, where the queen has come to Salisbury, the last being in 2012 for the Diamond Jubilee. 

But after talking to a few of the photographers and journalists that have covered it, the queen didn’t really meet many people. Mostly due to the security risk, I would think. 

So I changed my thoughts on just asking anyone from the Salisbury community if they would like to answer “What does late queen Elizabeth mean to you?” 

This led to me getting reaching out to a few people about getting them to answer the question. 

One of them happen to be a conservative City Council, and she told me about some of the rest of the conservative City Councils laying some flowers on Saturday morning, so I asked if they minded me joining them to be able to film them laying the flowers and then ended up going on to interviewing a few of the others as well as, filming the book of condolences.

Leading into the day of the proclamation of the new king. That was going to be taking place on the following Sunday ( 11th September ) As this was a shot I didn’t really want to miss, I was lucky enough to have Richard’s Clake help with filming some of the speech as well as recording a feed from the sounds system that the mayor will be talking into. So we would be able to get the clearest audio for the proclamation itself. Before the proclamation itself, I wanted to be able to film some of the city councilors getting ready. 

And the group of dignitaries as they said to arrive inside the guildhall, I planned to use this footage to help tell the story of the day. However, when filming something like this that has one opportunity it is always better to have more than one camera. As you will want to see some of the reaction shots as well as see and hear the mayor share the proclamation itself. 

The following week, if I am honest, was one of the odd’s works weeks I have been able to work through in my life, as a lot of networking meetings were still taking place, but everyone didn’t want to be pushed when it came to selling what they do. As everyone has been really considerate of the situation. 

So I used most of the time to interview as many people as I could, a lot with creating content and doing as much networking as normal. Due to the time scale of the project as I was looking to share the final documentary on the day after the queen’s funeral.

I need to start the post-production workflow by mid-week.

My plan for the post-production workflow was going to be to build each “act” in full before moving on, but I ended up creating the audio/narrative base of the whole documentary first. This of course starts with the opening audio from the beacon lighting over the summer. Followed by the BBC announcement of the queen’s passing. Then I cut up the interviews to do my best to tell a story. 

One of the things that I think I am sure a few of you, maybe thinking about is how you connect so many points of view into one story that flows, Personally, for me, I started by listening to all of the interviews again, then started placing them in any order of the story I was looking to tell, for example, Tom Corbin started his interview talking about the start of his time as mayor with the Queen's Jubilee. 

I wanted to start with this, as I was able to use it to create a smaller story within this “act” of the documentary. Also wanted to start with Tom's interview as the supporting footage that I was planning to use to go over the interview. Was the first chronological bit of the footage that I had filmed, after the queen had passed away. 

And where possible it is always better to share things in chronological order. 

After adding the proclamation to the end of the interviews, I was nearly able to start adding the supporting footage over the top of the “A-Roll”. The rule I personally follow when it comes to adding supporting footage or B Roll is whenever my audio says “Queen Elizabeth for example” 

I would add an image or a bit of footage relevant to her. As we try to hold the viewer's attention. I would repeat this progress over as much of the “A-roll” or talking clips as possible. 

Overall the post-production progress for the documentary, to five 6 hours sessions the last of their sessions was 7 pm till 2 am on Monday night. As if to be honest I underestimated how much of the queen’s funeral was on Monday. 

Of course when you create anything of this size or scale. There are a lot of things that I know I could have done better, but that is mostly the point of creating something that pushes you to what is possible. 

Many thanks to everyone who took part in the project, but also to you for reading this post. I hope you found it useful to hear my workflow for my second documentary