Exactly 6 weeks ago today, Ryan and I started the pre-production on a project titled as ‘You’re Not Alone’, and the truth is, that we didn’t quite realise how true and profound that notion is until the project was well underway.
The film was commissioned by Children North East earlier in the year as part of their 130th anniversary. They’d seen what we’d done with Round Here, and wanted us to make something, in their words, “that pulled at your heart strings in the same way.” Nee bother, we thought. We were starting from a good place, because the charity had also enlisted our mate and poet Scott Tyrrell (who’d previously penned the poem for Round Here) as well as north east legend Tim Healy, who had also borrowed his gruff, geordie voice talents to that same film. Aye, the lads were getting back together for the hopefully not-too-difficult second album. We were confident we’d have another smash on our hands. We went and worked on existing projects whilst Scott got to work on the poem.
A month or so later. And although some things were similar from the get-go, ie, writer, filmmakers and voice-talent, the key ways in which it would be a different beast were apparent from the first read-through of Scott’s newly-penned poem. The poem that was the basis for Round Here, you see, was general and open-ended, and so the imagery was always intended to be montage-y, and could contain archive footage in order to make our job as manageable as possible in order to hit the quick turnaround time we were presented with. Not so with You’re Not Alone, as Scott’s poem more or less told the backstory of the charity, which had been established in the late 1890’s after local philanthropists John Lunn and John Watson decided to do something to help the region’s destitute children. This was very much not general. It was specific, and it wasn’t so much open to interpretation as it needed to be an almost exact appropriate visual companion to the spoken words. And much of it was set in the late 1800’s. In other words, the film had to be inherently more ambitious than anything we had done previously, or the imagery would fall short of the words.
It’ll be fine, we thought. We’ll smash it just after Ryan’s paternity ends, maybe a month prior to deadline. It’s not easy to predict when a baby is ultimately going to arrive, so there’ll be an element of chaos in that, but based on our experience, we should have enough time, we thought. The one small issue being that we’d also never made a film as ambitious as this one, so really, how would we know that? Make no mistake - when it comes time to begin work on a particular project, we eat, sleep and breath that project for as long as we need to, but the fact also remains that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Roll on June, and Ryan and I were hard at work on pre-production. As Ryan’s paternity timed out, we were left with roughly 4-5 weeks to complete the project from start to finish. Though, as we progressed through pre-production, the number of locations, actors, props, resources, etc mounted and mounted, and the actual scale of the production became clearer and clearer with each discussion we had about how we would interpret and visualise the poem.
Apart from a fairly tight turnaround window, things were also complicated somewhat by the fact that Ryan was still a parent to a newborn, and so was functioning on perhaps 1-2 hours sleep per night. I brought my own complication to the party, with a life-long mysterious health issue showing up in its worst incarnation in years around this exact time. One of the symptoms being insomnia, and so Ryan and I plodded on, perpetually half-asleep but… consciously optimistic. Right, we thought - what have we got to make this happen… we’ve got a combination of a budget, and a decent amount of good-will from previous projects. So, we took to Facebook, and went about casting and pulling together resources.
You see, Ryan and I always want to be truthful in what we do. Not from some boy-scout place, but really from a place of cold, hard experience that taught us that this is simply a better way to be. It might not always be the easiest way, but it’s always better. So we’re always asking ourselves this question: is what we’re doing telling the truth, or making propaganda? All media is manipulation, they say, but we’ve no interest in making claims that aren’t true for aforementioned reasons. We’re also staunch believers in the whole ‘everything happens for a reason’ philosophy, which we can assure isn’t wishy-washy thinking, but a hard-tested personal decision to define things that happen to us as serving ultimately positive ends. So, when you’ve got a project like this, which had to be cut short by timings of other projects and Ryan’s newly born baby, you look for reasons why. What’s the reason that the universe lined up in this way for us this time? And once again, in the background, is what we’re doing and saying really true?
So, against the odds, everything we asked for showed up, every requirement fulfilled, sometimes in the nick of time, but always… there. People would offer themselves, their time and efforts up in startlingly kind fashion; and when asked why they would say something along the lines of “well, it’s for the children.”
So, maybe the why was to create the hasty conditions necessary to truly test all involved? People not only had to help, but they had to help fast, sometimes at great inconvenience to themselves and their family. “We’re doing it for the kids.” We would hear, again and again.
And so slowly but surely the truth of what we were trying to claim was proven to us. And this truth was thus: we are a region who cares deeply for its vulnerable children & parents, and will go the extra mile to lend a helping hand. I think Ryan and I could even relate to the vulnerable parents that feature in our story, and the work of Children North East. Not that we’re saying we had it as hard as them, but things were difficult. Sleep deprivation is hard, and physical illness, too. But thankfully, the region was there for us in the same way the charity is there for those people. In what was the most Unified production yet, people came together to do something good, to support each other and to tell a story that inspires and celebrates the good that’s there in our region, usually unspoken and uncelebrated.
Children North East have done this for 130 years - we dipped our toes into this world for maybe two months… but we left with the experience and knowledge of something utterly invaluable. We left knowing that truly, when the going gets tough, this region reaches out to one another and leaves them with the confidence that indeed, they are not alone.
Thank you, to everyone who had a part in making this film happen, big or small. You know who you are, and we appreciate the heck out of you. We can’t wait to work with you again.
- Jon & Ryan @ Unified
