Charlie Productions : How We Made It

Everything about 'Burnt Bernard' was right, except, unfortunately, us.

"Burnt Bernard" is one of the most popular films we've made but it is also one of the few we find genuinely disappointing. Made during one of our most productive periods where the freedom granted by owning our own camera and edit suite enabled us to hide from some fundamental problems with the way in which we were working; "Burnt Bernard" was shot before we realised what was wrong and edited before we'd solved it.

Worse still, with the final cut just a few days old we found ourselves sitting at the BAFTA party watching the five nominated short films that had beaten "Russell Square" and descovered one of them, "Sweet" addressed the same basic premise with a better budget. In short "Burnt Bernard" is a great film made at entirely the wrong time.

PREPRODUCTION.
The making of "Burnt Bernard" is a story of two halfs. The first part of the process , up to and including the shoot, was hard but fun. We felt like we'd learnt a lot from making "Russell Square" and we felt like this new film would definitely be the best and most professional thing we'd yet made. Sadly we were largely happy to coast by on this sense of profesionalism without taking many of the necessary steps to actually improve our production values.

By this time Chris was working for the Cruet Company, a camera hire place down in Wandsworth. For the loss of a great deal of his time and a varying amount of his concentration, we gained free access to more lights than we could ever previously have hoped for. Also, following "Russell Square" Ben had started seeing First Assistant Director Katie Lloyd and, since she had just left school with no immediate plans for University, she began to take a more active role in the pre-production of the next short film.

Katie's role as First AD had never been one that would be recognisable as such to anyone who had ever been a First. This was entirely because at this stage neither Ben or Chris had ever worked with a proper First and so they had very little conception of what the job actually entailed. Equally, since we were used to working with such small crews the need to have someone organising every last heart beat was never there. Katie first started working with us on "William Shakespeare's It's A Short Film About Honour" and her role had grown up around her in much the same way that our own understanding of our function as directors had evolved to suit the differing ways we worked on each film. By the time we were making "Burnt Bernard" Ben and Katie were basically acting as the production team whilst Chris planned the technical side of the shoot that he and Ben would then direct together.

The storyboard gave Chris nightmares - with eight people seated round a dinner table and the conversation flicking from one person to another, the possibility of crossing the line was very real. A meticulous shooting plan was devised to make sure that everyone would look like they were talking to each other. In addition, camera position and movement were to be used to heighten the awkwardness of the situation.

In many ways the flexibility that our lack of formal film training is one of our most vital assests. It's true that for years we have wrongly credited Katie as a First AD when really she is something else - but then this largely applies to all of our crews on these early films. In the end job titles didn't matter, what was of concern was what needed to get done. This is why we soon took to using the credit "This Film Was Done By Chris and Ben Blaine", since this seemed so much closer to the than the prosaic "Written, Directed, Produced and Edited by..." True all of these things had been done but most of the time it was nigh on impossible for us to tell where the lines lay between the role of writer and director, or director and producer, or writer and editor. Although now we tend to have a clearer idea of these distinctions, it is still very easy for us to see the project as a whole rather than get stuck thinking about one small corner of it (and in many cases even directing, something often perceived as being close to authorship, is only a small part of the overall picture.)

The downside to this lack of knowledge is that there were times when we walked into trouble without realising quite how stupid we were being. In the end the crew of "Burnt Bernard" was just the three of us. We'd made films before with less but never had they been of this scale. However, when we found that our regular sound recordist Phil (again someone with no background in or understanding of film sound) couldn't make the proposed shoot dates we decided that we'd make the film without a sound recordist - we'd just borrow a really good mic from Keith and leave it set up in the middle of the room. This was part foolishness (our understanding of sound being very very small at this stage), but also our options were limited - there were trainee sound recordists at The Cruet Company, but we had chosen to shoot during the week, meaning anyone wanting to work for us from there would have to take a precious week's holiday to work for us for free. A common answer to crew dropping out these days is to put an add up on Shooting People but this was before that website had changed the face of UK Independent film-making. Also, Chris was intending to light and shoot as normal, except this time using a far bigger lighting set up to anything we'd had since we shot Cold (with a crew of fifteen or so).

Still if our arrogance blinded us to the folly of attempting to make a film of this scale with a crew of three, one of whom had still to recieve her A-Level results, then at least in some areas we were starting to turn to professionals for help. Feeling that the script was good enough to attract a bit of talent we approached Ben Miller and Simon Pegg who both turned us down. We then approached Darren Boyd (Hippies, Smack the Pony, Green Wing) who not only agreed but was willing to work for expenses only - however he soon became unavailable for the dates that we wanted to shoot.

