Striking With Pride

Striking With Pride: United at the Coalface is a brand-new Sky Original feature documentary, exploring the unlikely alliance forged between the gay men and lesbians of London, and the striking miners of South Wales, between the 1984 and 1985 London Prides.   

Made famous by the 2014 BAFTA award-winning film Pride, this is one of the most unexpected and uplifting love stories ever, not between two people, but between two communities who – seemingly worlds apart – found common cause and compassion for each other in the face of immense challenges and changed the course of history for queer people in the UK.   

As beloved as the film is, the real story behind the script is much richer and more powerful than you could ever imagine, and the legacy of these events is still felt to this day, forty years on since the 1984/1985 Miners’ Strike.   

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK finalist, Tayce, dons her iconic Welsh dragon look to narrate the film, telling the powerful tale to a group of children in a playful and poignant story time session which highlights the lasting impact this story has had on communities 40 years later.  

Oliver Bramley – Post Producer 

We worked with Offline Editor Martin Taylor to ingest everything at Sky, managing the full post workflow to make his life as easy as possible. Due to a quicker turnaround than expected to make TX in time for Pride Month, we had to be agile throughout Offline and even more so during final post. To hit the deadline, we allocated additional resources and people, and we constructed a timetable of signoffs with as much built-in flexibility as possible to ensure the production’s creative process wasn’t disrupted. Martin delivered locked pictures to us on May 24^th, and we turned around this feature doc within the week, the day before TX on May 31^st. 

It was an incredible team effort to get this one over the line in style, ensuring that we did justice to such an important film. That included: the stylistic and colourful Grade that perfectly merged a rural Welsh mining town with the vibrant streets of Soho; the Mix, driven by the fantastic Welsh men’s choir and complimented by a powerful Sound Design, and the Online that encompassed a vast amount of archive whilst making everything look on point. Working with Story Films was a fantastic experience as they were ever-present throughout the process, collaborating closely with our team to achieve a thrilling end result. It’s a truly fascinating film that’s both sad and uplifting and I’m proud that our hard work in post has played a part in elevating the storytelling. 

Finn Curry - Re-Recording Mixer 

About a month before the project started we were sent a synopsis, various mood boards and then a rough cut, so we had a good idea of what to expect. The aim was to engage with the project and to try and help bring the Director’s vision to life with a sympathetic Mix.  

The reason for having three of us from Audio was the short amount of time available. The turnaround was pretty quick - in and out of Audio Post in five days - and at 77 minutes long it required a decent amount of time on each element. After the first two days of editing, I had a further two days for the mix before a day of sign-off and delivery. We combined all of our work into a single Pro-Tools session, at which point I started work on the Mix, ably assisted by Tatjana, who picked up various essential bits and pieces such as the extra Foley and SFX work that was required. Her being there was a great help as I could keep my focus on the main Mix and not get distracted by other jobs.  

Once the Sound Editing was done, I focused on the dialogue before moving on to the full Mix and then spent a fun day with the Director, Ashley, as we finessed the Mix together. It was a real challenge to get everything done in the time available and with a feature length show being done in such a short time I just had to maintain focus and trust that the process (that cheesy old phrase!) would deliver the results. One additional challenge that provided a bit of fun was mixing the choir in 5.1. The composer delivered the stems for the choir pieces and so it was a joy to be able to mix that into true 5.1. It sounded amazing and forms an integral element of the film too. 

The final day was a big one for the Director, the Producer and for Story Films as they had to run straight to the Online to get the final pics sorted but overall, it was very intense but incredibly enjoyable. It’s a fantastic show, which I would highly recommend watching, and I'm delighted with the outcome.  

 Tatjana Radivoj – Sound Editor 

As Sound Editor, my first task was to Edit the archive dialogue and effects. This covered anything that wasn’t recorded specifically for the documentary. I also did some sound effects editing/ design, as well as recording some Foley where we felt that extra sounds were needed - for example the opening of the story book. A lot of these are very subtle sounds, but when added together with everything else they result in a really rich and interesting mix.  

One challenge with this project was the sound design for the archive. They didn’t all come with sound, so we added sound effects in multiple layers to these shots. The main issue was making sure they sounded “old” enough to work with archive videos. This often meant adding in noise and crackles, or choosing sound effects that had a bit more noise to them. I loved working on this documentary. It’s a really powerful, moving story, and a very important one to share. I feel really proud to have been a part of it.  

