Documenting Athlete Life As It Happens, with Tom Day

Tom Day’s flair for human stories and his skill in telling them finds its beginning in his early teens. With his trusty JVC handycam, Tom would home make movies, convincing his friends that it would be “a good idea to cover themselves in golden syrup and red food colouring” for his latest zombie epic. 

Maybe a bad example of a ‘human’ story, but nevertheless one that stuck with Tom for a while. Filmmaking was always a hobby for him, and as all hobbies do once they stay for long enough, it turned into a passion. 

“I’ve always been driven to make my own stuff,” he shares. Throughout school, university and early in his career, Tom never abandoned his passion projects, and it was actually a passion project that ended up getting him noticed by his first major production company. He still believes this is the best way to showcase your style as a director, develop your voice and do something “for the love of it.” It was Tom’s reason to pick up a camera in the first place.

“I’ve always been drawn to filmmaking and whether that’s commercials or documentaries, that’s still what it is to me. The fun is in the art of making!”

In fact, after graduating from university Tom created a passion piece on a boxer – the short profile film ended up being seen by the legendary boxing promoter, Frank Warren, at Queensberry Promotions. “He liked what he saw and consequently asked me to make promos for their fighters,” says Tom. “Those next few years really became the training ground for my working style.”

Regardless of the project’s size, Tom would never neglect detail – he spent hours in pre-production developing each idea and script for each story. He’d meet the boxer for the first time, get them to buy into the idea and only then, assess if he can pull it together. 

This is where Tom learned the ropes of emotional depth in both short and long-form content, a pillar in his style today. “These fighter promos were at a very small scale. Crew wise, most of the time it was a director of photography and me, rocking up on a train to whatever city that boxer is based in.”

Because of the limited resources on the project, Tom and his team were pressed to lean into a grittier, more organic look and feel, which suited the grind and struggle of the sport. They made the most of the textures and available light in locations to craft this look – everything would be shot handheld, keeping a “dynamic energy” in mind. Tom wanted audiences to feel as if they’re there with the boxers, understanding what it meant to be them. Forging this real, human connection between his subject and the many-eyed judge that is the audience, was paramount. And still is – Tom rightfully points to this project as the one shaping his storytelling vision.

A moment of learning Tom looks back on constantly is working with director, Robert Rafalat on an online content series for Adidas. Operating a Ronin-M with an A7S, as the director of photography who was also Tom’s friend couldn’t do it, Tom jumped at the chance. “It was the best thing I ever did. I spent the summer with the crew going around Europe shooting with top football teams and watching Robert work brilliantly with football superstars in time-pressured conditions.

“Even when things didn’t go the way he had planned, he always had a plan B right there on the spot and was never flustered. In the final product, you would never know it hadn’t all gone his way! I learnt so much from him and that team that I still carry with me on set today.”

Today, Tom has reached and exceeded his teachers. He works across commercials and documentaries – a challenge few can master. But, instead of zoning in on the differences between the two formats, he finds it easier to pinpoint the similarities.

“In the documentary space, I have always had a commercial grounding, which has given me a different perspective on storytelling. A lot of the sequences in my documentaries are purposefully stylised in the way they are told, full of personality or strong tone. Ultimately, they’re entertaining.”

Keeping the documentary format fun is the commercial influence rubbing off on him, but for the most part, Tom agrees there’s no rule book to go by anyway. “We have so much creative licence to tell the story in a way that speaks to us, and hopefully to the audience.” On the flip side, Tom says that for most of his commercials, he works hard to infuse them with a sense of ‘realness’.

Making something believable, however, often comes with a more restrained style of storytelling – subtle, yet powerful. “I’d like to think of myself as quite observant of the world around me. Of people and of my own experiences and I think these sensibilities translate into the performances on screen.

“After saying all of this, I feel like I’m subconsciously pulling these two seemingly opposing forces of commercial and documentary together.”

At a crucial point of his career, Tom joined Pulse – a production company he’d admired from afar for a while. After meeting them for a coffee, it became immediately clear that 'now' was the right time to work together. “The dynamic work they produce resonates so well with my own. But it’s also the people at Pulse that I bought into so much and straight away being able to have exciting and honest conversations together. I knew this was the place.”

