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A couple of years ago I had a bottom of the range dv camera and a pc with some editing software on. I’ve always wanted to make a documentary but resigned myself to the fact that I don’t have the experience, financial budget or human resources to do something as ambitious as that.
At the time I was living in a large warehouse on the edge of town in an old industrial area that was soon to be demolished; with a couple of artisans and artists. There was the writer in the corner, the woodworker down the hall, the art photographer on the other side of the hall, the mad junkie downstairs who made beautiful, intricate craft with his hands, the mechanic and philosopher in his own little workshop a bit further down the road, and then there was me in the middle of all this. Around us there also lived a few hobos whom we befriended over time (we were not really that far apart). We lived a life of poverty and beauty, a rare existence free from the mental and physical constraints of normal society.
One day I was sitting in the mechanics workshop who also happened to be my ‘priest’ to whom I confessed all my unspeakable thoughts. I could always count on Jaap to give me good advice since he was allot older than me and a man of the world with loads of experience in it’s ways and highly intelligent and perceptive to boot. He probably could have been a professor with some prestigious title somewhere (he used to be a teacher), but he chose this simple life for reasons of his own. I was bemoaning my lot as a rebel without clue and filmmaker without a crew and he was listening patiently. At the end of my pitiful excuses for not doing anything he simply said: ‘Why don’t you do a story about us?’
It never occurred to me before that we were a little marginalized community on the edge of society who led an absolutely unique existence and that, that was an interesting story in itself. I didn’t need to go to the Amazon jungle to find a lost tribe or pay exotic models exorbitant fees; I could do it all there. Hell, I didn’t even have to throw petrol into my car.
From that day my philosophy in any creative effort was born:
Do what you can with what you have.
You don’t need a big budget or tons of support to make a documentary. A documentary simply means you are documenting something and you can do it with anything, even a simple pen and paper. The trick, I found; is to tell a good story, and that comes purely from creativity and imagination which happens to be FREE! No amount of equipment, crew or even experience can buy the power of imaginative thinking.
I finished the documentary with no budget and a couple of months later we organized an art exhibition at the workshop and I ‘premiered’ it at the opening. The exhibition was a huge success, beyond our wildest expectations. The place was crammed with people from all ages and backgrounds and when I played the documentary at the end I it got an amazing response from the audience. For me, that was payment enough and marked the project as a success, although nothing much came from it afterwards.
Since then, the whole old industrial area was demolished and renovated and all the individuals from this unique community are now scattered all over the world. The only thing to be witness of those wonderful careless times is my documentary, which gives it value beyond any monetary figure.
Sadly my equipment was recently stolen along with my copy of the documentary on the hard drive of my pc, but there are still a few copies out there and I hope to bump into one again somewhere along the line.
The moral of the story is: If you’ve got an idea, don’t let anything stop you. Improvise and innovate and do what you can with what you have.
Oh yes, and back-up! |
United States
