Documentary Making Guerrilla Style

Tomorrow, all being well, I will be able to pick up a couple of hundred DVDs of my documentary YARN.

Yarn was born as an idea a year ago. There was some money available at the end of the "Writers 2 Readers" project, which I had been involved with. What to do with it? The project organisers asked if anyone had any ideas. My idea was to make YARN, a documentary based around readers groups in the East Midlands.

But the money was limited. A few thousand pounds. Not enough to employ a film crew, let alone an editor. The solution was to strip everything back and do as much of it as possibly myself.

Filming things guerrilla style may mean you end up with a few ragged shots, but it sure gives you the freedom to take the camera where you would not be able to take it otherwise. And it makes the interviews more intimate. Just a couple of people talking. The fact that a camera is sitting on a tripod in the background is soon forgotten.