Film-maker and director, Jonathan Smith, describes how you condense four months of ordinary family life into eight films.
On the 16th December 2007 I watched the Hughes family walk back into their home. In the week and a half they had been away it had been transformed, fitted with 21 cameras and 16 microphones. There were cameras everywhere except the bathroom. I watched from next door, a cottage near Canterbury converted into a temporary TV gallery, as the normality of family life unfolded on a bank of hi-tech screens.
Documentary experiment
That surreal experience of watching the Hugheses wandering around their home was both the first day of a documentary experiment but also the culmination of 15 months searching for the right family. We met families who were desperate to be on television; everything from the family with psychic kids to the wannabe Partridge Family. We met families we really liked but who didn't want to have the cameras in their home. But, as the weeks went by and we talked with more and more families, our search became less about what we didn't want; people who just wanted to be on television, families so extreme the audience would not recognise any of their own lives, and more about looking for a family whose life included the issues we hoped the series would reflect.
Finding the family
I met the Hughes family for the first time in September 2007, with only a few weeks' money left in the budget to search for families. They were full of questions, eager to know more about the idea for the series but at that stage far from being committed to taking part. We really got on though and after a few meetings I was desperately hoping that Simon, Jane and their family would say yes: they were funny, intelligent and sometimes loud. And there was so much going in on in their lives. Tom was growing up fast, Charlotte was starting sixth form and about to learn to drive and Emily was the most open, wilful and funny teenager I had met. To top it all, Jessica, the eldest daughter had just had a baby and was due to get married in the summer.
Fly-on-the-wall
When Channel 4 first spoke to me about directing The Family, I could see it was an opportunity to bring the fly-on-the-wall documentary up-to-date with 21st century techniques. I'd be able to use modern camera technology for a forensic examination of family life in what we all hoped would be a truly groundbreaking and innovative documentary series. But since no-one had done it before there was no guarantee that it would work.
Telling the story
A new approach
By the time I met the Hugheses I had been in what felt like a constant conversation about family life for just over a year. From talking to all those families, I'd become convinced that the detail and intimacy of our approach could capture something new about family life. After all it's nearly 35 years since Paul Watson's groundbreaking series, The Family, and so much has changed since the mid 70s.
I told the Hugheses I wanted to make a series of documentaries that were true to their own family, and would also resonate with the audience. As a film-maker you want to find the places or institutions that you feel will tell you most about what Britain is like today. Perhaps the most important institution of them all is the family.
So instead of wandering around the house with a camera crew, we would sit in the cottage next door where we created our gallery and watch life unfold; from dad Simon making his first cup of coffee in the morning through to 19-year-old daughter Emily creeping home after a night clubbing in the early hours of the next morning. There would be no director asking people how they felt and the place of long interviews would be taken by conversations between members of the family.
Filming
Twenty-one small, remotely operated cameras were installed throughout the house. We wanted their home to remain their home and for the cameras not to turn it into an artificial environment. So there were certain times that the family could have the cameras off in their bedrooms and there were no cameras or microphones in the bathrooms. And since we weren't in the room with them filming on a day to day basis we also made time to see them in person, having a takeaway in their house every week or just going to the pub for a drink.
As the weeks of filming passed the surreal feeling of sitting next door in the gallery receded and we became used to watching the family's routine. Every day a shift of 10 people would start at 6 in the morning waiting for the family to wake up and another shift would take over until the early hours of the following day.
And every morning the tapes were carefully transported to a storage room. And then when that storage room was full, we started to fill another. In the end we'd have 5000 hours of footage on nearly 2000 tapes in about 200 boxes.
That's where my work really began,turning all this into gripping, meaningful films.
The Edit
From the outset, a few things were very clear to me and the film editors I was working with. First and foremost, although we may have used technology that was similar to the kit you normally associate with reality shows like Big Brother, that didn't mean we should assemble the programmes in the same way. I'm a documentary maker and these films are documentaries. This wasn't an exercise in just running scenes of today's goings-on in the house. Our aim was to assemble and present true stories that came out of our observations of this family's life, not to provide Big Brother style hour-by-hour accounts of what happened while we watched them. This involved painstaking effort, carefully compressing timelines, intercutting and interweaving narratives and endlessly debating the most telling shots to use.
Universal themes
Soon, a number of strong themes and storylines were emerging from daily life in the family home. These themes captured universal truths about family life and I wanted them to form the backbone of each film. Sometimes the storylines occurred neatly over a few days. Sometimes they were spread out over months. Sometimes the family seemed to be wrestling with a problem and they'd go round and round with it for weeks before it was finally resolved. And from the thousands of hours of footage, eight films emerged. I hope they show not just the essence of the Hughes family, but something everyone will recognise. Landmarks like turning 40, seemingly small issues like bedtime or tidying rooms to the problems of school or trying to decide whether it's time for one of the children to move out. It's a series about the universal themes of family life.
Next steps?
The technology has been great to use and I think the material it has produced is remarkable. I wonder where else we can go with these techniques? I believe they have opened up the possibility of a new kind of intimate and considered film-making, and the opportunities have only begun to be explored.
