Taking first steps...

Being the daughter of a violin maker I was quite obviously privileged when it came to my own knowledge about the instrument as well as having the opportunity of filming in my own house. But having worked on several documentaries and TV programs in the past I also knew that anytime people are interested in someone’s work, that someone is usually more than happy to talk to you about their profession, hobby, desire, etc. Hopefully my father and his employees would be just as happy to have me watch, film and interview them. Luckily I already knew most of the tools that were used for violin making, the questions that people ask when they wanted to find out more and the very interesting and important historical point of the instrument and hence I had a good idea of what I wanted to get done, from the very start.

However, during the early stages of production I also got strongly influenced by a short documentary called ‘The Café’s’. It was shown to me by Abbe Fletcher - a lecturer at Kingston University and documentary filmmaker herself – and featured a somehow different way of documentary film making, with a series of carefully selected shots, showing well framed images and objects. I decided to produce something similar for the introduction of my documentary. Hopefully I was going to be able to make my shots appear as beautiful on screen as the ones from ‘The Café’s’.