Kai and I made our way up the mountain on the 22nd of October after patiently waiting on the wind and the rain to hold off in our favour.  We were scheduled to meet the Cableway team at 7h00 that clear sunny morning. They only started to arrive around 7h30, but we spent the half hour getting some great shots! When everyone was ready we made the journey through air with the staff and the equipment they needed to get to the top station.

Kai was only available until 11h00 that day – and I greatly appreciate his getting up extra early to be able to fit the shoot in – so we pushed through the next three hours. Bevan Jeacocks was great, he picked up the process quickly, everyone was helpful and no animals were harmed!

Next I tried to work the editing into my schedule, but this was impossible and I ended up editing over Christmas. I wanted to have the clip both mixed and graded, but my impatience (to get the video broadcast) got the better of the process and it has not been graded.  The clip has been mixed because it was going to go online and I had to ensure the audio was, well, audible.

So, here it is, nearly five months after the shoot. Hope you enjoy it!

Thank you to everyone who helped out and who was willing to help out!

I imagine that someone who works on the imposing, resilient and (thank goodness) immovable Table Mountain will have a unique perspective on the city that flanks it. A perspective that I would like to hear and I imagine others would be interested in, too.

Ticket to the top

On Wednesday, 23rd September, as the image on the left will varify, I met with the suggested Capetonian and did a recce of the Cable Station.

Everyone is keen for the shoot to happen and the little film to be released on Cape Town Tv, youtube and of course on our own web site.

The main complication with this shoot is the weather. Working in Cape Town in winter, you grow accustomed to the wind and the rain and somehow you learn to work with the elements. When you’re shooting 1 000m above sea level, however, and your means of transport is a cable car, the weather is all important. Clear skies with light moody clouds are what we’re after, not dark skies and thunder clouds. A gentle breeze will keep us cool, while gale force winds (like the one howling as I type) will blow the sound away and make for a messy shoot all around. Imagine the crew pictures!

The other minor complication, further complicated by our reliance on the weather, is crew availability.  Our team is small, with just me (the director), a DOP and a sound person. All of us working on this project are doing it for fun and for the love of making movies. Our compensation will be the completed product for the world to see on the internet. Of course, this means that when a paying job arrives, crew members have to respect the demands of the real world, put this project on hold and feed their bank balances.

So, when the first warm, sunny, windless day arrives, keep your fingers crossed that there is crew available to take that trip to the top. Or just keep your fingers crossed that there will be a sunny day.

Being the Change is the first episode in Masupatsela Series II. We learn about Bulelani Mvotho and Sam Faleni’s dream to establish a local cinema where they live.

Bulelani and Sam of Snapshot Media in Khayelitsha in Cape Town work hard to realise their dream. Not only do they recruit friends and other skilled people to help them, they also make the films for the cinema themselves.

Read more on Snapshot Media.

Being the Change will be screened on SABC 2 on Monday 27th July at 11h00.

Thabo with Children from Sinethemba

Inmate with Children from Sinethemba

The story was a winner! Everyone loved the idea of hardened criminals with hearts of gold showing the world that there was more to them and that rehabilitation could happen where we least expect it to. We told the story of the Group of Hope through Thabo Zondo, who was in prison with a life sentence for murder. We shot at an Open Day at Brandvlei when the families of the Group of Hope prisoners visited to see the various crafts they had produced and also to hear about the outstanding community work they were doing.

Johan with a Child from Sinethemba

Thabo and his Girlfriend

In 2009 Mr Pansegrouw, the social worker who started the Group of Hope with the prisoners, tells us that a number of the prisoners from the group have been moved from Brandvlei to medium security prisons. Amongst these prisoners is Thabo, who has been moved to Goodwood Prison where he will be closer to his family. As if that were not enough, Mr Pansegrouw reports that Thabo may be released in 2010.

We are hopeful that the Group of Hope may be able to offer its members another chance in society.

David Goldblatt's photo at the bottom

Free Range Films made the front page of the newspaper last week.

We’re refering to the front page of the ‘Friday’ arts supplement in the ‘Mail & Guardian’ of 27 Feburary 2009. The bottom photograph on the front page was taken by David Goldblatt on a shoot with Free Range Films for ‘Masupatsela’ Series I.

At the time Goldblatt was working on a series of photographs about HIV and AIDS in the South African landscape. We wanted to do a story on him for the programme to show an unusual and interesting way of dealing with HIV and AIDS. Goldblatt was game and set the director – Tina-Louise Smith – the task of finding various occurrences of the AIDS ribbon around Cape Town.

One Saturday morning Smith set out with the post production assistant, Zukiswa Simulekane, to take photos of the AIDS ribbon in the landscape around Lansdowne, Athlone, Crossroads, Khayelitsha and Hout Bay.

Next, Smith uploaded the images on the backend of our web site for Goldblatt to inspect with his keen eye. He made his selection and the Free Range Films team set off for Khayelitsha with Goldblatt and his camper early one morning. The photo on the ‘Friday’ front page was one of those that came out of the experience.

The newspaper article can be found online.

Below is a video excerpt from the insert we produced on Goldblatt for ‘Masupatsela’. Goldblatt talks briefly about the locations we found for him.

Outside the Hospital - mid-October

Antoinette Demonstrates

It was unbearably hot on some of the shoot days and the hired vehicle’s temperature guage told us on one shoot in Khayelitsha that the exterior temperature was 41° Celsius. While that may be par for the course in Yemen, we are living in a Mediterranean climate in Cape Town where we call temperatures that reach 38° Celsius extreme.

Mandiseli's Interview at 41° Celsius

The Play

Despite having to contend with the regional climates and the elements, we think that working with mostly solid and personable crew helped to make the shoots fun and good work. There were soundmen who helpfully carried tripods and production assistants who raced to get you what you needed, nevermind their personal discomfort. Of course, there were also one or two who strolled to get you what you needed, which we took in our stride – the Free Range Films stride, not theirs.

Moving On to the next Location

In the Classroom with Luvuyo

On this production we weren’t always able to meet characters before the shoots. In some cases it was hard to get hold of people and then to lock them down to our dates, while in other instances they were a little grumpy towards us over the phone. These are problems that come up in every documentary production and we dealt with them in the characteristically easygoing Free Range Films way. Meeting the characters on the shoot days eventually, we always found them to be incredibly open, warm and surprisingly accommodating.

As always, a rewarding experience!

[Photos with dates on them were taken by Rikki Lee Solomon]

After many months and nights of coding, writing content and finding our way around the WordPress interface, we think we are finally ready to go live. There are still bits to tweak, but you – the user – should be able to find your way around easily.

Let us know what you think of the new site!

Fields of Play is a twelve minute documentary that was commissioned by the District Six Museum. It provides a brief history of the fascinating world of inner-city Cape Town soccer from the late 19th Century through to the mid-and-late-20th Century.

The interviews were done with men in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and even in their 90s. Their stories take us back to places we may know very well, but their stories are of a different time when these places and spaces looked different and were used for different reasons and by different people. This creates a clear sense of time having passed and of worlds that some of us were definitely not a part of. Through this project we were privileged to be allowed access into these worlds and to imagine life in the past.

On a technical level Fields of Play allowed us to work with and wade through hundreds upon hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings. We learnt how to use the pan and zoom effect on Avid and we learnt about all the problems that come with using so many stills images on one timeline. Of course, then we also learnt to solve these problems!

For more on this production visit Fields of Play.