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I’ve known Soap (Stewart McKellor) since 2003. I met him just as I was starting to learn to tattoo, before I did my first tattoo.
Soap’s shop Lab Monkey in Stirling, Scotland was the first place I did a day’s work as a professional tattooer. I learned a lot there.

Aside from Soap’s contribution to my early development as a tattooer, he’s seen some of his friends start working at Frith Street Tattoo. Including Steve Byrne, Aaron Hewitt myself and Valerie Vargas.

I was in Scotland for the Scottish Tattoo Convention held in Edinburgh. So I visited Lab Monkey and did a few tattoos. After a meal with his family I took the opportunity to interview Soap about what it’s like to be on the periphery of a shop like Frith Street Tattoo.

In this clip he talks about why he started tattooing and his first tattoo experience. He also talks about the influence FST has on his shop and what it’s like getting tattooed at FST.

Thank you Soap.
You can see some of Soap’s work here.

Stefano has been at Frith Street almost since it’s inception.
He’s been with us for almost a decade and is the only apprentice Frith Street Tattoo ever had. He started handing out shop flyers on the streets of soho, progressed to answering the phone, cleaning toilets, making needles and finally to doing great tattoos.
I’ve worked with Stefano almost every day since I started at Frith Street in August 2007. It’s been a pleasure and an honour to be a small part of his progress into a solid, well-respected tattooer.

I shot this interview late one night after the shop closed. We had a couple of drinks and talked for over two hours.
Stefano talked about how he tries to find his own style within established tattoo styles, the historical and current influence on his work and Gwyneth Paltrow.

I interviewed Noble on 10th March 2013.

He was in town for a few days and asked about this film project. It was cool that he was keen to take part.
The interview was a fairly quick one. He’s been to the shop a few times and knows Dante and the rest of the team fairly well now.
In this short clip he talks about how he came to work at Frith Street, how the shop is both a local shop and an internationally renown place for tattooing. He gives us NobleStyle shoutouts to the regulars and guests of Frith Street with a quick reference to the sticker design from a couple of posts ago. Finally a comment on how and why Noble is the #hashtag master of Instagram.

I interviewed Jordan in August last year and posted a short video clip in November.
With my new line of questioning and techniques and I think this is a much more interesting interview. I hope I can still use some of the footage from the first interview too.

Here Jordan talks about how some negative experiences can influence you and teach you to be a better tattooer (and person), how he learns about tattoo styles and the people who invented them (hint: its not the internet). Then he talks about how it’s important to know how to give a customer what they want but that’s not always what they ask for.

Thanks for watching.

Well, not really panoramas, but it’s the same idea.

I mentioned in an earlier post about a photo book I’d like to release when this film is complete.
I’ve been trying out different ways of taking photos around the shop.

Here’s a few portraits of some of the guys at the shop that I used to test how I’d use the look.

Dante was the first one I shot. When stitching it together I realised I could tell a story or at least emphasise elements by shooting from different angles.

With this portrait of Emiliano I tried to capture different points in time in the same final image. Sadly, I didn’t get chance to stick around until he finished the tattoo.

Jesus & Mary. These guys watch over the shop every day. Anyone who’s been in to our basement shop will recognise this statue.

I decided to get shots of The Shop when it was empty. I hope to take one during a busy work day once I get comfortable with this technique.

Even though the space was tight, I managed to get most of the angles I wanted for this portrait of Valerie.

I look forward to doing more of these in the future. I really like the way these pictures have some of the same feel as getting tattooed or doing a tattoo. There’s multiple things to think about, lots going on and it’s a little overwhelming at times.

While Valerie was painting a sticker design to promote this film, I did a quick & dirty test with my iPhone to see if I could use the same idea with video. I uploaded these clips in HD at 1080p so they’ll look great full screen.
There’s a white version that emulates the look of the photos.

Then there’s a version with a black background that I think suits video better than the white.

These are early versions and tests. I aim for the finished products to be much better looking and more interesting.

Everyone loves stickers, right?

I’ve designed a couple of stickers to get the word out a bit about the film.

I haven’t decided which design I will print but I hope to have it ready for the Paris Tattoo Convention next month. Hopefully I’ll have them available at the Frith Street booth. I may do flyers based on this design too.

Beau Brady was in town for the Brighton Tattoo Convention last weekend. We were chatting about the film and he joked that I could have him parody the classic Atlas pose. It was a funny conversation and I thought it was a great idea.
The day before Beau flew back home we did a quick photo shoot. He spent the best part of a whole day “getting vascular” by eating chocolate, drinking milk and protein shakes, lifting heavy things and doing push-ups.

Beau used water bottles and our shop helper Nicholas, as weights:

He gets posture advice from Jordan during training and the shoot:

Blue Steel.

We tried to find gold briefs but alas, shiny black leatherette was all we could find at short notice.

Shane and Nicholas hold the backdrop while Jordan and Chad watch from the sidelines.

“Which way is the beach?”

