Woo hoo! We reached our target on Kickstarter last night! I’m so delighted. We reached the £5,000 mark just before midnight!

Thanks so much every single one of you that has donated, shared our link on Facebook, tweeted for us and sent us words of encouragement. Even though it’s been hard to raise the money, it’s been wonderful too as it’s felt like a real community effort, with people helping all around the world, including a Facebook auction ran by QUILTS in several countries, SANDS in Derby donated a large chunk of money, and Mel Scott from Finley’s Footprints worked really hard to get all her followers to back us.

As well as tremendous support from the baby loss community, we also had loads of support and donations from other lovely filmmakers, many of which are making their own documentaries at the moment. This was so kind of them and really encouraging.

And of course our own friends and family who were kind as always!

So a big thank you to everyone who’s been involved.

But we have 50 hours of left until the deadline, so please keep sharing, because every single additional pound we raise will go towards the cost of us completing this film.

Last Saturday, 22nd June, we filmed a great event in Derby. This was the Baby loss awareness day in the main square. It was being ran by Derby Sands.

The  chair of Derby Sands is Louisa Evans, who we will be featuring in our film. We plan to do more filming with Louisa and her family very soon.

The local Sands group had planned the day which included stalls to raise money for the group to continue to run and provide beautiful memory boxes for the local hospital.

There was also the Sands team and a bereavement midwife on hand to support any parents that approached them about the loss of a baby. They gave out information on their support group. There was a balloon release.

Parents wrote messages and tributes to their babies on tags which were tied to balloon and released at 2pm. This was an emotional moment for many of the parents gathered.

There was also a very good raffle with loads of prizes. There was lots of support from grand parents too who were their to remember their grand sons and daughters.

It was great to meet the team, we interviewed some of them on the day and we look forward to working more with Louisa soon.

Derby Sands can be contacted here: http://www.derbysands.org.uk/

Our crew for the day was: Director – Debbie Howard, Producer – Polly Perkins, DoP – Emma Dalesman and Sound Recordist – Grant Bridgeman

We had a really exciting shoot day yesterday. Two of our film’s main characters Beth and Stephen Morris of the Born Silently Cycle Challenge, were invited to tea with Samantha Cameron at No. 10 Downing Street in light of wonderful work they’ve done raising money for Tommy’s Baby charity. It was a great day for them and also for the rest of those attending that work hard for Tommy’s too. It was good to see stillbirth being discussed at No.10 and there are plans to tackle the high stillbirth rates in the UK.


It was also great to catch up with Beth and Steve and see what they have been up to since we last filmed them finishing their Born Silently ride a few months ago and to see what their future plans are.

Our crew yesterday was Producer Polly Perkins, who’s brother Toby Perkins is a labour MP, and took us the House of Commons for lunch on the bank of the Thames. Polly did a fantastic job of getting us permission to film directly outside No. 10, which was not easy at all! So big thanks to Polly for that, and also the the lovely Rosemary that worked at No.10 and made us very welcome. Our DoP was Emma Dalesman, who did a wonderful job as ever. Particularly since I had left the tripod plate attached to another camera when from a shoot last week and poor Emma had to improvise by attaching the camera to the tripod with gaffer tape!! (Sorry Emma). But don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson, that will never happen again. Still, she did a fantastic job as ever, even working with a dippy director like me! Our Sound Recordist yesterday was Rowan October, and old friend from Sheffield years ago who it was great to see and did a lovely job for us. Then there was me, Debbie Howard, Director, taking lots of pictures and generally having a great time.

Some of the funny moments were arriving at the security check point, obviously quite a strict business and me announcing “Hi. We’re here to do the shooting on Downing Street”!! That really didn’t go down well.

Also it took longer than expected and we were starving. This is the one street in London without a Tesco express on the corner!

Anyway, it was a great day with some fab footage. So thank you to everyone that played a part in us getting this together.