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On the road with Gerald Dickens

On the road with Gerald Dickens

Monthly Archives: October 2020

Bringing A Christmas Carol To The Screen: Part Two

20 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by geralddickens in Uncategorized

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‘Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’ When I walk onto a stage and the lights come up as the sound effect bells toll I can launch into that memorable opening line with sheer confidence that I will be able to spend the next 90 minutes telling the story of A Christmas Carol in a professional and effective manner. For over 25 years I have lived with the book and pretty well know every nuance and mood within the text. It may be boastful, but I think I am quite an expert on performing A Christmas Carol.

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But recording it? Videoing it? That was a whole different field of expertise and a field that I had not yet entered – indeed I was struggling to even find the gate!

When the opportunity to film A Christmas Carol was presented to me it meant that I had to learn quickly and that is something that always excites and challenges me. Initially the plan was to film the show as it appears on the stage, which would be quite simple to do – probably the work of a single day. I was introduced to a talented young videographer, Emily Walder, who specialises in the filming of stage shows and she confirmed that the project would be a relatively simply one. A couple of cameras at most, a sound engineer, a couple of takes to capture a few close ups and different angles, and then patch it all together in the editing suite. Emily’s talent lays in editing and she has even been part of a project that won an Oscar, so I had absolute confidence in her to bring my show digitally to life.

My first job was to find locations and, as I mentioned in my previous post, I was originally looking for beautiful theatres. The architect Frank Matcham was renowned for his spectacular interiors and even though his work came after Dickens’ death, a number of his finest creations still exist and would suit my purpose exactly. I approached a few and received encouraging messages back; during the period of lockdown theatres were shut up, dark, locked, so the opportunity to breathe some life back into them, and receive a small income too, appealed to managers.

But then the project took a turn: initially it started by thinking about using different scenes within the theatre space – brick walls back stage could be suitably bleak and sparse, maybe a bar or box office space would be warm, plush and welcoming. Perhaps we could use exterior walls……and that is when the search for locations widened.

Encouraged by Liz to think further and further outside whatever box my mind was in, I started imaging fantastic backgrounds for the story. Although I know a lot of people didn’t approve of it but much of our inspiration came from the latest BBC2 adaptation staring Guy Pearce which was premiered in the UK last Christmas. There was plenty wrong with the production but the darkness and bleakness of many of the scenes appealed and I was keen to take that tone.

My first location idea was Highgate Cemetery in North London, where I have performed a couple of times. Not only does the site boast a wonderful array of gothic gravestones and monuments, but a little chapel would suit the interior scenes as well. The mood board started to overflow with pictures of dark, lichen-covered, higgledy-piggledy gravestones with slips of grass rising like fingers from the graves below, and my script became a confusion of angles and views which would challenge the viewers’ minds

But Highgate Cemetery wanted too much money

It was then that my thoughts came around to Rochester and the various venues that I described in my last blog post. With clear images of the scenes in my mind I started re writing the script again, complete with costume changes and lighting effects and sound effects and long tracking shots and tight close-ups. It was at this stage that I received a very polite, if somewhat nervous, email from Emily reminding me that when I’d contacted her I had asked her to attend a theatre and film a couple of run throughs of my show: The project seemed to have changed somewhat and she wanted me to understand that what I was asking for may not be possible with a crew of 2.

Emily is completely professional and of course her concerns were valid for when I looked back at the script I realised that I would need a crew of 700, with a budget in the millions and the end film may just be ready for Christmas 2021…..

We agreed to use my complicated script as an extension of the various mood boards that I had created and I began to pare things down until I had another, albeit simpler, version of the text.

Day 1

We met for the first time in the crypt at Rochester Cathedral. The lighting and the arches formed the perfect confusing background for Scrooge’s memories, but we instantly had to come to terms with modernity: Exit signs, fire alarms, electric outlets, stylish glass doors with carefully designed logos etched into them – all seemed to be in the back of every shot we wanted. However we soon managed to find the spaces we needed and began to work.

Without too much discussion we quickly fell into a routine which served us well throughout all of our shooting days: I would say which scene we were to film and suggest any ideas I may have had when working on the script (filming over shoulder, close up of face etc), and then I would actually run through the scene allowing Emily to walk around me searching for suitable shots and angles.

