This Dog Won’t Bark
Two Sundays ago, I decided to walk a kayak back to Leeds from Bradford – and film it. I had never made a film before, and this felt like a good opportunity to do so. I had no real plan for filming other than to try and imitate the videos that had first inspired me to do this. It was going to be an experiment, a taster, a trial.
The journey itself was simple: arrive in Bradford via train; go and see a man about a kayak; then, haul this restoration-project-to-be back to Leeds by hand and trailer, following the Super Cycleway. It was an affordable mode of transport, aye, but it was also a good excuse for a l’arl adventure – and I’m always up for that!
As laborious as the trog might have been, it was well within my ability. Although I’ve never hauled a kayak that many miles in under five hours before, the mental and physical strains of human-powered treks such as this are somewhat familiar to me now. That’s not to say that I didn’t find it difficult; of course, I did. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the resilience I have developed towards such difficulties, an acknowledgement of my current strengths.
For me, the real challenge was gathering footage that was good enough to make a film with.
It’s not that the footage I gathered was awful, per se; the angles were fine, as was the audio quality and the overall clarity of the videos. In fact, most of the recordings were adequate – on their own. My issue was with the lack of overall consistency.
In striving to be as true-to-life as possible, I had decided to keep the scripting to an absolute minimum. Instead, I relied on intuition and iteration, improvisation. If a clip became too verbose, for example, I would start recording again, each time attempting to retain the same energy and enthusiasm as the first. Inevitably, this system became a contradiction; the naturalistic aesthetic I was hoping to preserve was now being disrupted. The more ‘takes’ I took of the same monologue, the further it seemed to stray from reality. The result of this was an assortment of disjointed offcuts, too jagged and reluctant to form a larger whole.
In reflecting on this mass of unmarriable snippets, I was initially discouraged. I began to doubt my ambition to begin working with film. Perhaps I should just stick to writing, I thought. But then, I realised that this was only the first hurdle. Yes, I had failed, but to have failed is to have tried – and that’s always worth something. Failure is an almost inevitable part of expanding one’s own comfort zone, without it we would cease to learn. I remembered Beckett’s words in some sort of promise to myself: next time, I will ‘fail better’. I’ve got a lot to learn, and isn’t that great?
With love,
Jamie x
My GoPro died about three miles away from my destination, but I thought it would be cool to share the time lapse here anyway: