A few weeks later I was approached by a producer at Public Television Service Taiwan (their BBC equivalent) about working on a feature documentary they were making about the coastline of Taiwan. Every few years PTS make these high-end docs with the purpose of getting it out to as many international film festivals as possible and winning some awards! It sounded like a great project to be involved with!
So in February 2012 I flew to Taiwan for the first shoot. We had one morning to meet the team and prep the kit in Taipei before we flew to an island off the coast of Taiwan for the first filming days. The weather was terrible, and the characters we were filming didn’t really seem to be clicking and after a few days we headed to the next location unsure of how well the shoot was going.
The next stop was Chenggong in the south of Taiwan. That evening we were welcomed by the fishermen and drank a lot with them - as is tradition in Taiwan (in fact I’m yet to find a country in the world where drinking a lot isn’t an important ‘tradition’)!
The next day at 5am we were at sea with the crew, and the sea was huge. Their small boat bobbing around in the ‘black tide’ with waves crashing over the deck. They’d had film crews on the boat before and it seemed most of their experience had been of cameramen turning green in the first five minutes and spending the rest of the day lying on the deck getting in their way. So the fact that we managed to keep working all day seemed to impress them (although between you and me it was touch and go at times).
Between the evenings spent drinking at the karaoke and the days on the boat spent not getting sick
they seemed to like having us on-board and welcomed us into their
community so the rest of film was shot solely in Chenggong. 
The way they fish is, in a word, extraordinary. Four men on a boat driving around in the largest waves they can find (this is where the fish are) looking for fish. That’s right, literally looking for individual fish. In an ocean. When they spot a fin the cry goes up and they chase the fish while the captain runs down from the bridge, along a plank protruding from the bow of the boat, straps his feet into straps right at the end of the plank and grabs a 20kg harpoon.
He then shouts directions to the guy who’s taken over the steering and eventually, with a lot of skill and a little bit of luck they harpoon a huge Marlin - usually weighing between 150 and 300kg. To say this technique is ‘sporting’ to the fish would be an understatement, if the fish dives even a few meters it gets away and often the fishermen go home with no catch. The fishermen also work with a local scientist who uses their harpooning skills to tag fish with GPS transmitters. An unusual alliance but without the fishermen's skills Dr Chiang can't tag the fish and without the data he's collecting there might no be any fish for future fishermen.We returned five or six times throughout the year, filming in the community, at celebrations, with the fishermen’s families as well as a total of nine amazing days at sea. On the second shoot I gave the captain some prints of that first day at sea and even he seemed surprised that how big the waves had been that day.
Filming on the boat was incredibly hard. It’s small and has two levels, which meant climbing up and down with the camera. At the higher level the listing of the small boat is amplified so it's even harder to work to hold on a keep a steady shot. Simply walking along the deck couldn't be done without constantly holding on or even crawling - especially when I had the camera. The constant pitching and rolling meant anywhere I stood I had to brace with at least four points of contact and even then I’d often fall or slip when we were hit by a really steep wave. Toby the camera assistant and Frank the director often had to physically hold me down. After all the shoots the tally for items blown over-board stood at 1x lens cap, 1x baseball cap and 1x headphones, plus one broken viewfinder where the movement of the boat slammed the camera against a wooden support and then all my weight against the camera. Here’s Frank holding on for dear life on the first day -There was constant spray and rain in the air. Each day I would go through two or three lens cloths by cleaning the lens almost every shot. In fact in the middle of one filming day the AP asked me to explain what filming on the boat was like and all I talked about was cleaning the lens - it must have been all I was thinking about! Here’s a video of this very interesting revelation...
On the very last shoot we were faced with a new problem. Health and safety laws changed in Taiwan so no one could go on a fishing boat if they didn’t have a fisherman’s license. After a whole year of filming, one more day at sea was all we needed so we found a way around - which ironically was by far the most ridiculous bit of health and safety we did on the whole shoot. We left the harbour on a tourist whale-watching boat then once out at sea we came along side the fishing boat. The waves were so big that the boats couldn’t tether together with out destroying each other. Instead, with some incredible boat control, the two boats held about a meter apart as they pitched and rolled in the large swell, narrowly avoiding crashing into each other. We had to pick our moment, waiting for the boats to align and leap from boat to boat, in a frankly awesome fashion!
My time shooting this film was really enjoyable and a great privilege. The fishermen and their families really let us into their lives and I hope they get as much out of watching the film as we did making it. I even got a Taiwanese nick-name, 'Lobo'. I never quite got my head around it but somehow it means both 'lucky' and 'white radish' at the same time. 'A Town Called Success' will hopefully be shown at film festivals Worldwide in the near future so keep an eye out for it. It's a beautiful and non-judgemental portrait of life in Chienggong. The trailer is here (no subtitles I'm afraid - but the real thing will be subtitled into English).
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