The first scene to be filmed was Scrooge waking up as The Ghost of Christmas Past visits him. I had made a decision not to actually physically portray the spirit (it is an impossible challenge anyway as Dickens describes it as an ever changing form:  ‘For as its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.’) My idea was for the ghost to be an indistinct presence represented by its voice coming from a different place each time it spoke. The echoes of the low stone vaulted ceiling only added to the mystery and eeriness of the scene.

I was delighted that Emily immediately bought into my vision and filmed the action from all sorts of obscure angles, whilst the sound engineer Jordan wielded the unwieldy sound boom as effectively as he could so as to counteract the natural echo.

We filmed all of the ‘past’ scenes in various settings around the Crypt: Scrooge on the road, at school, losing Belle and seeing her later in domestic bliss. The vergers and staff in the Cathedral couldn’t have been more welcoming to us and allowed us to film uninterrupted all morning.

Our next venue was the tiny, cramped 6 Poor Travellers’ House, which would become the Cratchit’s home – it seemed apt that the happy, close-knit family should be housed within the comforting walls of a charity alms house.

Once again our first job was to move as many indications of modern life as we could before finding suitable angles to film, which was in some ways easier in the cramped confines of the room than it had been in the cavernous crypt – here we just didn’t have much choice! In fact the space was so small that we decided to shoot some of the scenes through the tiny windows, which not only gave us an extra perspective but also a sense of Scrooge being apart from the action, and a slight feeling of voyeurism in the way that Alfred Hitchcock used so effectively over and over again,

At 5pm we had everything filmed that we had planned for the day, which was just as well for in a couple of days the curator of the 6 Poor Travellers’ House was due to leave the grey of Britain and head to Portugal for the winter months, meaning we would not be able to return until the Spring, which would be rather too late for our purposes.

Day 2

We re-grouped a week later to continue the filming. Due to the constraints of the various locations’ availability we were filming out of sequence, so it was a good thing that I have become so completely familiar with every scene of the story over the years, meaning that it was easy to pick up the various emotions as we went on.

Our first location was at St James Church in Cooling, out on the marshes, looking over the rivers Medway and Thames towards the county of Essex. It was 7.30 in the morning and a beautiful clear sunrise was bathing the scene in an amazing light so Emily and Jordan unpacked their equipment quickly in order that we could begin as soon as possible.

A tiny quiet village church in the midst of remote marshes: what could possibly interrupt us at that hour of the morning? The answer, everything. Nearby is Cooling Castle, now owned by a famous musician who obviously doesn’t like the marsh’s resident crows gathering on his roof for he, or one of the farmers nearby, had installed a bird scarer, which went off with a loud retort every twenty minutes or so, meaning we had to time our shoots carefully.

We were not only battling with the shotgun, but as the church is situated on an s-bend, a sort of chicane around the graveyard, we also had a series of cars dropping down gears as they approached it, and then accelerating away again on the other side. As time passed so a very large tip-up truck, whose traditional signwriting proclaimed it was the property of GORDON’S, rumbled and rattled past, only to return ten minutes later with a full load. Rattle. Bump. Grind of gears. Whining transmission. Surge of diesel engine. Rattle. Bump. After a few of these drive pasts the driver of Gordon’s truck would give us a cheery wave of apology each time he guided this monster along the little lane.

The supposed silent idyll was also punctuated by horns from far away ships and the odd executive jet screaming overhead!

We were joined on the second day by our very good friend Martin Smith who is a superb photographer and had offered to come along to take a few stills for publicity purposes. It was Martin who introduced me to Emily as they have worked together on various theatrical shoots on many occasions. As Emily, Jordan and I picked good locations for various shots, so Martin hovered in the background recording the scene.

Our first shots were filmed on a couple of pathways across the marshes, which eventually will form the opening and closing of the story. Charles Dickens loved to walk in this very countryside, so the idea of the narrator of the book striding across the fields as he talks seemed like a good way to begin. The light was beautiful, so were the clouds, although the strong wind made recording the sound a tricky proposition (not to mention bird-scarers. aeroplanes, cars and ‘Gordon’.)

Having captured the open countryside shots we then moved into the churchyard itself, where we spent a good couple of hours filming a number of scenes in different corners. The obvious ones: ‘Marley was dead, to begin with’ and Scrooge being shown the vision of his own death were filmed at various ancient stones, whilst we also recorded shorter patches of narration which may, or may not, be used at other points in the story.

