Jonny von Wallström

During the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a documentary about freedom of speech. Since last year me and two colleagues have been doing interviews with people from Egypt, Tunisia, France, Saudi Arabia and the UK. Talks have been about censorship, freedom of expression and democracy. It feels like the project is really taking form. Documentary filmmaking is a really vague thing and a lot of the time you have no clear idea of where things are going. 

Then something just happens. You suddenly realize that you have enough pieces to put the idea together. You start to see the people and stories that you’ve been looking for. I think we’re moving towards that place at the moment. It’s not exactly the way we set out for it to be, but I think it feels better than the original idea. Mostly I think it feels better because it’s for real, actual people that is living the idea.

The timing for it is perfect, in a week or two the missing third of our trio is coming back to Sweden. We’ll be going through all our material and ideas, then we’ll piece together a more specific idea of our film. One year of pre-shooting and research will hopefully result in a complete idea that we’ll be able to apply for funding through. The project will otherwise proceed in a slower matter.

At the moment we’re thinking of financing the project one step at a time. I have all the equipment for the production, so all that we’re actually in need of is financing for the costs of shooting the project. Recently I started to break down my projects into these kind of stages.

Stage 1
First research + pre-shooting, in that phase there’s no funding.
Stage 2
The second stage is financing the actual shooting and then shooting it.
Stage 3
Then when that is done, we jump into the editing room and build the whole story, when that’s done we actually will be trying to finance the whole project.

This way we have far more control and ownership of the project, something I think is vital to realize and be true to our visions.

It can be extremely stressful to work this way, since you’re fumbling in the dark you might loose hope in the project. That’s a natural feeling in all projects though, but I try to look at projects in shorter goals, that way I always move forward. This way of working is slow though, but I love it, the slow and improvised process of making film is amazing. You shape the story while you’re making it, very far from the traditional way of making film. It does bring a lot of challenges. By working this way you automatically put yourself outside of the traditional financial-system. But that is something I consider positive, because it often feels like it’s the only way to keep true to your ideas.

This process is really inspiring to me. It’s like sculpturing, you slowly shape the story piece by piece. Where you often have no idea of where your going. Creative minds work this way, I feel at most creative when I just do things without planning too much. I have a clear idea, but I’m open to things that just happens on the spot.

I find myself really locked in when working in more structured ways. Something I believe create predictable stories. That being said, let’s see where the project ends up. Even though I work in a creative chaos many times I try to keep extremely structured. Recently I read “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky. It’s a great and inspiring book that makes the obstacles of making ideas happen really clear. A lot is common sense, but it was great to just hear it in an obvious way.