So we turned once again to our pile of actors and started auditioning. After a few terribly unhopeful candidates we came across Seth Jee who unfortunately too became unavailable.

The rest of the casting had been quite easy though, mainly because quite a few of the parts were written with actors in mind. We'd been wanting to work with Simon Poole ever since making the poor man suffer "Good Morning, Who Are You?". After failing the audition for Islington in "Russell Square", both Keely Beresford and Becca Bozenska had been assured parts in whatever we did next. Equally Liz Giles and Elzibeth Grolle, who had both been too small to even get an audition for Islington, had intreagued me by what they had written in the letters they sent with their CV's and I was keen to meet them both and hand out parts left and centre. In the end Becca had a theatre tour throughout our filming dates and Elizabeth Grolle turned out not to have been in the least bit French (something I had simply convince myself of for some reason) and so our Angel, Jo Harper, happily stepped into the part of Sophie and we cast Phillipa Bain in part of Sandrine (mainly because she had fluent French noted on her CV).

Ross Holland replied to our advert in the stage and looked exactly how Duncan had been in Ben's imagination when he was writing the script, so although the part wasn't written for him, it would have been had he sent his CV in earlier.

However with no Tony and still no location our shooting dates had slipped and slipped. Simon became unavailable because of a play and then, thankfully, he became available again because it was awful and he didn't want it. It was then that Simon, concerned that the film was stuttering to a stop, came up with a rather good piece of inspiration - why not look for a holiday cottage somewhere outside London and just rent it for a short while.

Our trawl through the files of the London Film Comission had produced no space we could get into for less than a £1,000 and we'd been at the end of our wits. Simon's idea lead us to a converted loft space just down the road from us in South Mymms, which was just about big enough for our needs and at £200 was just about cheap enough for our budget. It was not an ideal solution but it was at least a solution.

Then Phillipa became unavailable more permenantly and so at we cast Helen Neale in her place (again largely because she could speak French). Seth was available for the new dates however by now we had auditioned Femi Houghton. When Ben wrote the script Tony was, for no particular reason, a pudgy blonde man and so he needed a bit of persuading to consider Femi. Having watched the audtion tapes Chris however was adamant that Femi was the man for the job, being the only actor who had really brought to life the relationship between Tony and his imaginary friend Bernard. With Ben convinced we gave Femi the part which was one of the very best decisions we made.

We found Kalil Rouse, who plays the young Tony, through the Susie Earnshaw Theatre School and Pepper, the lop-eared rabbit who plays Sophie's Hare came from a local Wildlife Park in Broxbourne and with that we were ready to roll, probably about six weeks behind our original intentions, not that this mattered. The very last person to pull out of the project though was Designer Barbara Scwartz, a German whom Ben had met up with at the start of the year and who had been very keen to work on the film. It was Barbara who found the rabbit prints that adorn the walls of the flat and also came up with one or two other nice little touches, however sadly she had to return to Germany a few days before the shoot as the result of a family emergency and we never heard from her again.

PRODUCTION.
With Barbara disappearing in a cloud of Bavarian apology the three of us set up the flat ourselves with a bit of help from some of our trusted friends like Jim Waller. We started filming the next day, Sunday 24th September and for the first two days things went pretty smoothly apart from one occasion when Simon had to step into the breach and pay for everyone's lunch when Chris' cards both got refused.

By Tuesday we had effectively shot the first half of the film, we'd done the rabbit scene and the three of us were coping surprisingly well with the limited space, in fact we probably wouldn't have been able to fit a sound recordist into the flat if we'd had one. However, Chris had caught a cold and by Tuesday it was starting to really kick in. After a couple of hours in a confined space with eleven people and all the (very hot) lights the air was thick and the cast were pink and pickled. The mic was giving us problems too. After one day of beautifully clean sound, we started to pick up a clicking interference which plagued the rest of the shooting - we decided to try and fix it in post as we (in conference with Keith) had no idea how to fix it. Add to this the "delicious" dinner of undercooked pasta with not quite enough sauce and spirits were starting to flag.

Things got worse for the cast after lunch when someone suggested instead of making more pasta we simply put all the uneaten food back into the pan and reheated it, adding some margarine to make it look nicer. To be fair we did tell them what we were doing and no one complained, in fact Ross couldn't stop eating the stuff even when we weren't filming him. More worrying was when we found that the value margarine we'd bought was still not soft after a day under the lights...