The appearance of the terrible visions of Ignorance and Want was filmed against a gnarled old Yew tree in which the bark seemed to form into the grotesque faces of generations of starving children.

When we finished at St James’ we loaded all of the equipment into our cars and headed back into the heart of Rochester and to Eastgate House, our final location for the day.

Our first job was to reconnoitre the entire building and decide which rooms to use for the various scenes that would be filmed there: Scrooge’s office, Scrooge’s home and nephew Fred’s party. It took a while to come to a final decision but eventually we set up in a small oak panelled upstairs room, with my clerk’s desk next to an empty fireplace. The stool which would represent Bob Cratchit in the scene I placed in a little alcove with light streaming in, suggesting the ‘little cell, a sort of a tank’ which Dickens described in the original.

Having run through the scene a couple of times and tried various angles, during which Martin had got some fantastically dramatic photographs, we decided to go for a take.

I concentrated on the lines, Emily concentrated on getting the shot, Jordon kept the boom mic out of sight and Martin…well Martin slid down the wall! Suddenly we aware of a scraping of furniture on the floor and I suppose our first thought was that he had simply leaned against the cabinet which moved, but it was more serious than that. Martin had fainted and as we watched he slowly tumbled to the floor (ever the professional he somehow managed to fall in such away that he didn’t crush any of his expensive and heavy photographic equipment which was hanging from a harness strapped to his body.

There was a moment when time stopped – just a moment – and then Emily, Jordan and I rushed over to him, and made sure he was comfortable. In just a few seconds his eyes flickered open and he gradually became aware that the little room was at a different angle than the last time he saw it. We explained what had happened and slowly he began to remember feeling as if ‘everything was was swimming’. We took him downstairs and into the fresh air where we gave him a glass of water, but he was still not feeling 100% and we thought it may be best to call an ambulance, just so that he could be checked over.

The paramedics arrived in a few minutes and were fantastic (God bless the NHS!). They chatted, asked questions, tested blood pressure and heart rate, and came to the conclusion that the fainting was simply a result of a very early morning and not enough sustenance.

The team in green phoned their findings back to head office and while they waited for the official advice to come back down the line they asked us about our work and were terribly impressed by our various theatrical endeavours. One of the paramedics said, rather forlornly, that he wished he had an exciting job, to which we all chorused ‘What? Saving lives every day is a pretty amazing thing to do!’ The modest reply maybe didn’t install a huge amount of confidence in any of us but perhaps not in Martin the most: ‘Oh, actually I don’t save the lives of about 85% of the people I see!’ I think he meant that most cases he saw were mundane. I hope that is what he meant.

When Martin was given the all clear, our new friends packed up their equipment and bade us a cheery adieu with a parting reminder to ‘drink more water!’

Somehow it didn’t feel right to continue filming now and as we had got some amazing footage in the can (or megapixels on the chip), we took the decision that it had been a valuable and productive day and that we would re-group in a week’s time to finish up.

Martin and I found a dainty café where we had a restorative lunch of quiche and a little salad, and then went our separate ways.

Day 3

Another week on and Emily, Jordan and I were back at Eastgate House (Martin had decided it may be better not to make the trip this time), with a long day ahead of us, but what we did not have to do was spend lots of time trying to work out where to shoot.

We set the little office space up again and picked up with the scene we had been filming before. Spookily, eerily (and the house is about 400 years old so perhaps not surprisingly), at the very moment we reached the point in the scene where Martin had fainted the week before, so one of Emily’s lights failed. We all looked at each other, but chose to press on in spite of whatever spirit floated around us in that confined space…..

We finished all of the scenes in the office, then moved to another very sparse room on the top floor in which we filmed all of the scenes in Scrooge’s home, including leaning out of the window and shouting to the little boy on Christmas morning, much to the surprise of the residents of Rochester.

When we had finished the filming upstairs it was almost 1 pm, so learning the lessons from the week before we decided that it was time to eat and drink water.

In the afternoon we had one more location – a bright large room, where we re-created Nephew Fred’s party, and had plenty of space for the lascivious Topper to flirt with the niece’s sister. For the game of Blindman’s Buff I tied one of my cravats over my eyes and managed to complete the scene without bumping into anyone or anything.

