Interview Highlights from Vision Australia RadioSam catches up with Daniel Fenech, director of The Blind Sea which documents the life of blind surfer, paralympian and Vision Australia ambassador Matt Formston, as he heads to Nazare in Portugal to surf some of the biggest waves in the world.
The Blind Sea is set to release in cinemas around the country from August 11, and you can find a session near you and purchase tickets via good.film (external website), with 50% of profits from each ticket being donated to Vision Australia.
The Blind See is a documentary featuring blind surfer, cyclist and Paralympian Matt Formston, who set out to surf one of the biggest waves in the world and in the process set a Guinness World Record for the largest wave surfed by a male surfer with blindness or low vision. And to have a chat with me about the blind. See, I'm joined by director Daniel Fenech. Daniel, welcome to Talking Vision. Thanks so much for your time.
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Now today we're of course here to have a chat about your film, The Blind. See. So tell our listeners a bit about the blind, see? What is it about?
Sure. So the Blind See is a documentary. It's about former Paralympic cyclist and four time world champion para surfer Matt Formston, who a lot of your listeners are at Vision Australia might have heard of before, is quite proactive with the VA community. So this is a documentary on Matt's life. But, you know, as part of, I guess, the adventure of of following somebody to do a documentary, we actually followed him on his journey to go big wave surfing. So we took Matt to Nazaré where he surfed what turned out to be a world record wave for a male visually impaired so far.
Oh my God. Okay.
Yeah.
That's amazing. Tell me about that world record wave that Matt was involved with. I'm pretty sure not only myself, but a lot of the listeners out there, probably full of questions like, you know, how does that even happen? How do you set up the opportunity for, you know, something like that to even come about?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was that caught us by surprise, actually. So when we set out to make this film, we were actually planning on shooting it exclusively in Australia. There's plenty of great spots along the East coast. And what unfortunately happened for us is, you know, obviously weather changes and things. We didn't get the swells that we were looking for. So that year in pre through Covid we didn't get the monster winter swells that normally happen. And then the following year when we did get into production it didn't happen either. And I turned to Dylan Longbottom who's our kind of Mr. Miyagi of the movie. He's like a big wave legend. He's a surfboard shaper, makes all the, you know, the big wave surfboards, you know, for all the pro big wave surfers like Chumbo and Justine. So I turned to Dylan. I go, mate, we're not really having any luck in Australia. Do you think we can get Matty to Nazarene back alive? Dylan thought for a minute. He's. Oh, yeah, 100%. So, you know, we, you know, scrambled. A month later, we're on a plane off to Portugal. Um, and we get there and like the whole lead up to it, there was like weather reports saying, Big Momma's coming, big Mama's coming. And for those who know, who don't know how it kind of works, they're big. Mama is like the big 100 foot wave that everyone dreams of. So we had two weather systems that were going to collide and create Big Mama, and we're going to get like The Ride of a life. And Matt was like training hard. He's doing his breath holes and his toe training and everything that he had to do to prepare himself because he, you know, it was coming. And it turns out Big Mama didn't come. And there was just this monster mash up of storms and whitewash, and we actually couldn't get Maddie out onto the water until the last day, which was extremely stressful. So when we finally did get out there, Matty had a pretty good run. And that last wave, um, we saw it. We all just could not believe what we saw. And Maddy picked up a world record. You know, we had it measured and we had it certified and yeah, picked up a Guinness World Record for the largest wave surfed by a vision impaired male at 50 something feet, which is a five story building. So Matt was surfing a five story building at about 70km an hour.
Oh my God. That's incredible. And you've got something else in store for us on the end of that as well.
Yes, yes, yes. One of the things that was really interesting, because I don't serve, one of the things I found really interesting was that apart from writing the wave, one of the best moments when you're surfing is those conversations you have out back with your mates. So you paddle out the back and you're sitting on the board and you're waiting for your set to come. And those are some of the best moments and memories people have. Waterproof microphones don't really exist and the kind of coming through now, but we rigged up some specialist microphones that could record locally, so we actually waterproof these microphones and sent the boys out back with these microphones on. So one of the things about this film is it's all about inclusion. Well, that's one of our key themes. And you get to see people from all over the world with all different skill sets, helping Matty achieve his dream. And one of the ways we demonstrated that was having those microphones. And I don't even know if there is a movie out there yet where you can hear so clearly what goes on. But you can, you know, you can hear them cheering and psyching Matty up and all those moments that lead up to riding that wave. And you can see how hard it is because because you were invited into that world and you're part of that journey. And that's something that we're quite proud of as well. It's like you get to peer behind the curtain and see, like everything that goes on, which is exciting.
