How do we know Chasing the Sun was a huge success? Because of the twitter streets. By how quickly test matches are selling out. Because of how many of our friends who once loathed watching rugby adored the series and now watch the Springboks with us each week. This was Greg’s second season as Series Director for production house T+W’s award-winning series. Colwyn, after being the B-Unit director on Chasing the Sun 1, came on board as an episode director for season 2. Here’s what they learnt over the 6 months of production:
- Find the story. Chasing’s success is rooted in its focus on human relationships first, rugby second. Winning the World Cup isn’t enough to make a compelling series. Audiences need insight into our key protagonists - the players and management - since most of the audience know the results of the games.
- Great writing can be brutal. Finding the story is a process full of dead ends and rewrites. Occasionally it all comes together and just works. But more often than not, the story fails to line up at first and if you don’t stubbornly keep digging away to get it right, you’ll end up settling for something mediocre.
- Hulle weet nee wat ons weet nee. Not being at the World Cup ourselves, we didn’t know the stories we didn’t know from within the Bok camp. At times you have to play detective to pry those stories out.
- Stay true to the brand; in this case a celebratory story of hope. We were often tempted to throw in salacious details from behind the scenes. But we had to ask ourselves if they served the Chasing message and cut them out if they didn’t, no matter how provocative they were.
- Identify your rock stars and lean on them as your key storytellers. All the players and coaches had great insights. But some were just better on camera than others. Those interviewees were critical to drive the story forward.