With all of the scenes completed we tidied up all of the rooms we had used and returned them to the state they had been that morning, and then made our way outside to film a few exterior ‘linking’ shots that would be used to join some of the scenes together. The sun was beginning to go down and we had to work quickly against the rapidly fading light, but he golden glow was beautiful on the honey stone of the cathedral and even as we walked back to our cars Emily was filming a few extra scenes to have in reserve should they be needed.

And that was that. a wrap. No hugs or handshakes in our masked socially distancing world, just thanks and goodbyes.

Now it is time for Emily to work her Oscar-winning magic over the show as she stiches all of the scenes together in an order that Charles Dickens would recognise. The next time I write my 2020 version of A Christmas Carol will be ready to view.

Getting A Christmas Carol On to Film…At Last!

14 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by geralddickens in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

2020 has been an empty vessel for me. With the spread of the global pandemic and the resultant periods of lockdown and government-induced precautions the theatre sector has died a death and the opportunities to perform have been non-existent since March. I have walked, cycled and run; I have tried to make the most of the situation I have found myself in, and I have continued to contact possible venues in the hope that my very simple one man show will prove a concept that can suit these new days of restricted audience numbers and social distancing.

But despite all of that potential negativity 2020 has been a remarkable year for me for I have undertaken two projects entirely new to me, both out of any comfort zone that I have slipped into: I have written a book and I am making a video.

Ok, strictly speaking I had started the book last year but I have managed to complete the manuscript and it is in the hands of my publishers (oh, to be able to type those two words is an extraordinary thing!). throughout this year the proof-read manuscript has been returned for me to check, I have made a few changes and returned it ready for the process to begin again and at the moment I am waiting for the next stage to begin and the exciting thing is that I have no idea what that will be! It is all new to me.

The second project is more nerve-wracking for me as I am in charge of it and have no background in writing, directing or acting in videos, my experience lies within the great broad brushstrokes of theatre and the subtleties of film have past me by.

But 2020 is a year of change and it has been essential to embrace whatever prospect has presented itself. This, then, is the story of the video.

As many of you will already know a major feature of my performing year is taken up with an extensive tour to the United States. I have been travelling for over 25 years and many of the venues have become regular stops where amazingly loyal and enthusiastic audience members return over and over again to watch me perform A Christmas Carol. Very early in the year it became apparent to me that the 2020 tour would be impossible to organise. The future was extremely uncertain and infection (and death) rates were soaring in both Britain and America. The introduction of a 14 day quarantine period for anyone returning to the UK from overseas sealed my decision, for if I were to travel to the USA in December I would not be able to perform at home at all in the run up to Christmas: I took the decision to cancel the tour, and that, or so I thought, would be the end of it.

But I had not counted on the generosity of my venues and little by little word came back that some locations would love the opportunity to have a streamed performance which they could offer to their regular patrons. Over the years I have often been asked ‘who don’t you film your performance’ and my answers have always been evasive – ‘I wouldn’t know how to capture the connection between me and the audience’, ‘I don’t know how to get the right venue’, ‘The performance would have to be specially staged and directed to film each scene properly – that may destroy the pace of the show.’ The real reasons of course were more down to earth and basic: firstly, I have no experience in creating the script for, or actually directing the filming of a video, and secondly I have never had a budget to do the job.

When my American agent Bob Byers first approached me to float the idea of making a film it was because some of my regular venues, and one in particular – The Mid Continent Public Library service based near Kansas City – had offered to invest in a production of the show which could be distributed and shown to my regular and very loyal audiences. The budget was in place and that was one excuse that I’d lost!

Initially my plan was to find a suitably Victorian theatre and simply run the show a couple of times with a camera taking a few different shots which could be edited together to create a record of the performance, but as I began to research suitable venues Liz suggested that this was too good an opportunity to miss and we should look at creating something more impressive and memorable. I therefore broadened my location search: a gothic cemetery in London would be too expensive, as would some impressive stately homes that I have visited over the years.

In the end my choice came down to the opening shot I wanted to use: a bleak churchyard with the figure of the story’s narrator standing respectfully over a grave as the opening lines of the novel are heard. The inspiration for this image was the churchyard at Cooling in Kent, which in turn had inspired Charles Dickens to create one of his most memorable opening chapters, that of Great Expectations. Rather than looking for a church that looked like St James’ at Cooling it made rather more sense to use the original, and if I was going to be doing some of the filming near the city of Medway (made up of Rochester, Chatham and Strood as well as many other villages and small towns), it made sense to look for other locations within that conurbation.

I have worked closely with Medway Council over the years as their spectacular Dickens festival has been a regular part of my calendar, so I started to approach some old friends in the tourism and events departments and their desire to assist me and to open doors was very moving. Rochester is internationally seen as being to Charles Dickens what Stratford Upon Avon is to William Shakespeare, so the idea of featuring the old city as a character in its own right was appealing.

As well as the church in Cooling the venues I was looking at were Eastgate House, The Six Poor Travellers’ House and Rochester Cathedral, as well as a few exterior shots which would help to link one scene to another. Each of these buildings, remarkable in their own right, have appeared in Dickens’s works, so their presence in my film is a little nod to the complete canon of work and not just his ‘ghostly little book’.

To describe St James’ Church in Cooling I can do no better than to quote the opening chapter of Great Expectations:

I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.about:blank

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!

Today the Church still sits on remote marshland and the low leaden line of the river still slashes the green in half. Standing proudly against the grey sky there are no longer gibbets or prison hulks but cranes and derricks at the London Gateway shipping container port. On a cold misty morning it is easy to believe that the wretched convict is still lurking ready to terrify us.

In his description Charles mentions the five little stone lozenges nestled against the grave stone. Dickens would often exaggerate fact by increasing numbers, but in this case he couldn’t bring himself to record the true extent of a family’s tragedy: in reality there are thirteen little graves – a horrific reminder to the mortal danger of marsh fever.

Field paths near to the church were perfect to stride along, as Charles Dickens would have done, narrating the opening of the story until I stand before a grave and look straight down the camera lens to address the viewers directly for the first time….

I also used the churchyard as a base for short lines of narration throughout the story, as well as the setting for the appearance of Ignorance and Want and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come (not to mention Scrooge’s own grave stone)

Eastgate House is a remarkable building dating back to the 16th century. Originally built for a Mayor of Rochester, the red-bricked house stands proudly at the end of the High Street, which in former times was part of the main route from the south coast to London and therefore a very important thoroughfare.

Charles Dickens featured the venerable pile in two of his books, in fact it bookended his career appearing in his first novel The Pickwick Papers and his final, unfinished story, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

For me the darkly panelled rooms with their tiny mullioned windows are perfect to represent both Scrooge’s office and also his home (the staircase particularly giving me plenty of scope for an eerie Hitchcockian sequence as Scrooge ascends to his rooms), whilst the newly renovated rooms with the Georgian-styled duck egg blue interiors offer a superbly cheerful setting for the Christmas celebrations of Scrooge’s nephew Fred, as well as the flirtatious Topper as he chases Scrooge’s niece’s sister about the room

The Six Poor Travellers’ House was built at around the same time as Eastgate and was funded by the estate of Richard Watts to be used as an alms house for travellers. The accommodation was spartan, boasting six bedrooms complete with fireplaces, and an area where the residents could eat and share their stories in comfort

In 1854 Charles Dickens wrote a short story about the house which he called ‘The Seven Poor Travellers’ (he was the seventh) which of course brought greater attention to the admirable work of the Watts’ charity.

The house today is open as a museum and provides a superb background for the scenes involving the Cratchit family in their simple yet cheerful home.

But the Six Poor Travellers’ House had a surprise in store for us: Liz, the current curator, mentioned that although not open to the public the house also boasted a ‘the house of correction’ in the basement which we were welcome to use if we wanted to: Old Joe and Mrs Dilber selling Scrooge’s bed curtains and clothes had found their home!

The use of Rochester Cathedral will perhaps prove to be the most controversial of my locations as it represents Scrooge’s mind, rather than specific scenes. When I was researching the various locations I saw a photograph of the Cathedral’s crypt and instantly saw in the low gothic arches a series of interconnecting neurological pathways. The scene is perfect for Scrooge’s past – the images don’t exist in the real world, they are jumbled, confused and forgotten. So within the Crypt Scrooge sees his school room, Fezziwig’s warehouse and the scene of Belle leaving him all represented by a single piece of furniture.

The entire project has been exciting, terrifying and exhilarating and, as with so many performers across the world, from the warm ashes of live theatre is rising a phoenix of hope

In my next blog post I will discuss the development of the script and how I have come to work with a brilliant videographer and editor to bring the story of A Christmas Carol to your screens this Christmas.

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