In this interview, I hosted one, Charlie Phillips, a freelance sports media practitioner, who has been working in the sports media industry since 2016. He self describes himself as a ‘preditor’ as a lot of his work is produced, shot, and edited by himself, or in a small team.

He’s part of a new wave of sports filmmakers who leave behind large production teams in favour of only a handful of individuals who are capable of working in a number of different departments when it comes to completing a project. 

Most notably, Charlie, along with his friend, Greg Caines, completed a documentary for the youtube channel ‘Copa90’, called ‘The Welsh Football Revolution’ that chartered Wales’ rise from footballing minnows to a European Semi Final, to the World Cup. And in true ‘preditor’ fashion, the production team was only made up of two people.

Aside from working on sports documentaries, Charlie keeps himself busy, working on a variety of live productions, in a number of different roles, including, but not limited to videographer and editor. 

In the interview, we briefly discussed the appeal of working on live sports as opposed to film and tv. Whereas the former can be chaotic, it is very fast-paced and entertaining, while the latter has hours on end of downtime.

We also discussed the future of sports documentary projects and how much of an expanding market it is. To notice this, all you have to do is look on Netflix and see the multiple high-budget documentary series that they are producing, with projects boosting multi-millions dollar budgets.

And Charlie believes that South Wales is benefitting from this, as he has seen an increase in opportunities available, and a number of different sports productions popping up in and around Cardiff.