Speaking of those little sounds you pick up and all that sort of thing, you've been quite involved with quite a few people on the soundtrack. A lot of indie artists and a lot of people who've contributed to the music for the film. So tell us a bit about them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously the sound design is extremely important. We've even got a great review, someone saying that this film has to be heard just as much as seen, and we put a lot of effort into the sound. And obviously the guys at massive were incredible. We have a composer who composed a couple of like the key moments in the film, like pivotal emotional scenes with being an indie film. Our budgets were like tiny, tiny, tiny. So one of the things that I did was I reached out to a whole stack of indie musicians that I like and I follow, and I said, hey, look, you've got this track here or that track there. It's beautiful, you know? How do you feel about it being in a movie because it fits so well. And a lot of these musicians were like, well, I feel like that. I've got this whole library of just like little ditties and things. So the majority of the film, I'm quite proud of this because we're an indie production company. It's an indie film, but the majority of the music was produced by indie musicians as well. So unsigned artists who are out there week after week just peddling, you know, their music and their career, you know, got an opportunity to have their music played at the Sydney Film Festival in a few weeks. We're playing at the Sydney Opera House. Like they get to have their music on one of the biggest platforms in the country, and we're so stoked we could all come together for this.
Yeah. That's amazing. Hopefully it launches a few careers. Yes. Keep our fingers crossed there for sure. Now, Dan, I want to go back to that relationship between you and Matt in particular. Had you known Matt for quite a while, how did you get connected up with him?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'd known Matty for quite a while. We both worked together at Optus, which is his day job, and I was making content for his Rio Paralympic cycling campaign. So that's when I first met Maddie and Will shooting stuff together. And. And I always said to him, I said, look, you've got a really good story. It's pretty inspiring, but it's also really interesting and you should really think about getting a documentary made. And it turns out I wasn't the only person that had been saying it to him. And, you know, a couple of years later, I'd moved on and, you know, we'd stayed in contact. And he goes, oh, Dan, I'm ready to tell my story. And I'm like, dude, I think I'm ready to tell it. Because back then I was just coming up through the ranks. And, you know, I'd sort of gotten a lot better over the years, like, can you let me have a crack? And that was it. It was just, you know, trust both ways. So it sort of took us about a year or so to develop the story and get the initial sort of funding in place. Um, and then once that first sponsor jumped on board, it kind of like it just, you know, just sort of like steamrolled after that. And then the whole project itself took about four years from start to finish. Wow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's pretty incredible. And that four year journey and then, you know, and the start of that was um, in amongst Covid and all the curveballs that that threw and um, your direction no doubt. But um, so which is good.
For us for um, because we developed all the pre through Covid, so we didn't really have to go anywhere. There was no distractions. So that was help. That turned out really helpful. But yeah the first shoot was like straight after the gates had opened and they let international travel happen. So we were like straight out there to get started.
