DOCUMENTARY

MIMMO

STRINGS ATTACHED

Making MIMMO

Hampstead RFC

SHORT FILM

THE PART

BENEATH

PHOTOGRAPHY

THE TRUTH (Behind the Scenes)

Sofar Sounds

FILM NOTES

Aberrant ramblings on the screen experience

What made ‘Still: A Michael J Fox Story’ so damned good?A clue comes from its editor Michael Harte, who previously cut ‘Three Identical Strangers’ which also employed reconstruction filming to fill in vital gaps.Except with ‘Still’, the craftsmanship seems to reach a new level, with Harte helping to storyboard new footage during the edit and fitting it together seamlessly with the cut they already had:“We had an hour and a half assembly of just Michael J Fox’s audio book, and archive, and potential storyboards. And I had edited this on my own and sent it to the director Davis Guggenheim, and we were kind of excited about it. You could see that there was an arc there.I kind of got excited about this idea of an archival only film with Michael J Fox, but we had a couple of gaps in the story. But the pace of that cut was just relentless. I wanted this to be fast, and Davis was the same, but Davis and me decided we're missing a couple of moments in this.Maybe he can give us some audio, or he can re-record some of the audio that they cut out of the audiobooks? And Davis said, I'm going to record him on camera as well, just to be safe. And I got the footage back into the edit a couple of days after the interview.And I remember watching the interview and thinking, this is easily the best interview I've ever had in the edit. Easily. And I was so shocked and surprised how honest and funny he was.And he was like, okay, everything we've done, it's secondary now. That interview is the heart and soul of the story.So my job then was to figure that out, how do I add these two? You know, honestly, there's a version of this film where it could have been just that interview.Some of the reconstructions I thought were fantastic. Again, it's not like they were trying to trick us, but they looked like they were shot by Dean Cundey. They looked like they were from an 80s movie.They didn't seem at all out of place. I really bought into them. There was a couple of moments actually where I was almost full with the Back to the Future stuff, where I just thought, hang on, is that a behind-the-scenes shot there that I've not seen before?I think the trick with that was we storyboarded it in the edit, which is something I've never done before. We had a guy called David Navas. Davis was in LA, I was in London and David Navas was in Storyboard House in Barcelona. And we'd all get on a Zoom when the time allowed us.And he would do it in real time - he would draw the storyboard, and then he would put it on a screen and we'd say, okay, can you move him to the left a bit? And this kind of went on for a couple of weeks.But I think the reason it feels potentially like a Dean Cundey film is that we would start with a clip of Michael in his movies first and work our way out, as opposed to the other way around.So everybody, when they watch it, they say to me, oh my god, it's amazing that you found that clip - it was actually the other way around. We started with the clip and thought, where could this live?And we would then build, we would storyboard around these shots and repurpose the shots so that we always knew where the scene would end.”

Quotes from:
‘The Filmumentaries Podcast: No76 - Michael Harte’ - 12 May 2023

Freelance Producer/Director and Video Editor.Known for the mid-length documentary 'Mimmo', a profile of Italian mayor Domenico Lucano, heralded as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders by Forbes magazine in 2016 for his pioneering refugee work and rejuvenating the struggling town of Riace.Producing credits at top British production houses including BBC Studios, ITN Productions, BriteSpark Films/Argonon and Channel 4 News. Writer and director of narrative shorts including 'Seduction', 'The Runner' and 'Beneath'.Extensive experience in research, development, field producing, shooting and editing for high-end TV output, corporate video, short-form and long-form content; photography and photo editing; working with top onscreen talent; scripting for TV, video and news; and researching and writing in-depth features and analysis for websites, newspapers and magazines.Experienced user of Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Creative Suite.