Tonight, BBC Wales will air a documentary following the making of The Passion, the National Theatre Wales and Wildworks production starring Michael Sheen and the town of Port Talbot. I was lucky enough to have worked on the show in a number of small capacities. Primarily I was asked to work alongside Tom Beardshaw on Port-Talbot.com.
Working with a small team of local bloggers, photographers, film-makers and editors our task was to document the action, getting it edited and uploaded in as little time as possible. The idea was to create a channel which would make it possible to follow the action from anywhere in the world, as well as adding a new dimension to the story for people lucky enough to be following it on the ground. The idea was to blog “in character”, meaning we were telling the story as real. This involved working as quickly as our laptops could muster from anywhere we could grab a Wi-Fi connection – including Fraser Maclennan‘s mum’s dining table and, at 1am on Monday morning, the front steps of Port Talbot civic centre!
I’ve included the videos that I edited over the weekend below, but you can see full story as well as a film shot by Michael Sheen himself as “The Teacher” at port-talbot.com. We shot on DSLR, FlipCam, mini DV and iPhone and got as close to the action as we possibly could – the name of the game was information and not aesthetic so apologies for the extremely hand-held nature of the footage.
You may have seen and read a lot about The Passion over the past few weeks, and will no doubt hear more after tonight’s programme airs; but I cannot over emphasise what an amazing event it was. I got to hear a lot of stories from and about Port Talbot, met some great people, had a genuinely good kebab and saw a town learn to walk a little taller all in just three days. I feel grateful to have been even a small part of it.
