Taste Of London - Shelly Adams. (Directors Cut. The experience)
This documentary was not as tense as the others as I had become quite at easing at filming these documentaries that I was feeling both confident and comfortable whilst on the set at Shelly’s.
After watching a documentary that Helen featured in which sought to find out if there was such a thing as a British dish, I was determined to try to answer this question my self and to get that answer I turned to Shelly Adams.
Shelley Adams is a long-standing family friend so when approached to be a part of the documentary she showed a real interest and was keen to make the project a reality.
Being a busy woman it took a little bit of time for her to arrive at a decision of what food choice she was going to share for her experience and based on her choice you could see she really took the time to think the story through.
Seeing as I had covered numerous flavours from different cultures I was really hoping to include in a British flavour and thought of Shelley for help to fill that sector and it turned out that I got more than I could have possibly asked for.
One of the things that I liked about her documentary is that her story different from the others had a lot more depth and history. It was a real educational experience as within the time I had known her for, I never knew about her heritage.
Shelley’s experience was as much an indoor experience as it was an outdoor experience. To fully gain the essence of her story, she took me round to her mothers house only a few doors away to film their garden of the home grown ingredients, one of them being the ‘green top rhubarb’ and told me how most of her ingredients and herbs used in her cooking on a day to day basis are grown right from that garden.
I found it really educational as she and her mother explained the difference between homegrown rhubarb (Green top rhubarb) and the rhubarb that’s bought in packs from the shop which is also known as the forced rhubarb.
This experience as the title states really were a British flavour in my opinion as everything from her herbs to her organic ingredients to her Green top rhubarb are situated from within the country.
Her food experience being so detailed meant I had to make sure I did my research to make sure that I had gotten every part of the story right.
This became more important during the editing of the film as she spoke about the Rhubarb triangle and gave a descriptive account of the view inside a forced Rhubarb shed. She also gave accounts of life as a child on the fields with her uncle and aunt.
With the research I did, I found numerous websites with suitable images of Rhubarb for the documentary experiences and sought through the right procedures to obtain the images. I even went as far as contacting Rhubarb Triangle Customer Services to request for images of the Rhubarb triangle, images of the shed and any other images they were willing to provide.
Forced Rhubarb © 2010. Amy Anderson.
Rhubarb Pickers © 2009. Christopher Thomond/Guardian.
Rhubarb Shed © 2008. Geospace
Rhubarb pickers © 1997. Shelley Adams. All rights reserved.
All images taken for her cooking experience (I.e. images taken on the day in her kitchen and in her mothers garden) apart from the images of the rhubarb triangle barns and images of the forced rhubarb were all taken by my self (© Junior Monney). All other images were obtained through the right forms of permission to be used in my documentary (© 2010. All rights reserved to the owners. Refer to credits for full creditation) and the image of the rhubarb pickers were provided by Shelley along with her full permission given to use this image.
As for nerves there were none. This made my job a whole lot easier as it meant that we did not waste time double taking any scenes or sections.
Passionate about the rhubarb dish being a traditional dish that has remained in her family for years, Shelley finally had the opportunity to tell the story to a large audience and I was more than happy to be the person that would be sharing her food experience to that audience.
The filming experience ran very smooth and this time fortunately I did not have any issues with the equipment or filming the experience, everything ran as it was supposed to, and Shelley kept to my guidelines as asked to.
We finished the documentary with enough time for me to grab as much location film footage as I could obtain of the house, of its surroundings, of the town and anything else I could think of that would really bring out the beauty of her story.