Tom Nursey – Dialogue Editor 

I heard about Striking with Pride back in January, when a couple of clips were forwarded through from the Edit to see to what extent we could clean them up and make them useable. The name of the game with Dialogue Editing is smoothness. Smoothing edits, smoothing levels, and smoothing room tones across all different contributors. At the end of a dialogue edit, you should be able to solo just the dialogue and have a consistent listening experience.  

The most challenging aspect of this project was the timescale. I had just two days to produce a bulletproof Dialogue Edit for 77 mins of running time. This meant I had to be fast and efficient, managing to get a full edit pass done in one day, and leaving day two for fine tuning and finessing. I used a new tool in this dialogue edit which helped me greatly with some choppy edit sections – iZotope RX Text Navigation. This allowed me to scan in multiple audio files for each interview and have them transcribed, so that I could search by text to find replacement words that I could edit in to help iron out any jumpy bits… the future is now! 

Finn was the Re-Recording Mixer, meaning it would be him sat in the sign-off with the client. This meant it was very much about giving him exactly what he wanted, and he produced a fantastic mix. The efficiency of us working in tandem and to Finn’s specifications, meant that he could crack on straight away with his Mix once the Edit was completed. I’m delighted with my work on this program – 77 mins of dialogue edited in one day is a new record for me! The client was very happy with the outcome, and it was a pleasure to work on such a fantastic project. 

Mark Mulcaster – Colourist 

When I first heard about the project I was hooked immediately and had a call with Director Ashley Frances-Roy about the look that we might explore in the Grade. I was particularly interested in the contrast between 1980s Soho, a decade and location where fashion and colour ran riot, with the wintry bleakness of the miner’s strike. With all of that in mind, we made a concerted effort to make sure that the interviews didn’t look gloomy or depressing but rather blended both worlds. 

The film had some strong contrasts between the footage of the day and the studio scenes with the children and Tayce. All the interview set-ups felt like they were shot at the time of the strikes with some very nice art direction which made my job a lot easier. Ashley also had a strong sense of how he wanted each interview setup to look which was bright and saturated throughout. Some of the wide shots were very wide and lacking focus so we added some power windows in Baselight to draw the viewers’ attention to the subject as well as adding to this with shapes. 

The archive was quite disparate as we had a mixture of news sources and home video footage shot by the campaigners which tended to be overexposed and to have deteriorated over time. Some of that we had to embrace because trying to do anything with it didn’t improve the quality of the footage and was likely to make it look worse. It’s key to know when to do what you can with a shot and then to walk away and let it be. 

Striking With Pride has a good mixture of both personal stories and accounts of the events as they unfolded. Ashley did a great job in balancing out a complicated story and interspersing enough of the personality that helps keep the pacing of the film fresh and dynamic. If there’s one thing that I hope people take away from watching it, it’s that even the wildest different aspects of society can come together to support each other and work towards a common goal, something that I think is a great message in today’s world. 

Jon Slade – Online Editor 

Shortly before Striking with Pride arrived in the online, we had discussions about the quicker than usual turnaround time and the knock-on effect in Post caused by the transmission schedule moving forward. 

This necessitated doing most of the Online work on conformed, but ungraded pictures. When using Media Composer to Online we would commonly work with effects on 'filler' tracks anyway, and this allows us to slot a Grade in underneath later down the line. The film has a large amount of archive, all of which needed technical checks for edge-blanking, interlacing artefacts and motion errors. There were also quite frequent analogue/ digital tape errors that the footage had picked up during its life - such as dropouts, glitches, head clogs and colour framing issues. Where feasible I was able to remove the distracting ones by painting out or motion-estimating new frames. Aside from the archive, the rushes were very good. There was a persistent dead pixel, and some mild sharpening/stabilising in places - and cosmetically I also had to track in some touching up of the talent's visible wig line. 

Ultimately, the entire Sky Post Production team pulled together to bring the film over the finish line, and I finally got Graded pictures just a few hours before delivery. It was well worth the effort for what is a great film about a great story. It is films like this that are important reminders that unity can help bring about change, not only politically but socially - and get us to where other LGBT+ members like myself are where we are today. 

Striking With Pride: United at the Coalface is available on Sky Documentaries and streaming service NOW.