Documentary Making - the Blitz

For one of our modules we are supposed to make a documentary. We had a brilliant idea. I, Veronica, Catherine and Grant were going to focus on Veronicas background, and venture to Poland to spend a few days at Auschwitz and get an interview with an ex-prisoner. Veronica is from Poland, and her great grandparents lived there during the Second World War and Veronica was interested in finding out more about her roots...

The trip was going to take place during our Easter holiday. I, Veronica and Catherine were assigned to go, as Grant did not have a valid passport and could therefore not come along. The time before our journey was about to begin we spent several hours, days and weeks investigating in the history of Auschwitz, the Second World War, Poland in general, Veronica's family history and so on. We also had to spend many, many hours getting all sorts of permissions for filming, the camp and its exhibitions, through Auschwitz. Luckily, with Veronica knowing Polish, she was able to sort this out and get an allowance to film the exhibitions that we would like to highlight in our documentary.

We also managed to rent the cameras out for a longer period than we are usually allowed, which helped a lot as the trip would take about five days. Also, since Veronica's parents still live in Poland, we were to stay at her parents house over there which also meant it would get quite a lot cheaper than it would if we were to take in at a hotel or hostel somewhere.

With all the information required, all the research printed and read through, we were all being very excited about the adventure ahead of us. Then, it all went wrong. The volcano ash cloud swept over the UK, Poland and the rest of the world and we were stranded, unable to get our project done. We tried to find alternative ways of traveling, such as buses or ferries, but it took either too long time, or turned out to be way too expensive. After all, we are all working on a student budget...

So, with heavy hearts we decided to postpone this project and hopefully be able to do it over the summer holidays instead of now, as we have other modules at University that takes up quite a lot of time, and which we cannot miss due to exams, hand ins and similar things. Instead we had to refocus and decide on a new subject to be able to cover in a relatively short space of time. We had many ideas including fox hunting, a seance (ghost whisperer) at a castle in the middle of nowhere, the holocaust in Britain and such but nothing really sparked that little bit extra as Auschwitz and Poland had. In the end we managed to decide on an idea after hours of scouring the Internet for anything at all. We came across information about the Blitz and realised that it is now 70 years ago that major attack struck London. We wanted to angle the documentary from an inspirational point of view and highlight the fact that the fire fighters fought for over a hundred days for their fellow people, and see how this is still being remembered in the UK today, within the rescue services and so on.

At the moment, and it's all in progress. Veronica and Catherine are in London at this very moment, joining in in a Blitz tour, taking the through London, pointing out what happened where and when and how, and hopefully being able to get some great footage from that - I am sure they will, they are both absolute stars with the camera. On Monday further recording will take place as we will have an interview with a young fire fighter about his inspiration from the Blitz, and to get a better understanding if it is an inspiration for the younger generation today or if this is just something we have thought up...

Not quite sure how it will turn out, but I am sure that we will do our best to make a nicely looking documentary about one of the most remembered attacks of London.

Updates will follow, and eventually, the documentary itself.