Sunday, 4 March 2012

Liverpool Documentary - The Planning Stage

When we learned about the trip to Liverpool to film a documentary, I was looking forward to the wide variety of opportunities to film whatever we wanted there. But then we discovered in the brief that our documentary had to be based upon/around a news article significant to Liverpool itself..

We looked around on the net as a group, found possibilities from football, to the docks and graffiti. However we stumbled upon a news article that seemed both interesting, and an article that could be constructed into making a documentary.. the article we came across was from the 'Liverpool Echo' local newspaper website.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2011/11/19/liverpool-city-council-planning-to-charge-buskers-100252-29801770/

The council are planning to charge buskers to play on the streets of Liverpool, and apparently other cities and towns across the country may be following suit. The buskers will be required to hold a permit to be able to play, and in some cases may be allocated times and days to where they're 'allowed' to play that week.

This proved to be a greatly interesting article that allowed us to create a documentary on. Our aims were to portray a positive image towards busking, combining interviews from both the public and the buskers themselves. To portray a more 'human' side to busking, rather than the public seeing them as a more robotic, 'lifeless' figure on the streets of Liverpool.

Using this idea as the ground base, we were then able to discover a more well-known busker named Johnny Walker, who'm in fact is in talks personally, with the council themselves about the legislation that may be going ahead sometime this year. He offered a brilliant viewpoint from the busker's perspective to the council's perspective. He even managed to gather a statement for us from the council about what they're planning to do.. however this is after attempting to contact the council personally about the legislation but getting no reply.

Our second idea for the documentary project, was to focus around the statue of a vandalised priest, one of which Banksy (the infamous and controversial graffiti artist) placed a mosaic slate in front of the priests' statue's head in the national museum of Liverpool. This article allowed us to again, use our ground base to build upon, perhaps exploring Banksy's art throughout the city, and expanding into other areas of art, for example street art, graffiti etc..

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/multimedia/arts-and-culture/video/2011/12/15/national-museums-liverpool-s-reyahn-king-on-banksy-s-cardinal-sin-at-the-walker-art-gallery-100252-29960047/

After pitching our two ideas in front of our class we finalised on the Busking idea, as it proved to be a more interesting, entertaining and flexible idea.

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