Filming the Work of a Goat Sanctuary

Following a visit in July 2009 to “Buttercups”, a goat sanctuary in rural Kent, I as “Mr. Director” directed the group towards making a film of the activities. Nothing like good old fashioned dictatorship to get things done.

During the following few months the group worked hard filming a wide variety of scenes covering the daily routine of caring through to the meeting of the medical and social needs of the goats. Problem was the team began to fall for the charms of the goats. Popping in” just to see how they were doing” and of course filming during the visits.

Throughout Bob Hitch, the founder of “Buttercups”, allowed full access to all the many aspects of the sanctuaries work. He was also instrumental in getting the necessary permissions to enable us to film veterinary surgeons both in the operating theatre and on location.

The end result of this flurry of activity was 20 hours of video tape requiring editing.

Where to start? First was to meet our original filming brief “A day in the life of Buttercups”. This required editing, music selection, animation, scriptwriting and “voice-over” recording as well as cleaning up the sound tracks of the on location interviews. Anyone ever tried to separate the noise from inside a Landrover bouncing over rutted tracks with the driver’s commentary. Took me ages.

That done I still had hours of unedited tape just begging to be used. Stage 2 then was building a number of short films (filmlets?) to add to the content of the final DVD. This proved to be both enjoyable and informative. I learnt a whole lot about skills such as haymaking, goat dentistry, lice control and … err ... castration.

Prior to general release, the finished DVD was shown to an invited group from the sanctuary in recognition of their patience and assistance in making this project possible.

A trailer for this film can be seen here,

and you can find Buttercups on the web at:

www.buttercups.org.uk

One of the bonus spin-offs of all this filming is the production of a documentary for entry into selected competitions. Watch this space to see how it fares.

In the meantime I, in tandem with the rest of the group, are looking for our next challenge.

Jeff