Despite the food and the rising humidity the shooting went according to plan and the performances were, as they had been throughout, spot on. The lighting looked good enough to get Chris an interview at NFTS for the cinematography course. Also the cast, the largest we'd worked with at one time, were on our side and the mood was really friendly. Originally we had planned to shoot the dinner scene over two days, however, the general feeling was to stay late and complete it in a day - which we did.

All that was now left was the doorstep scene at the end and the flash back with Kalil (which was eventually filmed a week or so later in Adam's kitchen) and, after a day's break we met in Islington to shoot the goodbye sequence on the doorstep of a friend of a friend. However the steam house atmosphere of Tuesday had taken it's toll - both Jo and Keely had come down with Chris' virus and were heading for illness. Chris himself wasn't doing that good either... Matters were complicated further by the sudden, unexplained, cancellation of the taxi we had intended to shoot Simon and Liz's departure in. However, thankfully, for this day we were joined by both Adam and Zee who gave us the support that we were starting to admit that we needed.

Finally, with the principle photography wrapped we returned to the flat in South Mymms with Adam tied up, after first shooting an entirely different film called Soldiers.

POSTPRODUCTION.
It's now that the second half the story starts, the part where it all goes wrong. Of course the truth is that the mistakes were made before we shot the film, which of course meant that try as we might there was nothing we could do really put them right.

The first mistake, the one we were able to correct, had been the ending of the film. Chris had been adamant from the outset that the script had a weak ending and needed something stronger. In the absense of any good suggestion of what, Ben had been happy to shoot what was written and hope it turned out alright, which, it didn't. The taxi footage which formed this ending and which had been such a struggle to get was pretty much unusuable. Chris had been quite ill by this stage and yet for some reason he was the only one in the taxi watching the shot, except for the most part he was just struggling to hold it together in the moving vehicle and stop the lights from bouncing into view. In the end the constant ticking of the meter encouraged us to call it on the third take when really we should have gone for a fourth or fifth. Under these conditions the weak ending that had been scripted was utterly hopeless.

However all this required was some thought, a reshoot with Keely and for Chris to push her for the smile which saves the entire film. The real mistakes had been to ignore the sound and to over-think what was basically just a conversation.

Keith had been good to us and leant us, for free, a highly expensive studio mic from the shop where he then worked. Unfortunately it was not especially designed for recording dialogue and none of the three of us who were there knew how to work it. The end result was a patchy soundtrack, with the bathroom scene playing noticably quieter than the rest of the film - but at least in this scene the sound was clean, with clicking interference and unpleasantly loud irritating slurping and chewing noises all over the dining room scene. The only really effective solution to these problems would have been the ADR the whole film, which was not something we could afford to do.

Faced with the task of trying to bring to life a script where, for the most part, people sit at a table and talk we had gone to town on the meaning of camera movement. The storyboards we drew up were long and complex, breaking the dinner party scene down into something like ten different camera positions or movements that each corresponded to a change in mood. When it came down to the shoot this often lead to confusion, especially since the cramped space meant that a lot of the time we couldn't achieve what we'd envisigened. Moreover, the the shooting plan actively went against what would make the film funny - the performances.

The end result was that whilst the performances had been hilarious live, the first cut, which followed the storyboard pretty much frame for frame, was very flat. So busy had we been to give meaning to our camera moves, we had actively sucked meaning from the performances. We had forgotten what Robert Orr had shown us on Crowd Scene - that the funniest thing is not the joke but the reaction - and we'd stifled the actors by making them follow us. Again, the only really effective solution to these problems would have been to reshoot the film.

It was about now that the "Russell Square" BAFTA shenanigans blew up and so it wasn't until the early part of 2001 that we really got to grips with the edit. However the first part of 2001 was, generally, a really bad time for us. Chris was working too hard for the Cruet Company and ended up crashing a company van on a motorway when he fell asleep at the wheel at 75mph.Through pure good fortune the only damage was to the van and the equipment inside it but it was another sign that the break-neck pace at which we were working was doing more harm than good. Our tendancy to shoot first and ask questions later had taken us to the point where we could no longer survive on our raw talent.

"Russell Square" had not won or been nominated for the BAFTA Best Short Film Award, a failure that cost us £5,000. With the bursting of this bubble came the awful realisation of the amount of work we still had to do. Complete failure and unexpected success are both easy to accept, the partial success of "Russell Square" was a harder pill to swallow. It showed that we were very good but still not good enough. This fact was also clear from the first cuts of both "Burnt Bernard" and our next short film "Old Man Dies", which we had shot in December.

