St Andrew's Church

Pre production

I emailed the church asking them if it would be okay to do some filming in the church.

In the meantime, we went to the library to read up on the church to get an idea of it's history and what elements to explore and what questions to ask.

We received a reply stating that it was okay for us to go ahead and film in the church.

From then, we decided to visit the church and speak to some people and see if there was anyone willing to speak about the church on camera. We spoke to a steward named John, who agreed to be interviewed and so we arranged to interview him the following week. He also told us that he was part of the choir and that they practice on Friday evenings. This interested us, as we wanted to set some shots and record the audio of the choir singing as a soundtrack for the film. Whilst we were preparing for John's interview, a man called David was hovering around, taking an interest. John suggested that we speak to him about being on camera, as he had been a caretaker there for around 12 years in the past. David approached us to talk about the technology we were using, which we used as an opportunity to ask if he wanted to be interviewed, too. At first he declined, but after some persuading he agreed and we shot his interview after John's.

We had already popped into the church once before we had started filming, as we wanted to double check with the office that it was okay and to ask if they knew of anyone who would be willing to be on camera. We first encountered another steward who suggested we speak to Jack Spence, the historian, as he knew a great deal about the church. She gave us a list of times and dates of his talks that he does at the church. We spoke to the people in the office who suggested we speak to a man called John Dobell. We actually went on to film John's interview, but due to the extremely poor quality of sound, we decided not to include it in the final edit.

We went back to the church on a day we knew Jack would be in so we could talk to him. We sat down a had a chat with him and told him about the project and that we wanted to interview him. He said he'd be happy to be interviewed, but had a busy week ahead of him, and that he couldn't do it until the following week. This wasn't an idea time for us because we wanted to start the edit by then, so we persuaded him to agree to being filmed after one of his talks on Friday. Whilst setting up for his interview, a lad who had attended his talk was still in the church, enjoying a cup of tea. Jack suggested we speak to her, as she'd been attending the church for many years and had done some volunteering work there. She agreed without hesitation, and filmed her interview straight after Jack's.

By now, we had enough interviews to start putting together the edit. We'd also got our main cutaways, which were the tracking shots of the interior of the church and some external shots in the evening. We were worried we'd have a problem setting up the track and dolly in the church, as the people who worked there seemed a little uneasy about us being there at first. As we had gone back so many times, they became more comfortable with us being there. We'd stand and have a chat with anyone who had questions about the film and even showed them some of the shots we were getting. By the end, they allowed us to set up the track without hesitation and any queries about what we were doing stemmed from curiosity about how it all worked.

Once we'd got enough cutaways, returning a couple more times to get what we felt we needed to aid the edit, we started to piece it all together. It had been suggested that we drop the RWY film for the moment, and focus all our time on 'Resurgam', as well as adding some archive to the edit.
We did so, which took a lot of stress off of us, and we were able to get the edit to place we were satisfied with it.