Sourcing local Bristol talent and minimising travel helped get our series produced through the pandemic says exec producer Tally Garner
Production company: Mam Tor Productions
Commissioner: Ben Irving
Length: 6 x 60 minutes
TX: From Sunday 6 February, 9pm, BBC1 & iPlayer
Executive producers: Tally Garner, Morven Reid, Alice Seabright
Directors: Alice Seabright, Amanda Boyle
Producer: Joanna Crow
Writers: Alice Seabright, Kayleigh Llewellyn, Poppy Cogan
Post House: The Farm
It’s 2017 and I am meeting Alice Seabright for the first time. We are bonding over our shared fascination with people who lie; why they do it, what are they hiding from, and can you create a character who lies a lot, and still care about them. And if someone lies or pretends enough, at what point does the lie/pretence become real? And in our social media age, what is real anyway?
From these initial conversations Chloe and the character of Becky was born.
We worked up a pitch and took it to Ben Irving at the BBC who commissioned a treatment, then a first episode script, and soon after a second.
Things were moving; Morven Reid joined Mam Tor as head of development, Alice went and directed two episodes of Sex Education and then, just before Christmas in 2019 we got the big news that the BBC wanted to greenlight our show. It was to be Mam Tor’s first production and Alice’s first show as writer, director and exec producer, and a huge moment for us all.
We assembled an all-female writers’ room in my kitchen. Alice was to write four episodes with Kayleigh Llewellyn taking on episode three and Poppy Cogan, episode four.
Morven ran the room with Sarah Granville, our trainee script editor, and Bolu Babalola as a non-writing member of the team. It was pre-Covid and we had no idea when we finished the room in Feb 2020 what was to come…
With all that followed in the midst of a global pandemic, it soon became clear that the initial plan for financing the show with the BBC licence fee and a Banijay minimum guarantee was going to need a rethink as Covid costs soared.
We decided to take the project out to market that summer and Matt Creasey at Banijay lined up the pitch meetings. The pitches were all done over Zoom but given Mam Tor has never had an office and has always worked remotely, in many ways it was business as usual.
Amazon Prime Video came on board in their first global deal out of the UK – something I still pinch myself about – and we set a plan to start pre-prep in October that year. Prep proper wouldn’t start until January 2021, but with the landscape ever changing and a number of productions pushing into the same shooting period we knew we needed to crew up early.
I love working with clever, ambitious women who are terrific at what they do, and that sums up Alice and the Chloe team. Line producer Philippa Cole was the next to join and together we started to work towards an April shoot in Bristol.
With the story really rooted in the cultural scene of the city we wanted to work with local talent as much as possible as well as minimise the amount of cross-country travel crew would need to do and so stepped up experienced local 1st AD Joanna Crow into the producer role, and she and Phil started sourcing local crew wherever possible.
My tricks of the trade - Tally Garner
- Communicate – sounds obvious but when face to face meetings are hard finding ways to communicate is vital – we love a WhatsApp group on Chloe
- Go local – where possible we worked with local HODs and crew and their local knowledge saved us on numerous occasions
- Be flexible and collaborate – we always try to say yes, although sometimes it might be a yes…but…
- A trainee in every department – we tried to do this on Chloe, not knowing then how our trainees would save us as Track and Trace pinging took hold at the end of the shoot.
Meanwhile the scripts were being written and working with casting director Lauren Evans our key cast were coming together. Erin Doherty/ Becky was the first on board swiftly followed by Pippa Bennett–Warner, Billy Howle, Jack Farthing, Lisa Palfrey, Poppy Gilbert, Akshay Khanna and Alexander Eliot.
American actor Brandon Micheal Hall was to play Josh and so the SAG exemption process began and was only finalised the day before he was due to get on a flight to the UK to start filming. Read throughs, story sessions, rehearsals were all done remotely and with some of the strictest testing measures in place from Amazon, we got ready to start filming.
Jo worked through the schedule, minimising the number of locations and travel days, maximising the use of the locations we did have, grouping the cast days together as much as possible – anything we could do to minimise the threat of Covid where at all possible. It’s thanks to her, our incredible Covid team, and the crew that we got through almost four months of filming without a single shutdown.
By the end of the shoot, a combination of positive Covid cases and people being “pinged” by Track and Trace meant we were stepping people up across almost all departments, but we got there, we wrapped and now all we had to do was deliver it for broadcast…
Joanna Crow, producer
Our shoot took place in summer 2021, when every other lockdown-gestated, delayed or restarted project had decided to shoot simultaneously in the hazardous new protocol-ridden landscape of Covid-world. Grips were like gold dust, dollies and cranes traded on the black market and jokes about how many crew are needed to change a lightbulb became painful (Ping! ‘change it yourself’).
Whilst we made it over the finishing line without shutting down (with a drone strapped to the roof for a shot of an imaginary badger), it was a thrilling, ‘high stakes’ ride. Watching Squid Game now feels like light relief. Compassion and humour were survival skills.
Photographically Chloe and the world of Becky/Sasha is a world of contrasts. To reflect that DPs Katie Goldschmidt and Steven Ferguson, embraced a visual grammar that changed with the character whilst remaining highly subjective. Shooting on the flexible sensor of the Sony Venice combined with lenses from Panavision and an evolving lighting style helped to inform this language.
Becky’s world is raw and intimate, made up of mixed colour temperatures and shot in the super 35mm sensor. Sasha’s world is glossier but heightened and shot with the full sensor in 6K for a shallower depth of field. The ‘retro’ look of the teenage flashbacks had the sensor windowed to a Super 16mm size and was shot on Canon Super 16mm zooms.
Our sound palette emerged early on in Seabright’s scripts, immersing the audience in Becky’s state of mind as she transitions between identities and lies, memory and anxiety. The sounds of the sea and water are heavily linked to memory and childhood and the mixed emotions of trauma and loss. A bath toy flapping its wings in Bristol created whole orchestras of emotion for our socially-distant sound designer in New Zealand.
Distance was no object as Soundscape and Score riffed with each other across oceans. Will Gregory’s (Goldfrapp) sublime Score is an emotive mix of synths, gongs, vibraphone, cello and Adrian Utley’s (Portishead) guitar which, much like Seabright’s writing and our crew, created a lightness through some dark times.
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