Henry Leung

Student Number: 728669

Tsz Hang (Henry) Leung
728669
Unit: CT4STORY
Unit coordinator:
Yael Friedman
“The Rutland Arms”
Project Report

Henry Leung

Student Number: 728669

A. Original Concept
The Original concept of filming at the “The Rutland Arms” was in response to the original brief of documenting a place in Southsea. The idea for filming a pub, came from the original three members of the team. The reasons behind this choice was, the diversity of clientele, the atmosphere and capturing a sense of community in a traditionally run family business. ‘This pub is our pub’, appears to be the motto or so the first idea for the film is to capture this in a non-fiction film of 3-5 minutes and explain why this pub is so unique.

B. ‘Development’ and the Project Report

1. Evaluation of Research

At the very beginning of this project, I had a documentary theory lesson about Bill Nichols’ six modes of Documentary. Therefore, I decided to have a further reading about this theory, and I went on to one of the websites ‘Six Principal Modes of Documentary Filmmaking, Meridian Stories’, and it includes a brief of all six documentary modes of Bill Nichols’ theory, from expository to performative mode. After a clear and full understanding of those modes, I have a clear idea of how we could approach our documentary style with Bill Nichols’ participatory mode, which we, the filmmakers, can interact with the subjects of the film, and having some interview shots, letting the subjects tell the story by themselves.

But that is not enough, therefore subsequently I went onto YouTube, searched for some previously similar work to ours, and maybe get some influence of what exact shots or sound or editing that we could approach with. I found a few of them quite interesting, such as ‘The Power of Darts’ by ITV
Documentary, and because ‘The Rutland Arms’ has a dart board and pool table as well, so maybe we could follow their example of an over the shoulder shot of a guy playing darts and cut to an extreme close-up shot on the dart board with darts reaching the board one by one. We thought this would be a nice way of telling the story of customers coming into the pub, hanging out and do whatever they want with the faculties provided.

However, besides researching about the theory and how to approach to shoot the video, I also went to search for answers to my question ‘what makes this pub our pub?’, and because I wanted to know ‘why everyone love this pub so much’, ’what makes it so unique’, and understand more about this pub and the history background of it. So I typed in ‘The Rutland Arms Portsmouth’ on
Google, and found a news article about the family owners of the Pub, ‘The Rutland Arms is more like community centre than a pub’ by The News UK,( 2012, November 1) and I realised that this

Henry Leung

Student Number: 728669

pub is owned by a family with four generations, from Johnstone Barr the eldest (Rachel’s grandfather) and his wife Hannah, to Margaret Russell and her husband Dave, then to Ross and
Rachel Russell, and finally to their adorable little boy. Apart from that, I also noticed the reason of this pub’s popularity in this neighbourhood, as you always get a warm welcome inside the pub, and everyone is welcomed here and you get know each other inside-out.

Therefore, from this point onward, we have made a list of people that we want to interview and chat with from both sides; the customers and the family staff.

Henry Leung

Student Number: 728669

2. A Critical Analysis of the Film/ Video - ‘Close Reading’

In this documentary, I was one of the Cameraman in the filming process, and one of those things I like about filming this project, is you get a warm welcome every single time with the staff, there was once or twice they even offered us free drinks on the house. But now, let me give you a close reading critical analysis of this documentary.

First of all, it started off with a nice establishing shot of the Pub, and a nice