Two widely-praised recent projects for Tom were his work for Adidas Originals and the Metropolitan Police, in collaboration with agencies Homeground and Pablo respectively. For Adidas and Manchester United, Tom and his DoP were aiming for a shooting style which felt very reactive and ‘in-the-moment’. ‘Best Pub Team in the World’ ad for Carlsberg was a consistent reference in the project. 

“We used crash zooms, purposeful reframing and a very organic handheld feel to subtly punctuate the humour and ensure it never felt staged or too on-the-nose,” says Tom. “It’s stripped back, as are the performances, and that’s the beauty of it. It feels like it’s just happening. This shooting style sounds simple, as it doesn’t involve techno cranes and the like, but actually took us a lot of testing to feel confident in nailing this approach.”

Barry Keoghan’s equally laid back performance comes as the cherry on top. A film about people, for people, and for the love of football. The grit of Tom’s film for Adidas almost goes full circle – to those boxing shorts he did back in the day, where the ‘as it happens’ filmmaking was not so much a choice as a symptom, and to him working with Robert Rafalat on Adidas. 

However, with projects like this, it’s more than just proving something to your younger self. It’s a promise, kept. Growing up, Tom’s two passions were filmmaking and football – both playing, and watching. The grit he portrays in his stories is something he sees as a sacred pact between players and fans. “There’s an unwavering dedication to turn up for training, travel for a game, whatever the weather, whatever the distance.”

This is why for him, when portraying any sport, he couldn’t resort to typecast or generic ideas of what the ‘fan’ looks like. “Each fan has their own unique relationship with their club and the sport. With their own perspectives, stories and emotions.” Tom seeks to repeatedly explore, and cut through the symbolic relationship between clubs and fans – it’s the quest to understand the stories behind both that keeps him inspired. 

Metropolitan Police was a little different, as Tom himself recognises. Similarly organic in its feel, but donned with an elevated visual style and, importantly, a sense of “kinetic energy” throughout. “I wanted the role of a police officer to feel dramatic, dynamic and unexpected,” the director says. With this in mind, the camera was “purposefully always on the move, taking the audience on a visceral journey along London with action around every corner.”

Now, Tom has a documentary that’s about to come out on Netflix December 10th – ‘Undisputed’, taking on the boxing world once again. Talking about it, he says:

“Something I’ve told myself and the team throughout the last year of making boxing documentaries is that we have to keep challenging ourselves to tell the stories that will connect beyond traditional sport audiences.

“To do this, we have to make sure the story is human first. Anyone, even if you don’t like boxing, can get attached to the person behind the gloves and go on a journey with them that will have them rooting hard come the 12th round!”

His job, Tom says, is to humanise the fighters, in a way where before you know it, you realise they aren’t so different from you and I. “They love their families, they have insecurities. They have dreams they want to conquer. I’m very proud to say that I believe you will feel all of this with Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk in ‘Undisputed’.”

This is a big promise, but one that Tom is confident in giving. He knows the challenges of his work inside out, and knows how to tackle them. The biggest one is knowing when to push the access and when to pull away.

“This is something that only over time you can train, knowing what the right move is,” he says. “At the end of the day, you are working with real people who are trying to live out their high-pressured lives and everyone has a limit as to how much time they can give beyond themselves.”

Getting the sense of when to say “Thank you and see you tomorrow,” rather than push and potentially frustrate can be the difference between a good shoot and a terrible shoot the next day. “On the flip side, there are times where it just feels right to ask that one last question, to open that door, to spend that extra ten minutes and that’s often where those nuggets of pure gold are found!”

A golden moment like that on ‘Undisputed’ was an emotional interview Tom did with Frank Warren, where Frank revealed something extremely personal. “I was taken aback by not only the revelation itself, but also the fact he felt comfortable enough to share that with me. You’ll know the moment I’m talking about when you see the film.”

Looking into the scary, bright future ahead, Tom nurtures a hope – the world of commercials and documentaries to blend, at least in some way. The rise of AI and the expansion of cheaper VFX paves the way for constant questioning in the future. “So, I hope that the stories with a real human at their heart will be the ones that cut through the most.

“There are audiences out there who want a deeper connection to their sports star or team, and slightly longer form content allows you the opportunity to do that. Whether that’s a two-minute film, an eight-minute episodic series or a feature film. I feel like the traditional rules of storytelling have changed and we should all be open to these new avenues.”