Component 4
Not utilizing creative efforts annoys me greatly, so whenever I have ‘abandoned’ an creative project, I will always do my best to transform it into something else …
The Miracle Mockumentary (working title) was a mockumentary film idea that would have recycled the footage that had already been filmed for the abandoned The Miracle of Crowdfunding project.
The idea was to film new footage for a partly factual and partly fictionalized account of the process of making The Miracle of Crowdfunding.
Additionally, footage originally filmed for The Miracle of Crowdfunding would have been utilized within The Miracle Mockumentary.
The film would have been largely improvised with a dry humour style and would have explored themes of the poverty gap, family estrangement, being an outsider, the high expectations of an out of touch education system, coming of age and finding your purpose in the world.
I was very keen to make a highly entertaining 80 to 90 minute film that would have been submitted into various appropriate film festivals.
The plan had been to film the additional footage in the summer of 2015, but the project fell through when my co-creator and co-star stated he was not comfortable exposing himself and his real life on camera.
Additionally, the time-consuming demands of building my MTA Portfolio completely took over and I lost my focus on The Miracle Mockumentary.
The Mockery of it all
The point of The Miracle of Crowdfunding had been to create a crowdfunding campaign that I could have used to raise the tuition fee funds I needed to go back to university to study a traditional master’s degree I had been accepted.
While I didn’t eventually end up using The Miracle of Crowdfunding to headline a crowdfunding campaign, the process of making it inspired me to build my own master’s degree from scratch.
Therefore, The Miracle of Crowdfunding was a success and did in fact fulfill its original purpose of empowering me to study a master’s degree.
However, the fact that all the footage we had shot for it in the summer of 2014 would never see the light of day just didn’t sit well with me.
It wasn’t until the beginning of 2015, while I was undertaking my 365 FRAMES 2015 experimental filmmaking project, that I started to think much more ambitiously about how we could salvage all the material we had created.
One of the surprising observations that emerged from the filming of The Miracle of Crowdfunding is just how comical, ridiculous, grueling and reflective the while process had.
As I reflected on how enjoyable and enlightening the whole process had been, even when it was exhausting, I started to think it would make for quite and entertaining and quirky film in its own right.
It had a very Withnail and I feel to it.
The story of two hapless souls trying to get somewhere in the world, but continuously complicating it and further fucking it up along the way.
The Miracle Mockumentary was always envisioned as telling the story to two people who keep trying to get somewhere, but never actually get there (as indeed I had done with the abandonment of my crowdfunding campaign).
When it occurred to me that we could re-use some of the footage we had already filmed for The Miracle of Crowdfunding, the idea to create a mockumentary film about the experience of making it came to life.
Furthermore, I liked the idea of creating a mockumentary film that would take a real incident (the original Miracle of Crowdfunding footage) and create a new fictionalised narrative (The Miracle Mockumentary as only a partial account of what actually happened while making Miracle of Crowdfunding) to encompass it.
The video below highlights the raw footage from The Miracle of Crowdfunding that I wanted to use to begin of The Miracle Mockumentary and it is from this very footage that the idea for The Miracle Mockumentary as an independent film originally grew…
The above footage was filmed for a video that would have been released during the mid-point of the 30-day campaign I had originally planned to run to raise the tuition fee for my master’s degree.
To visually illustrate this mid-point in the campaign, I designed a short video that we shot in the middle of the Bristol to Bath Cycle Path (which was halfway between my home in Bristol and all the filming I was doing in Bath).
However, the mockumentary grew from this particular footage because it very much summed up my thinking for the ‘middle of the road’ and ‘not getting anywhere, but not through lack of trying’ aesthetic I had for the film, both visually and thematically.
Another reason why I became exited to make The Miracle Mockumentary is because it would exploit multiple layers of narrative and representations of reality, i.e. the original Miracle of Crowdfunding footage and the newly shot partly fictional footage shot to encompass it…
One of the themes of documentary filmmaking I fixated on when I was doing documentary filmmaking in the final year of my BA (Hons) is the idea that a documentary can never be a one hundred percent accurate re-creation of the reality it captures.
The creative choices which permeate throughout the whole filmmaking process – from the interpretation of the original conception through to the fragmented editing – ultimately result in the full reality of what was originally captured being distorted and corrupted.
A documentary is just another constructed fictional account that draws heavily from the facts of an actual occurrence in reality.
The same description could be applied to most fictional films; in some shape or form, the material that inspired there creation came from actual occurrences in reality.
Following this line of thought I questioned why even have a documentary medium of film in the first place…
“Why try to be a representation of actuality when a fictional presentation can reveal far deeper truths about reality? If you’re going to make a fictional presentation, then the documentary medium is redundant.”
Documentary: From Problematic to Paradoxical – My Final Reflection on Fencing, Filmmaking, Duality and Deceit
This idea of that any representation of reality would ultimately end up being a corruption of that reality had stuck with me ever since I graduated with my BA (Hons) and it also found its way into my 365 FRAMES 2015 project that I was orchestrating while also conceiving of The Miracle Mockumentary…
In conceiving The Miracle Mockumentary as a fictional factual hybrid, I realised it gave me the perfect vehicle in which to visually dissect this theme of what constitutes a representation of reality.
“Documentaries present more than truth – through the indirect – a lie – they present a deeper and a more fundamental truth about human consciousness – we need lies to give truths their values.
Lies are an essential component of humanity.
As much as there is a paradox at the heart of every human being, there is a paradox at the heart of reality and in our knowledge of that reality.”
Documentary: From Problematic to Paradoxical – My Final Reflection on Fencing, Filmmaking, Duality and Deceit
I grew more and more excited about integrating this larger philosophical question as a self-reflexive part of the new fictional Miracle Mocukumentary narrative I envisioned encapsulating the reality of The Miracle of Crowdfunding.
Then I pitched my idea to George, the cinematographer on The Miracle of Crowdfunding, who seemed pretty sold on the idea of doing more filmmaking.
While the story of The Miracle Mockumentary would have been about me and George playing exaggerated and self-mocking versions of ourselves while we went around Bath and Bristol filming material for The Miracle of Crowdfunding, the real focus of the film would have delved into theme of being a young person displaced in today’s complicated world where it is not so easier to graduate from university and then set yourself up for life.
Visually the film had a lot going for it because it presented the disparity of two broke university students (and we were penniless at the time) creating a crowdfunding campaign and asking for money in the highly affluent city of Bath.
There was great difference of priorities between myself and George that would have also been a great source of conflict between ourselves in the film and had been a source of conflict between ourselves in reality.
George was setting himself up with a new job, living situation and sorting out his interpersonal relationships, in particular the relationship with his son, whereas I was trying to reach for the sky by asking random people to fund my master’s while ignoring my interpersonal relationships.
George was being very selfless with his pursuits, whereas I was being very selfish.
George and myself also differed in terms of demeanours.
I had a very manic go-getting energy with a perspective that anything was possible just as long as you were completely ruthless and unyielding in the pursuit of your success.
George, on the other hand, was very quiet, introverted and of the belief that he was not going to get anywhere fast either in his personal life or in his professional life.
When you have a film that is about two characters, you want those characters to bring polar opposite energies to the table so as to maximize the potential for drama and conflict between them.
Just look at every buddy cop film that has ever been made: There is always the crazy one and the sane one.
Ultimately, I felt that the experience of making The Miracle of Crowdfunding provided us with a good canvas on which to tell a quirky and relevant story that would resonate with any individual trying to find their way in the world.
Then I started to write a rough script that would integrate with what we had already shot, but would leave a lot of room for improvisation…
However, I very quickly gave up on writing definitive script because my ideas kept evolving as I wrote the thing.
It made more sense, from a time management and improvisational perspective, just to write out a rough outline list of the new footage we needed to film and work from there.
The plan was to head out in the spring and summer of 2015 to film the new material.
However, it never came to be.
The first hiccup was that George became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea putting his life on camera for everyone to see. He didn’t want to portray himself on camera, even an exaggerated version of himself. He wanted to keep his personal life private, which is fair enough.
Secondly, my attention on the project kept continuing to drift away as I focused more and more so on building my MTA Portfolio.
Ultimately, The Miracle Mockumentary was put on the shelf and now it is completely dead in the water.