We had become friendly with the team behind NOW TV, an obscure cable channel that was trying to market itself as being for and about young, trendy creatives. They screened our films, interviewed us and generally treated us like the up-and-coming young stars we wished we were and they went under before the end of the year. The desperate search for money for the print of "Russell Square" had seen us interviewed by Robert Elms on BBC London and this was followed by a interview for Radio One during the shooting of "Old Man Dies" which eventually became reduced to a meaningless ten second soundbite. Everywhere we looked we were dazzled by our own mediocrity.

The salt in the wound was when, with "Burnt Bernard" finally cut and to some degree rescued, we saw the BAFTA nominees. Having fallen only just short of the top spaces with "Russell Square" we still had hopes that "Burnt Bernard" would take us a little closer. These hopes died in our mouths when we saw "Sweet", a short starring comedians Noble and Silver about a man with an imaginary girlfriend. It's not the same film as "Burnt Bernard", it's slicker, sexier, better made and fundamentally shallower. It was the sort of film that got nominated for awards and it had come out just far enough ahead of us to make Bernard look like nothing but a pale imitation.

In the end we had managed to salvage our pride from the rushes. Ben had scoured the tapes for anything that could work as reaction to give meaning to the jokes and add tension to the spaces between them. One of the good things about shooting on DV was that for the most part we had left the camera rolling between takes, as a result there was a fair amount of footage of the cast that could, with a bit of judicious manipulation, be used as reactions. This ranged from a lovely moment of Simon irritatedly pouring himself some wine after being told off to Jo warming her face up between takes. Some shots were played backwards, some were slowed down, in one instance a shot of one side of the table looking bored that was cut too short when Helen looked up to listen to what Ben was saying to her, was used with Helen's portion of the screen dropping into reverse so that she kept her head still.

Having recut the film once a computer failure left us having to do it all again from scratch. Angry, depressed and with the cut of "Old Man Dies" causing more rows between us, we ended up working sullenly with each cut and change was viewed with scepticism and doubt. Keith was exceptionally busy at this time and it took ages to complete the incidental music. In the end Ben and Keith took a couple of nights to work on the score together and were both satisfied with the end results; however Chris took an instant dislike to the results and much to Keith's irritation we never used his work.

Ben had used a track by Buena Vista Social Club piano genius Rueben Gonzales as a guide to cut to and in desperation he decided to try and create incidental music by looping sections and taking out choice pieces that seemed to fit specific emotions. The end result was far more satisfactory and with many of the tangential problems either solved or at least out in the open we began to feel happier with what we'd made. All that was needed was a decent sound mix to put the film in order.

This last sentence applies to nearly every film we've ever made and at the point of writing we have yet to find either the money or the facility to enable us to do this cheapily. "Burnt Bernard" was no different from all the others, we asked people, we hoped that Keith would somehow develop a set of skills he's never had, we tried to do it ourselves on Final Cut Pro, we reached a point where it was just about OK and gave in.

By now it was around June and half a year had slipped by since all photography had finished and both Ben and Chris were sick of the film and could see no real point in spending vast sums of money to try and fix something which was always going to be largely broken.

"Burnt Bernard" did not get into any major film festivals. It was not taken on by the British Council. It did join "Russell Square" on a tour of Papua New Guinea and it did play in quiet a few smaller festivals in England. Where it does play we invariably recieve emails from strangers telling us how much they loved it. Indeed, it was the coincidence of seeing "Burnt Bernard" at his local film festival a few days after getting an email from Ben that convinced Barrington Paul Robinson that he wanted to work with us, or as he put it on the phone "You are my boys".

People in the industry, people who are aware of what it takes to make a short film see all the errors that we see when we watch it. Everyone else just sees Keely smile at the end and then they start to applaud. It is something that neither of us will ever quite accept. Watching it together in the late autumn of 2001 in Brighton, Katie who had just started an English degree, was astonished to find Ben morosly deaf to laughter which greeted the film. Having been thoughtlessly sidelined in the publicity for the film, Ben's self-absorbed response left her scathing. By the time BAFTA had rung to say that "Burnt Bernard" was shortlisted, Katie and Ben had split up and Ben had plunged into gloom.

In the end "Burnt Bernard" did not make the final ten and so there was no panic for a print this time round. With Chris spending January living with Alex in Hull and then moving with Zee to Brixton, it was probably for the best that we were not called upon to magic thousands out of nothing for a second bite of the cherry. In the end, like so much else about this film, it was a good idea but the wrong time.

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"Burnt Bernard" was shot on location in South Mymms, Brookmans Park and Islington between September 2000 and February 2001. It cost £1,806.

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