Specialist Skills Essay

The decision to revisit certain traumatic events of my youth, and make this film about my late school friend Jack Susianta, was not a decision I came to quickly or easily. It was after the encouragement of my tutor Daisy, and importantly the enthusiasm of Jack’s own mother and brother, that I felt sure that ‘Jack’ would be an impactful and important film to make.

I already had a relationship with Jack’s family, but I had not seen Anna or Sam Susianta for several years. It was important for me to meet with them personally before coming to my decision. During this meeting I invited them to ask any questions about the film, and in return I asked them what they would want the film to be. I had a tutorial with Daisy beforehand, who encouraged me in my choice and told me to think of the process as making a film ‘with’ the Susiantas rather than ‘of’ them. This changed my perspective drastically and helped with my anxieties about appearing voyeuristic or, as one of my interviewees would go on to call, a ‘death groupie’. These fears were quelled further by Sam (Jack’s brother) explaining that if anyone was the right person to make this film, it was me. A statement I found deeply reassuring and incredibly kind. The notes from this initial meeting are collected in my on this page (1.0). 

I learnt making the shorter films, that working with individuals I knew already gave me a huge advantage in creating the intimacy I wanted for my film; my most successful films were the Interactive, shot with my sisters on a walk to the pub, and the Constructed, that I made with my friends. The performative and autobiographical modes were the most challenging, and confirmed I was not comfortable putting myself on camera the frame, or inserting myself into situations as a participant. It also showed me the importance of an existing relationship with contributor and filmmaker. Family orientated films like 51 Birch Street, Blue Bag Life and A Miracle in West Brom used this intimacy to delve deeper into the lives of those they were representing. I wanted to make this type of film, with contributors that were at ease.

As I began involving Anna and Sam in the film, Anna directed me towards a charity she had been working with in the years following Jack’s passing. The United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) works to raise awareness of and provide solace for the families affected by the deaths of their close ones at the hands of the police, prisons and psychiatric custody. With her encouragement, I made an application to the UFFC and was awarded £1500 towards the production of the film as well as a screening event that will happen in September. My written application can be found in my production paperwork. 

Before I had decided on ‘Jack’ as my final project, I joined a march with the UFFC to Downing Street in October. Here I heard speeches from families similarly affected by police violence, and developed a deeper understanding of the wider issues that Jack’s death had been an example of. This encouraged in me the belief that the film would exist not only for those who knew Jack, but appeal to a wider audience, and therefore tap into larger socialogical issues. 

Once I had decided to go ahead with the film, and had spoken to Jack’s family, I began gathering archive material to use in the film. Anna was the best source of this footage, and handed over piles of CDs, USB sticks, and even folders of court documents from Jack’s Inquest. These were incredibly valuable, especially the family photographs and videos of Jack as a child. In 51 Birch Street  much of the film includes filmmaker Doug Block rifling through objects and documents with members of his own family. This was my initial inspiration to begin filming with Anna, and she showed me on camera the further scale of her archive of Jack's objects, drawings, contents of his wallet, school books and so on. This collection even extended to include slides from his autopsy. I filmed this archive inside Anna’s home with her narrating and explaining what we were looking at.

 In retrospect, I would have liked to take these objects into a better lit studio and photograph them there, however in doing this I may have lost the intimate atmosphere achieved with the warmer, grainy picture and the handheld shaky roving camera. My discovery of the objects in real time as I filmed them was also a valuable aspect to the film. In particular, the moment I discovered a photograph of myself and Jack together in the room, included in the introduction as a subtle way to introduce our relationship. .

Reading the witness statements from the Inquest provided me with further information, and a moment-by-moment retelling of the event. This retelling was important for me to have in the film.  However, Anna had expressed that she wanted the film to not focus too heavily on the traumatic moment of Jack’s drowning, and I agreed. Therefore I decided I only needed one witness testimony from the canal. 

I read through all the statements, but Fred Mcgruer’s stood out from the rest. Fred lived in one of the houseboats on the canal, metres from where Jack drowned. There was naturally no contact details in the court documents, but I already had a network of people who might be able to get in contact with him. I got his number through a friend of a friend of a friend, and he responded to my text agreeing to be interviewed. It was luck to find an individual willing to help and interested in my project, however the value of my connection to the story undoubtably sped the process along and perhaps encouraged Fred in agreeing to be interviewed. 