While taking posture advice from Jordan and art direction from me, Beau’s expression is “Are you fucking serious?“

 The chosen shot, unedited.

Thanks Beau!

Yawn, more posts about transcriptions? where are all the videos?

Well, the sad truth is that I’m at a stage of production where that’s what’s happening and there’s not much to show for the work I’m doing. Danny is working on the transcripts as I film new interviews. I can’t do new interviews as often as I’d like because I have to work around everybody else’s schedule. Frith Street Tattoo is still running as usual and I can’t conduct interviews in a noisy tattoo shop. I have to do interviews after work or during tattooer’s days off. To add to the difficulty, there’s been a few conventions recently where nobody has the time to get interviewed because they are preparing for, or traveling to to conventions. I’m also preparing for upcoming conventions.

Whining aside, I’m still enjoying myself and within my very loose schedule and I still expect to have this film finished late this year.

While I don’t plan to sell this film or charge people to view it, (I’ll dedicate a post to the reasons for that at a later date) there’s a strong chance that I’ll offer things for sale that have things to do with the film: T-shirts, stickers, drawings, tattoo flash etc. Some other things I’d like to share and offer for sale would be:

• A photo book including work produced at Frith Street with other behind-the-scenes type shots. I’d like this book to also include some of the planning notes I’ve made during the production.
• A book of the edited interviews that will be used in the film.

In preparation for the kind of organisation those things require, I put together a book of the interviews I have so far. This book is around 170 pages. I expect the finished one to be around 250 to 350 pages if I include a few images. I used the publishing service at lulu.com. I just ordered two copies on Feb 13th, one for me and one for Danny Woodruff. These particular ones won’t be available to anyone else because they are totally unedited, often difficult to read and possibly libellous in places. I will produce a real one, with every interview when the film is finished. At the time of writing the books hadn’t arrived so I made a few mock-ups, as you can see in this post.

The post about hardware, software and equipment can wait…

Last week I interviewed Valerie again.
This time with my revised line of questioning. I think the answers may seem a little disjointed here, out of context. I’m really happy with the direction this interview took and I think it will help the overall direction of the film.

Here Valerie talks a little about the importance of peer review, reference, homage and touches on some of the negative health aspects that have arisen directly as a result of tattooing.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted.

I don’t have a lot to show from the work I’ve been doing on this project over the last couple of weeks. Danny Woodruff has transcribed the last of the interviews that I shot last year and he’s waiting for me to shoot more. The reason I haven’t shot any more just yet, is that as well as setting up reliable backups and other post production tasks, I’ve been working on new ideas about the questions I want to ask the guys at the shop. I hope that the new angle to the interviews will be much more interesting and further away from the standard tattooer interviews that we’ve all read or watched many times, as well as being more interesting to the interviewees. Hopefully it will be stuff the guys at the shop like to talk about too.

So there’s something interesting to look at in this post, here’s a teaser I put together with some footage of tattoos (for a change)

As soon as I shoot new interviews I’ll put short clips here along with updates on the progress of the film.

Maybe the next post will be about the slightly less exciting part of which software, apps, hardware and equipment I’ve set up to deal with the myriad of tasks making a film requires.

In November I mentioned transcribing interviews. When it became obvious I wasn’t able to do it on my own, I posted on Last Sparrow Tattoo asking for help from that community.
Quite a few people responded and offered to help – for which I’m very very grateful.
I now have a ‘reserve list’ to call on in the future – thank you all.

A long-time customer of mine emailed me with an offer to help transcribing the interviews. I sent him a couple of audio files of interviews just before Xmas 2012 and on New Year’s Day 2013 he sent me back the first transcription. His name is Danny Woodruff. I guess he’s the only other member of ‘staff’ on this project so far.
I couldn’t have been happier with the results of his work. He did a much better job than I could have, naming each speaker, marking laughter and audio problems etc. He even managed to deal with multiple accents. My northern English, Chad’s north eastern USA and Alex Reinke’s German accents didn’t seem to phase him.

It’s a hell of a lot of work, with more to come but all this effort will pay off when it comes to the editing stage.

Danny is away from the UK so he and I are keeping track of files and our progress using the project management site trello.com – it’ working great so far. I can sign in with my gmail details, attach files within the online software or link to files stored with Dropbox or Google Drive. The checklists there really make communicating remotely much simpler than doing it via email.

Here’s a glimpse at the “Transcriptions” folder on my hard drive. You can see the interviews Danny has transcribed and the ones he’s still got to do. In the coming months the “To Do” folder will get fatter too. I just need to make sure I update the boards at trello.com each time I finish an interview.

Here’s some close-ups of the transcription pages from Alex Reinke’s interview.
The eagle-eyed among you might notice that these are the bits from Alex’s Blog Clip last week.

The blank boxes to the right of the sheets are for my notes while re-watching the clips. Then I select the sections I want to use, cut them out and assemble a ‘paper edit’. I’ll use the paper edit to assemble the first cut of the film, so this project is still in the very early stages.

Thanks for reading,

Stewart.