Against The Clock diary: how it happened

I haven’t really written anything for me very much recently, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about the process of making Against The Clock.

I have no experience directing films. But I know what I want to see and more importantly, what I want to say. But there’s a big disparity between that desire, and the knowledge and experience to actually make it happen.

I’m not claiming to be an expert in documentary, but I have learnt a great deal. Mostly from this book:

Get it from Amazon it's ace!

And a little bit from the experience I’ve accrued making ATC. That’s what I want to talk about and I’m going to start at the very beginning:

Why a drag racing documentary?
Originally ATC was going to be a 26 second film for a project with 26, the writer’s organisation and the UVLC. I figured it would just be long enough to show a driver queue up, race and come off the track at the end. I’d tell his story using voiceovers.  The whole film would be one, continuous take.

This is of course, written with the benefit of hindsight. At the time I only had a vague idea of what the film could be like. One direction was making a YouTube doubler video:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td width="425" height="355" valign="top"> </td><td width="425" height="355" valign="top"> </td></tr> <tr><td colspane=2><span style="font-size:8pt; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, verdana, sans-serif;">YouTube Doubler</td></tr> </table>

The more I looked into it, the more complex this idea looked to make. I had to find two different race teams to agree to an interview and let me in their cars to shoot with cameras that someone else would own. All I could think was ‘insurance’. Not to mention organising two shoots and a difficult edit.

A producer I met through the project loved the idea of a drag film, but she thought the doubler bit was complicated. ‘You need a human interest.’

I went home, thought about who could be a drag racer: old people, children (there is an established junior drag racing class), people with disabilities. I typed in ‘disabled racing drivers’ into Google. I got two promising results. One was a Daily Express article about a blind man who raced the salt flats in Utah. He used walkie-talkies, four guide cars and GPS to guide his supercharged Jag. The other link was for Nigel Holland’s drag team, Ave a Go Racing.

The blind man lived in America and the article was seven years old. Nigel lived in Bedfordshire and was competing in the 2010 Summer Nationals. I emailed Nigel.

He was a drag racer and I wanted to make a film about drag racing. When I was ten my dad took me to see bike dragging and I loved it. It’s fast, the action is all in one place and I’m pretty sure I saw a man with a chrome-plated prosthetic leg. I love the look of drag racers and when I saw photos of Santa Pod there was something peculiarly reminiscent about where I grew up: the big, flat sky and the race to the horizon. It just seemed to fit: all the action was in one place I could see myself making a film there. And I was pretty certain the prospect of shots of American muscle cars, with their exotic paintjobs, would be just the show reel candy to entice a film crew to give me their time for free.

Nigel emailed back to say he was interested and that as a press photographer at Santa Pod, he could get us access to both the pits and the track. Rhys and Rich said they were up for filming. It looked as if it was all going to happen.

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