Documentary project - RECCE

Having arrived in Liverpool and establishing our groundings we set out to explore the city, heading through and down to the docks, where we captured some great images with  the sun fairly low in the sky. Walking through the city you see everything we predicted, from crumbling buildings, boarded up shops and scaffolding everywhere, which is then transformed into brand new shopping centres, angular modern architecture, culture art and heritage. There were stark juxtapositions with renovated old architecture sitting slap bang in the middle of a brand new building, the new building are all fairly striking, some of which seem form over function as you would be left with a bunch of triangular rooms.

This image seemed particularly striking having an older building possibly part of the pump house with the date 1883 printed onto it, with a brand new Liverpool Museum poking out behind it, I used this building as an anchor point for the shots round the docks having it in shot as we travelled round capturing the different angles and sides. 

There were several things I noticed on the recce, at first I was surprised by the condition of Liverpool I thought it would be worse, but there was a real drive for change with most of the old buildings covered in scaffold alongside a brand new shopping centre. I also noticed that the city had allot of yellow, including signs, bus stops, posters etc Which I decoded as a city that's trying to sell this happy colour showing this is a nice jolly city, which leads you to see the fakery of it all, you can dress a city up all you like but the social and economic situation may not change, as our starting point article stated there are no skilled workers in Liverpool, therefore you have mass unemployment. This seemed particularly prevalent feature when there was a big shopping centre that was covered in a pink wrap, hiding the original rundown architecture. However, covering things up doesn't address the underlying problem. I wrote these ideas down that night and arranged the schedule due to an absent producer due to illness. Starting at 6am, was the original plan but only half the group made that unsurprised so Peter (camera man) and me (director) left them sleeping off the nigh before, this wasn't majorly problematic however due to their roles. After returning from edge lanes sunrise we planned to be back for breakfast, then go out again to capture these yellow motifs dotted through the city and the scaffolding, and buildings covered in wraps. We were then going to go back to Edge Lane capturing it during the day with a stronger light. We then returned for lunch and went back out to capture the trainstation, the park/memorial ground, the two juxtaposing cathedrals and went near china town, finding the further you walk out the more it deteriorates, getting some interesting shots, full of juxtapositions. There was a point where we got a pan going from a scaffold building, to a deteriorated building, to the cultural china gateway, to the heritage of the cathedral, to a brand new block of flats, Everything within this pan held our original ideas.