#sam small

(I will need to re-upload the video as vimeo has made the video cut to black before the end, taking away Michael and Helen’s names from the credits)

     Sam Small is a poet, live performer and poetry event organiser. Thus, we all agreed it was going to be fundamental to not only get an interview about his poetry career, but also capture footage of him hosting and performing. Conveniently he was performing the next week, this allowed us to get an early start on shooting, and give us time to arrange the interview later on.

    We decided Michael and Helen would share between sound recording and interviewing, and I took hold of the cinematography and camera operating. This made the division of work very easy, and it all ran smoothly.

    We had over an hour with Sam before his performance, therefore left the camera rolling from various angles during an informal interview with him. However, despite having good footage, there was a lot of background noise, which would be quite distracting for the viewer. A longer microphone would probably have been ideal, as we didn’t want to be too close with the microphone, in order to keep the subject relaxed and casual. We decided we would use most of these clips as only cutaways.

    Following this shoot, we set a date for the interview, which would take place at Sam’s flat, as the decor was very personal and clearly portrayed his passion for a variety of arts. Therefore, we put together a list of questions as a group. The interview ran very smoothly, especially as Sam is a very confident speaker and had a lot to say. However, once the interview was over, we realised we had a huge amount of footage.

    This is where the post-production became challenging. We had almost 2 hours worth of footage in total. Our interview was not focused enough as we ended up having different topics of information all over the place. Considering 3 minutes of screen time go by very quickly, it was essential for every second to count. We spent a lot of time together colour coding our footage to organise the interview by theme. While we cut down a large amount, we were still left with around 20 minutes. We struggled to organise to meet up again, therefore I took on the rest of post myself: cutting, mixing the audio, colour grading, adding the cutaways, music and titles. Our subject was a very lively person, therefore the aim was to give the same feel to the documentary. I chose to add a fast paced soundtrack, bold and bright titles, and grade the colour away from its original orange tone, and towards something a bit more unconventional and cinematic.

Hello Speculative Bookshop! From Sam Small

My names Sam Small, I’m an amateur poet from Glasgow.

Load Poets

I first became aware of the Speculative Bookshop when they asked me to read some sci-fi poems at one of their first events in the Old Hairdressers. I had a fucking blast. They put on such a great night, combining poetry storytelling, comic books, literature and more.

Since then Dale and Jen have got involved with the fanzine I help…