Charlie Productions : Design Department

A blank wall.

Design has been something we've learnt, rather than something we've been naturally drawn to from the start. Rather than being budding Baby Kubricks, ever-concerned with just how the litter was strewn from the dustbin, or the leaves across the ground, we liked to find a location that felt right and got on with shooting it there.

A lot of this is down to money and time. As we generally produced our films at the start, without a real idea of what a 1st AD did on a shoot, we were in charge of not just actors and camera but also keeping time and keeping the arranged locations happy. As a consequence making sure that the hamster was spinning in his wheel was merely something we would marvel at - he had time to concentrate on the hamster?

However, as we learnt more and more about what each and every crew member could bring to a shoot, we began to realise just how much we were missing design from our films. We upped our game with Free Speech (in which we made a wood-floor bathroom out of someone's living room) and haven't looked back, banishing all greens and blues from the set of Death Of The Revolution (including the blue walls, turned to yellow just for the shoot) and finally getting to build a set on Hallo Panda. And in each one our design department grew and these tasks were taken on by people far more infinitely wise in all this than we have ever been...

It is the most wonderful thing to realise just how much a good design team can bring to your work. A blank wall is not blank simply because we turned up and wanted to shoot. It is blank for a reason - or it is not blank at all. Rooms are filled with everything that makes a character - actors gain so much from seeing their lives laid out, even as most of it remains out of focus in the corner of a picture (cf. the making of Hallo Panda, where actors Cariad and Steven lay out just how much the work of Katie, Victoria and Steph meant to them).

And, best of all, when you have a budget to build... Coming from a background of trawling real-life location after real-life location in an attempt to find what we've written, or make what we've written work somehow somewhere... Well, it's an absolute joy to have capable people building what was in your head all around you in a studio, better than you imagined.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.

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