As I gathered contributors from mine and Jack’s friendship group, there were several external voices that I wanted for the film. I set my focus on Tony Murphy, the lawyer that represented Jack’s family during the inquest, however I received no response. I also wanted a professional psychiatric opinion to explain Jack’s psychosis, and was directed towards a psychiatrist through a contributor. However after contacting them they admitted that because of the nature of their work they could not talk on camera. Because of the confusing nature of the psychotic episode that Jack suffered, an expert’s perspective on the condition would have been an interesting addition to the film, and so I regret not being successful here. I was successful in finding Kriss Lee, a photographer and contributor to the Hackney Gazette, who photographed the incident. I traced him through a watermark underneath his photographs on the Daily Mail’s website. Kriss was a Hackney resident who had lived along the marshes for many years, and therefore had interesting insights into the area. He agreed to be filmed, whilst expressing his surprise and annoyance at the Daily Mail’s nonconsensual use of his pictures. 

For the initial development of ‘Jack’ I used my own Canon DLSR. As I began shooting the interviews and interactive conversations I needed to move to a higher quality camera and sound recording. I had previously used the JVC 170 for shorter exercises and enjoyed its lightweight quality. I felt I had a grip on its functions and so I brought it to my first shoot with Anna. However under her indoor lighting the camera was excessively grainy, and far too warm. After reviewing this footage and conferring with Alev, I decided to switch to the Sony FS5. We booked a meeting to refresh my knowledge of the camera, noted here (2.0). 

Overall, handling the equipment proved my biggest weakness. I wanted to shoot alone for the majority of the interviews, and so I had to carry the equipment all myself. I therefore opted for the lighter monopod with the FS5, and thankfully no motion is detectable as I balance it by hand during filming. I had some issues with lost or damaged files which was frustrating, yet it highlighted the importance of taking multiple shots, spaced across different days so as not to contain entire segments within single files. Sound issues were minimal, with the exception of one important interview, where I found myself missing a cable for the radio mic’s. Luckily I had a Zoom recorder with me in case of a situation like this. In addition, I always had a gun mic attached to the camera through a second channel for an alternative recording. This saved segments of Ellie’s interview when her radio mic fell down her shirt, reiterating Alev’s fervent advice to always be monitoring audio with headphones whilst shooting.  

A large part of my film would be talking head testimonies, and so the quality of the conversation was very important. As previously mentioned, I wanted to be alone with the contributor and to shoot in their own environments, unless requested otherwise by the subject. A film I made in 2018, ‘To Be Operationally Ready’(3.0) focused on the art of conversation, and was where I learnt that informal interview, or ‘chatting’, was certainly one of my strengths, and true passions. I pre-wrote my questions (4.0) and began each interview with the following:

1. If you wish to pause the interview at any time please do not hesitate to do so.

2. You do not have to answer every question I ask you. The same applies if you say something on camera and later decide you do not want it included in the film, just let me know. 

3. Please try to answer in full sentences as best you can. 

4. I do not mind which direction you look, into the camera, at me or elsewhere.  

5. Do you give consent to be visually and audibly represented in this film?

Although my release forms (6.0) give me the rights over my content, in practice I allowed my contributors more of a say in what was used in the final edit. This was both because of the sensitive nature of the case, and the personal relationships I held with each contributor. I do think however that I will retain these values in future films I make. 

As this was my first project of this scale, I wanted this step to be thorough. I began by writing a summarised and time-coded transcript (7.0) of each interview in my own words. I needed to watch the interviews in their entirety, and so this process was very time consuming. However in hindsight I see that this was by far the most important step of my post-production process. Then, I created a colour coding system for the main themes of ‘Jack’. This was as follows: 

Once I had coloured these notes, I cut each video into small corresponding sub-clips, colour-coding these on Avid and sorting into different bins for each theme. I realised this was probably not the most efficient use of my time, so instead I cut the interviews into larger clips, which was just as effective.

Going into the edit process, I had an overwhelming amount of footage. Organising it in this way helped me to visually understand exactly how much content I had, and the subjects it covered. I would use this method for any future projects I might edit, whilst remembering where perhaps I am getting too caught up in unnecessary details.  

I wanted to re-familiarise myself with Avid’s software and began working with a more experimental approach, making short key narrative sequences. These included several alternate introductions, a retelling of the incident, and an anecdote of a school trip. I used versions of almost all of these sequences in the final cut, however, I quickly began to feel as though I was forgetting a lot of footage. Often when I work, I feel a need to comb through everything before eliminating piece by piece. I voiced these concerns with Laura during a rushes workshop, and she suggested I make a paper edit. With all the transcripts laid out on the edit suite floor (8.0), I was finally able to see the project as a whole. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the paper edit saved my editing experience.

After the paper edit I was moving quickly towards the final stages of the film. I knew I wanted a chronological structure, as the story is about a life and a relatively complicated incident, and therefore this made it both simpler to edit and, hopefully, to understand as an audience. 

