Fashion Documentary spoof

(John, the Belgium fashion guru)


A friend of mine, Acim, once told me, ‘what happened to your documentary! You never finished it…not good..man…not good’. Those words stick to me because I realised that, the potential of what I did was enormous.

I set out to document the impact of image culture on young girls, to find out the social change in today’s society but with an edge, my Italian friend Lillo, was going to interview them. If you know Lillo, you will understand the comic potential immediately.

So we went around the city, interviewing people during the February 2006 Paris fashion week. Along the way, we met some really bizarre characters, including a gay black guy selling 5 euro magazines about microphones and arrogant, pompous models who were cold and evil. By the way, I have nothing against models, I know a few but its just this particular group that was not cool.

One night, we went to the Dior opening with our celebrity-crazed friend, John, and waited for the event to finish. As soon as it did, he pointed out to all the stars we should interview.

Jessica Alba comes out and all the journalists run and scream surround her, and in the midst, I’m holding the microphone this time, and accidentally strangle an elegantly dressed woman. It was so embarrassing, but we got to interview some of the models, and of course, John decided to interview the strangest looking person he could find, an old man in some kind of prehistoric costume.

Moving on:

We finished the documentary, but with a backlog of 5 tapes and no energy, nothing came out of it. I captured all the tapes, but I couldn’t devote time to it, so I made a promo. Ill put it below.

I understand now how hard it is to make a documentary. It’s harder than making fiction. You have to be so attentive and portray information that won’t offend viewers and so on. What a great experience it was.

Filmmaking in Paris

I wanted to make a blog to talk about the films that I had done in the past, during my time in Paris. Through discovering the difficulties of making a film, working with crew, and people around me, I wanted to focus on making things myself towards the end of my studies.

In France, there is a culture whereby a film director must know how to do all the tricks of the trades. For some people this is absurd, maybe for most, but I found that concept very interesting: The Auteur.

So I decided to focus on how to make films with very low budgets, and control the image, producing, casting, sound, editing and directing myself. The reason why I wanted to do this was so that in the future, I would know exactly what everyone on my film crew should be doing. This said, I still don’t know what some people do (What does the second assistant’s second assistant do?)

Its been fun. The people in Paris are awesome (the internationals) and I think, that in the long run, ill miss what I had, but Ive got to move on.