Thalison Soares: The Path To Black Belt

I started shooting this project on suggestion from Thalison himself, he message me on Instagram and said "let's make a movie". Now I'm nowhere near a filmmaker, I have very basic understanding of shooting and editing, but the two of us embarked on this pretty ambitious undertaking.

We had no budget, just knew we would both be at the Abu Dhabi World Pro, Worlds and Brasileiro. I was living in Brazil at the time and that made shooting in Sao Paulo at Cicero's easy. All of the interviews and training footage we shot before and after tournaments we were both at, with the exception of a few training clips from Unity and Euros shot by my coworkers. I was not able to be present at Thalison's belt promotion at Brea Jiu-Jitsu, he had a friend film that and send it over to me.

In the end I'm very pleased with the forty minutes of footage we ended up with after the editing process. Much thanks to my wife for all the work translating the interviews to English and to Hywel for helping guide the process of putting the story together. Thalison himself was basically executive producer of the project, he is very professional, has a great vision and came up with as many if not more of the ideas than I did.