Rough Sleepers Pre-Production

The time has come to get all the pre-production done for my individual filming project, Rough Sleepers. I had to do all the same paperwork that needed to be done for our group project, such as getting application forms to get permission from the Bath Film Office to be able to film outside on the High Street of Bath, filling out risk assessment forms, making a schedule, the list goes on. I also made contact with the main subject of my documentary, a rough sleeper named Brian Jones (seen below).


A friend of mine from the church that I go to, Joshua Smith, often goes out to talk to the homeless, taking them food and making relationships with them. He's been doing this regularly for quite a long time now and knows all the Big Issue sellers in Bath, and when I mentioned to him that I was doing a project where I would be following the life of one homeless person to break off stereotypes, he said he knew the perfect person for the job. I went to meet Brian with Josh on Monday the 3rd of May and we took him for a meal at a local Chinese restaurant so I could talk to him and hear his story and prepare him for the interview.

The first impression I had of Brian was that he was the most talkative person I had ever met - the first hour I couldn't get one word in edge-wise. The next thing that struck me though was his genuineness - he works as a self-employed Big Issue magazine seller, lives off his own income from doing this and doesn't sign on for benefits from the government since he believes that he should do all he can to earn his own living and stand on his own feet instead of relying on the charity of others. While he does have the occasional drinking set back, he is self-disciplined and works 8 hours a day on his feet selling magazines and hopes to be able to earn enough soon to rent his own flat which could open the door to him getting a good stable job. He's known in Bath for being the Big Issue seller with things to say - his pitch for selling the magazines could almost be a stand-up comedy show, with poignant truths woven in such as 'we're homeless, but not hopeless'.

One of the lines he says often says how he's not expecting anyone to reserve a table in his name at one of the nicest restaurants in Bath, so what we thought we could do would be to actually go in and reserve a table in his name at Jamie's Italian, a Jamie Oliver restaurant that is known to be one of the nicest restaurants in Bath. We got the number of the woman to contact about getting permission to film in there, and we hope to do this as a surprise to Brian, to show him that he's worth enough to sit at the nicest restaurant in Bath.

To try to pre-visualise how the film is going to be structured, I created a non-conventional storyboard using index cards to show the sequence of shots, seen below: