So, this weekend, with relative spontaneity, we started filming. Kind of. "Untitled Brighton Documentary" begins. I finished work at 1, and as I was walking home it was brought to my attention that Callum and Saul were heading into town. Callum had shaved himself a moustache, because our housemate Ross had dared him to. After telling him that he looked like a right prick, and discovering that, if I were to return home to eat my beans on toast, I would be in the house alone with attention seeking Neanderthal builder 'Kev,' I joined the gang.
We made a group decision to put Callum's impending trip to Boots on hold, and we headed to Belchers, our local greasy-spoon where we duly indulged in some proper fucking food. It was after Saul's second can of Tango that we decided to embark on a preliminary filming mooch. Heading out with a camera, our main intentions were to capture some arty, cityscape style shots to kick off our creative journey.
After some nice footage of a gloomy Saturday afternoon on the seafront, the overall success of our venture was to explode into fruition when we were heading towards the train station along our native highway, the Western Road. We were asked for change by an elderly-ish looking man, who actually turned out to be roughly just 34 years old. He was with a few friends who were up ahead, one of whom was a woman in a wheelchair. Filming the homeless is all about taking risks, so I simply proposed: 'If we give you some money, will you talk to us?' 'Yeh. Sure,' he said. Brilliant.
As a group, they were not as willing and enthusiastic as their initial friend we had spoken to. The woman in the wheelchair was very reluctant to appear on camera, and one of the other guys said that he would of featured in the interview, but he had two black eyes and didn't want to be filmed in such a state. That is one thing that I admire about the homeless population. The pride. My Dad had picked up on it after years of working with them. He may have been covered in shit, but he still didn't want to appear in front of the camera because of a war wound.
We managed to usher the group down a side-street just off of the Western Road, where we stumbled upon a cluster of some silver bistro-style tables and chairs. We sat the crew down and got on with it. As Saul sent the camera rolling and we started chatting, I looked up at the shop front, only to be faced with a sea of middle-class glares. We had decided to conduct an interview with a group of homeless people outside a Children's fucking bookshop-come-cafe. Oh shit. Luckily, the lady owner was fairly understanding, and we captured a wicked first interview. We then ventured toward the railway bridge where we got some more shots of the city, encompassing more greyscale and train-yards than you could ever imagine. We made Brighton look like fucking Belgrade. Oh, and we trod in shit. Job done.
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