The first draft was approximately 1.5 hours long, the second I reduced to 40 minutes. From this I eliminated sequences bit by bit to reach the 20 minute limit. I learnt to be vigilant, and let my peer’s advice in the rushes workshop really lead in what worked and what didn’t. I made the end sequence last, as it required the most consideration. In the end I used the final words of Anna’s interview, as she expresses the same sentiment I had realised during my process; that although we are all remembering Jack, re-conjuring him in our minds for this film, the project has really become about us, about the people he left behind.

Because of the freedom of an extra budget, I was able to pay James Piper, a composer and engineer to mix the sound of my film and create custom music and effects. James works at BBC Broadcasting House as a radio studio engineer and was able to put the audio through a program called iZotope RX 11. This cleans up any audio to a much higher standard. I learnt from James the details of his processes and he explained the following: 

'Photograph 9.0  ‘shows the volume automation editing of the overall audio. 9.1 shows an example of some EQ editing. Finally 9.2 shows how sound was edited in iZotope. The plug-in seen in this example is a De-clip. This was a tool that could be applied to reduce distortion. 9.3 was the De-noise tool in iZotope. It helped me clean up portions of audio that had continuous (and unwanted) background noise. 9.4 shows a comparison between the unedited audio (red) and the final edited audio (blue). The horizontal dotted line on each track represents 0dB. You can see that the dynamic range of the unedited track is much greater, it passes over the line and falls under the line much more dramatically than the final version. The edited audio has more overall consistency, rather than having some parts too loud and some parts too quiet. 

Sound was an important tool in order to simulate the experience of events that could not be filmed. For this, I asked James to illustrate moments with subtle yet effective sound effects. For example the frenzy of helicopters over the canal, or the feel of the festival as an intoxicated teenager. We also recorded live tracks of the wildlife in the marshes using a Zoom Recorder.

Finally, an addition that meant a lot to me personally, was James’ musical composition using music by the artist King Krule. Arthur had mentioned in his interview that the song ‘Baby Blue’, was playing whilst we prepared to leave the festival, and that it ‘matched the atmosphere completely’. Like him, I am reminded of those last moments with Jack when I hear it. James took elements of ‘Baby Blue’ as well as his other song, ‘Out Getting Ribs’, and threaded them through the film. This was a particularly special detail to me, and hopefully to those who were there in 2015, watching now almost ten years on.

Aesthetic, Mode & Structure

Because this film covers a historical event, building a visual language without much live footage was a challenge. Therefore B-roll footage and archival images were of special importance. Hackney Marshes had such a significance to this story, it became a character in itself. Shots of the area in the winter and then in the summer worked well both to signify the passing of time, as well as reflecting my friend’s differing associations with the Marsh.

The mood created when sorting through Jack’s old school paintings and football merchandise was a playful and colourful visual tableau of childlike doodles, rough edged paper cuttings and treasures, evoking a homeliness and family-centred experience. This was exactly the mood I had set out to achieve with ‘Jack’. 

Another tool contributing to the film’s aesthetic language was my own archive of screenshots from social media. At first I used these purely as informative tools, but Laura explained that to someone from another generation, these examples of our teenage online correspondence were unusual. They were effective in building an impression of how we were experiencing the events in 2015 through our smartphones. I found her observation very interesting, and added elements like a Facebook icon of a voice note as it played on our group chat. The low quality photographs and videos pulled from sites like snapchat were also deliberate, illustrating the constant flood of content I was producing as a teenager during this time. This is where the documentary becomes autobiographical - a life-long process. Before I knew I was a filmmaker, I was collecting memes, videos, photographs, voice notes - a chaotic and unorganised archive of adolescent memories and experiences. Moments like seeing my own selfie on the news (a picture of me and Jack at a festival with my own face cropped out) were when I realised the pictures I took on my phone held value, that they were their own historical documents. 

Conclusion

This film was special for many reasons. As with most things, the stories of those closest to you are the most interesting. The experiences that you yourself have lived are the ones that evoke the strongest emotions, and therefore the strongest motivation to share with others.

The UFFC played a large role in supporting and encouraging this project, and the film will be screened on the 26th of September with members of mine Jack’s community. This presentation will take place at Core Arts, a mental health focussed charity in Homerton. The significance of their work helps to reiterate the importance of raising awareness 

 Alongside this motivation, I have undeniable anxieties of loosing my overflowing digital archive from the 2010’s to the ‘trash that washes up on the digital economies shores, and so like most of my work, this is an attempt to preserve it. Outside of myself, I made this film for my friends and for Jack’s family. After the death of any person, they live on only in the words and memories of those who knew them, and in time these too die. Documentary film solidifies testimonies for those who were not there. I knew going into this process that the time, detail and care I would give to this story was my own offering to Jack. What I did not know was how much it would teach me about representing the real hearts of human beings, how they process loss and tragedy, and the profound way it would help me understand my own position as Jack’s storyteller, and friend.