Wow. That's unbelievable. Give us a bit of an insight into those four years, what the process was like there and all that sort of thing. What was that like for you and the team?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I spent a lot of time with Matty just chatting about his story and the legacy he wanted to leave. What sort of, you know, messages that were kind of important to him, or life lessons that were important to him and kind of who was in his circle. So as a filmmaker, I was doing a lot of that groundwork just to work out what the story was going to be and how we were going to tell it. And then aesthetically, I spoke to Matt at length about movies, too, because obviously Matt's got like 3% vision. He's got macular dystrophy, so he only sees in his peripherals like Matty. How do you watch movies? So we spoke a lot about what worked for him, what didn't work for him, and it kind of shaped the way we built the whole edit from those initial conversations. So, you know, some of the things that we applied as we kept characters to an absolute minimum. So there's still a handful of characters, but, you know, there's not too many people. And the other thing too is I actually watched a lot of movies without the vision on just to put myself in that perspective. So yeah, limiting the amount of characters was pretty important. So that way it wasn't too disorientating. And we used quite a lot of observational sequences. So a lot of the cues that Matty and I'm sure a lot of your listeners would use when you just sort of out and about in public, like, you know, you get a feel for a person's personality through their mannerisms and their intonation and the way they speak and just sort of allowing the scene to have those moments. You can kind of bond, I guess, with the characters on screen, and then also found that documentaries that were just like, you know, one person talks and then you cut to another person talking, and then there's just overlay vision, but it's just two people or three people backwards and forwards talking. You kind of lose track of who's who. So we kind of kept all that sort of talking head to a minimum. But yeah, we just let a lot of the observational sequences happen, and we spent quite a lot of time in sound design too. So the crew over at Massive Music were just incredible, the way that they handled the sound design, like a lot of detail, like we did, you know, not just like the diegetic soundscape when you're outside and in the environment, but also things like, we took Matt for an eye test with Doctor Sam and just having all the little gadgets and gizmos and touching and just all those sounds that you would hear. They cleaned a lot of that up because we had microphones and they exposed a little bit cleaner and all that, But even and then even things like when mats out on the wave and it's really dramatic and all the music stops, you can still hear the surfboard slicing through the water, so you still can track what's going on. So that was a big thing for us, was to kind of make it the film as accessible as possible. And then obviously chatting with Michael over at Vision Australia, he actually wrote the script for the audio description. So having a blind audience catered for with this film was pretty paramount for us.
Oh yeah, and on that topic of audio description, how much did you know about audio description before you started working with Matt and with Vision Australia and the Blind and Low Vision community, was that something you'd always had in your mind as a filmmaker? A sort of in there as something to, you know, make these sort of things accessible? What's that been like? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I've never listened to audio description. I knew it existed, but I never haven't, never had a need. So I sort of never worried about it. So I did watch a few films with it. And, you know, some of it, some of the films, they put out ads and they just seem lazy, you know, it's just like a statement here and a statement there. And what Michael brought to it is he really brought a sense of poetry to like scene descriptions and just contextualizing the vision. So even the voiceover artist, she was like, man, this is probably twice as long as a normal audio description script for me. So there's like, you know, obviously, you know, we kind of want to be best in class with that kind of thing. But I know Maddie doesn't really watch with audio description too much. So as much as I understand that it's great for the low vision community to have it, there's going to be people who don't want it. That's where the observational sequences and all those sort of little tricks came into play. So that way it's kind of however you want to consume this film, you've got an option for you.
And that's super important because, you know, as we're both fully aware, the blind and low vision community is by no means a monolith. And myself, as somebody with low vision, I sort of consume movies in my own way. And as you've said, so do many other people out there. So that's really interesting to hear. You've had that experience as well, talking to quite a few people who do interact with these movies a different way. So in terms of where people can go and watch the blind, see what's the best way for them to do that, where should they keep tabs on that?
Yeah, well there's two ways. Like we've been really, really blown away with how many people have gotten excited about this film and picked it up. So I would just say, you can reach out to your local cinema and check to see if it's in there coming soon, you know. You know, listed as a coming soon film, but you can go to the blind see website and the Blind See website is the blind see. Com.au forward slash watch the film. And we've been working really, really hard. Our EP, she's just been so busy just trying to keep on top of every new listing that pops up. But she's been adding every cinema screening to that website, so you can just go straight to our website and jump on that tab and it'll take you to, you know, your local cinema and you can jump, you know, from Northern Territory or WA or Sydney or wherever. There's listings right around the country.
All right. Perfect. Well, I've been speaking today with Daniel Fenech, director of the Blind See movie featuring blind surfer, Paralympian and blind cyclist Matt Formston. Daniel, thank you so much for your time today. It was great to catch up with you and hear all about the movie.
Thank you. It's a pleasure.
So that's the blind see in cinemas between the 15th and 18th of August. And as an added bonus, 50% of ticket sales go to Vision Australia to fund the vital services for the blind and low vision community.
