When Rich told me we were going to make a movie and it was going to be messy, I’ll be honest, I thought we’d reached that stage in the relationship when things get a bit weird. Like when they start buying you underwear for Christmas and you think – when have I EVER worn anything like THAT?!
Thankfully, it turns out we haven’t quite reached that stage and he was actually referring to the promotional film for our new baking product – ‘Bake It Personal’ – which allows you to personalise cookies with three fab letter-press cutters and a bag containing set phrases and two alphabets. Phew! What a relief!
But he was right. It was messy. It was also surprisingly hard to ‘keep the area clean’ and ‘don’t imprint too hard’ and ‘keep your left hand out the way’ when you’ve got a camera sitting on your shoulder. Especially when you’re not the world’s best baker, as you may remember from the mayonnaise cup-cake fiasco…
Now I’ve done a lot of things in my time (reporter, English teacher, arts marketer, factory worker, audio-typist, bar maid, seller of big bits of steel…) but making a film isn’t one of them. What I can do though – and very well I might add – is make lists. So that’s what I decided to do. Make a list about filming. That’ll work. Right, what do we need..?
1) Cameraman – enter Stuart Kettell. Excellent cameraman by day and, I’ll be frank, something of a fund-raising legend by night. Stuart is one of those people whose lives, you think, can’t possibly be real.
He’s been fund-raising for Macmillan Cancer Support for eight years doing madcap stunts such as spending a week in a suspended box; spending a week suspended in a shopping centre by helium balloons, running multiple marathons in a hamster wheel – dressed as a hamster – canoeing from Paris to Coventry (and this isn’t even a complete list) and his latest, walking every street in Coventry (500 miles) on a pair of stilts.
You can donate here if you feel inspired! His next stunt is rolling a brussel sprout up Mount Snowden with his nose. I kid you not. I hope he has good knee pads. This whole blog could actually be about Stuart…
2) Really pretty biscuits and lots of dough – enter Lisa of Nan’s Nice Cakes, Grantham. You can find her here on Facebook. Lisa stepped in at the eleventh hour and made us the most glorious array of personalised biscuits, plus lots of dough to play with. Thank-you Lisa!
Props – we winged this bit and it took longer than we thought.. We dug out the Christmas gear, made party hats, bought flowers for mother’s days and weddings and wrapped boxes for birthday presents and still poor Stuart spent time between filming waiting for us to get our act together (we did a lot of ironing, strangely). He is very patient, but then he has spent a week in a box…
Kids – luckily we know quite a few people with great kids so we enlisted the help of our friend Celia Alexander and kids, Tom and Molly. Celia’s other half Neil, also does our website. We like to keep it in the family :)
Location – easy, our place. Or it would have been if it hadn’t needed a good clean first. Rich even got out the Power Cleaner to clean the oven – something I’ve never seen in my life before and no doubt, will never see again! That’s it there – looking very shiny…
People – Celia, on hand with the kids and not adverse to getting roped in (not that we gave her a choice!) our friend Mark from Creative Products, Tom and Molly of course, and Rob from the warehouse who didn’t need asking twice to get his Christmas jumper out.
List sorted.
For the rest, I’ll let the pics and the film speak for itself although it is worth bearing in mind that baking IS MESSY, cutting out shapes perfectly first time with no flour smudges IS DIFFCULT (as in seven takes difficult) CHILDREN DO GET DISTRACTED and Rob FORGOT HIS CHRISTMAS JUMPER. Make or break kind-of-stuff…
On the plus side – I did get proposed to for the second time running and this time, wasn’t wearing over gloves, so definitely an improvement on the first; the product is genuinely fab and easy to use and the kids had a whale of a time. In hindsight – so did I!
You can watch the film here on our Facebook Page. I hope you enjoy it!
