0 Phase 2 By debbiehoward / April 24, 2013 / Uncategorized (

Phase 2 of our shoot began on Saturday 6th of April when we went to Birmingham to film Mel Scott leading a workshop called ‘When a baby dies’ to a large group of midwives, student midwives and others. This was a very powerful day and we got some great footage.

This day was a great day for women. We had Mel leading the session, around 50 female participants, Polly Perkins and myself and prepared everything and we had an all female crew consisting of Emma Dalesman, DoP, Heather Jordan, Sound Recordist, Isla Baddenoch assistant, and myself.  Everything flowed smoothly and we met some useful new contacts at the workshop too.

Post Production of our pilot commenced in February 2013. We hired our Editor Richard Hannan and our composer Asa Bennett. We put together a 3:50 min version for us to send to commissioners and a 1:20 min shorter version too, for the Sheffield Doc Fest Meet Market pitch. It was  a long hard process to decide what went into the pilot, but we got there in the end and were delighted with the result.  This was completed in March 2013 and we submitted to the Doc Fest and are just about to start sending the pilot out to others now.

We also started working with our new Producer, Polly Perkins, who came on board to work with us and help us organise our shoot.  She will be working with me, Debbie Howard and our Exec Producer Colin Pons. Polly started getting everything into shape nice and quickly.

We also had some fantastic news at the end of March when we found out we had been given a £35,000 grant from the South London and Maudsley Charitable Trust. This was great news and meant we could begin phase 2 of our shoot, and hopefully raise the rest of the money to complete the film later on. So it was into production again for phase 2.

Welcome to the Still Loved blog. I’m Debbie, I’m the Director/Producer of this feature documentary.

I began to make this film because I had made a short film a couple of years ago called Peekaboo, which looked at stillbirth. During the making of this film and afterwards, I got to know many families who had lost their babies and they told me their stories. I realised that is was still very much a taboo and I wanted to make this documentary so that it would finally be talked about and people didn’t feel like they couldn’t talk about what happened to them. I felt there was no one better qualified to tell these stories than the parents themselves so I began to put the start of the documentary together.

Having talked to other film experts, it became clear that although these stories needed to be told, the film would be so bleak that not many people would want to watch it. So we looked for stories that showed the real heartache and depths of despair that families go through, but that had a positive outcome. We decided to work with families that had done something spectacular in memory of their baby or had worked really hard to help others experiencing baby loss.

We decided we needed to shoot a pilot to try and raise the money for the rest of the film. I went to some very kind sponsors that had supported us during the making of Peekaboo, which was crowd funded. Crowd funding means that it was made from donations from many different people that wanted to support us. Three of our main sponsors on that film sponsored us a second time and donated enough money to buy some filming equipment for our shoot to begin. We also ran a crowd funding campaign to raise a little more and altogether raised £10,000 so that we could shoot our pilot.

We decided to start by working with two families to begin with. Mel and Baz Scott, who have lost their son Finley is one of the families. Mel has gone onto write a beautiful book called After Finley as well as set up websites and services to help others that have gone through losing a baby. She also runs workshops to help train midwives how to look after a family that loses a baby. Beth and Stephen Morris have lost their twins Harriet and Felicity. They embarked on an inspiring cycle challenge called Born Silently, the two of them, together with a group of friends cycled 325 miles from their home town to where their daughters had been born. They raised well over £20,000 for Tommy’s baby charity during this challenge.

We used the £10,000 we had raised to film most of the cycle challenge and then to film some initial days with Mel and Baz. Our crew for this was myself, along with our DoP Emma Dalesman and Sound Recordist Grant Bridgeman. We got some fantastic footage, and although it was a very emotional shoot, where all of us cried several times, we got some great footage and were very happy with what we had shot. We shot this during November 2012.

This was phase one of our shoot over. We spent several days logging the rushes just before Christmas. We were very happy with the footage and excited to begin post production on the pilot.