Our first Mini-Documentary: Blue Marble
A participant in the Blue Marble scheme run by the charity Shoreditch Trust
If you’ve had a look around our website and clicked play on a few of the videos, you’ll be aware that we spend most of our time making short bits of content, rarely even getting close to the 5 minute mark. To make a change, last year, we decided to make a mini-documentary for Shoreditch Trust - we’d worked with the Trust a couple of times previously on their Creative Mentoring scheme and now they wanted us to make something to help promote their Blue Marble Training programme.
The programme offers people the chance to train and work in the kitchen of a real restaurant and eventually open up a career in the catering industry. Having had an office above the Waterhouse Restaurant where the training takes place, we’d met a lot of the trainees and more importantly, eaten a lot of the food they’d prepared.
For a while we’d been itching to do more documentary-style filmmaking and we thought this was a great opportunity. We knew that there was a story to tell, about the trainees and about why the kitchen, with its long hours and all its very apparent pressures, made such an effective environment for young people who had previously struggled with attitude, authority and commitment.
The production was split into two parts. We began by sitting down and talking to six of the trainees with an audio recorder but no camera - we wanted the discussion to feel as natural, unforced and unguarded as possible. Those interviews gave us about 7 hours of audio to work with. Eventually, we decided to concentrate on three trainees: Leanne, Jack and Lucca. All three had their own distinct story to tell, their own unique circumstances and personalities.
While we got a very rough half hour edit together, we arranged to spend a day with each of the trainees and a camera. We kept filming simple and relaxed, a tiny crew, one hand-held camera (the wondrous Arri Amira) and no lights. Finally we shot for a day in the kitchen, with all of the trainees and an open Waterhouse Restaurant complete with paying customers and food being served.
The edit was necessarily epic, we had so much great material to play with. We had to be brutal, making sure to avoid cramming too much in and potentially ruining the pace of the film. We tried several configurations before settling on the final structure, splitting the dream-like slow-motion sequences out from the more frenetic live action scenes in the kitchen.
We hope you like the film, we’re really proud of it.
Massive thanks to: Jacqui Roberts at Shoreditch Trust, who got the idea from the start and let us run with it; Mike Simpson, the DOP who made the film look so beautiful; Siena Bevan, who patiently worked her socks off to bring the whole thing together in the edit; and to the trainees, Leanne, Jack and Lucca, for giving up your time, telling your stories and inspiring us from start to finish.
Behind the Scenes: Remaking Contact
'Remaking Contact' is a project we just finished putting together for the charity Child HelpLine International, involving creating a film for each of twelve different helplines across Europe. If you've been following our work for a while you might recognise the concept, it's based on a film we made for ChildLine and the NSPCC (called Making Contact) that we made way back in 2010.
Our first piece of content to be released in multiple countries in multiple languages, we always knew that this project was going to have a set of unique challenges, not least the creation of over 400 unique paper-craft props designed by the wonderfully talented illustrator Hattie Newman.
With that in mind we made sure we documented some of the process, shot some behind-the-scenes and sat down the director, Thom, so he could give us a bit of an insight into the whole endeavour.
If you're interested in seeing the whole film in all it's multi-coloured, paper-folded glory, just click here and you'll be able to watch the full Czech version.
As mentioned, the original film has now been seen by thousands and thousands of children as part of the ChildLine Schools Service, which is pretty awesome. You can watch that and play spot-the-difference below, if you like.
Going Green
We're very pleased to be able to share the work we've just done for The Green Party, a film about the difference a Green MP can make, directed by our very own Ruth Sewell.
Shot on Sony FS7 in beautiful Brighton, Bristol and Camden, the film captures Caroline Lucas, Darren Hall and Natalie Bennett delivering a simple but important message: if you want change, all you have to do is vote for it.
A few days in, with a week to go until the general election, the film has already had over 71k views across YouTube and Facebook.
Behind the Scenes: Creating the music for 'Every Childhood'
Back in 2012, when the NSPCC first came to us and asked us to produce a film that would tell their complete story, we had no idea of the sort of scale that the project would go on to become. Fast-forward to mid-2014, we had filmed contributions from over 30 NSPCC staff at 20 different locations throughout the UK and we were in the midst of an epic edit.
Even then, we were missing one vital component of the film, the score.
From the outset the concept we developed had been intentionally adult-focussed - we wanted to confound the audience's expectation for an NSPCC film and showcase, for the first time, the everyday heroes who work tirelessly for the charity. Naturally the essence of childhood still needed to be present in the film though and so the idea of using a children's choir as background accompaniment was agreed.
To begin the process we engaged the composer Nathan Stornetta, who created the score from scratch, taking inspiration from a very early edit of the film. Next on our wish list was the perfect choir and we got exactly that in the National Children's Choir of Great Britain, who were very keen to get involved with the project.
In the film above you can see some behind-the-scenes as Nathan and the NCCGB met to record at the renowned Air Edel recording studio in Baker Street.