Simon Ellis makes his directorial feature debut with Dogging: A Love Story, a romantic comedy that will never be mistaken for a Richard Curtis movie. The film stars Luke Treadaway (Brothers Of The Head), Kate Heppell, Justine Glenton and Richard Reddell, and was shot around Newcastle in the winter of 2006. Simon writes here about making the transition from shorts to features...

I am completely stumped about how to start this article. Shooting a feature is such a complex tangle of... everything... so, where to begin? It may seem an obvious statement but making short films, as many as possible, is without a doubt the best preparation for directing a feature. It becomes clear very quickly how things can spiral out of control and I most certainly would have gone insane had I felt out of my depth at any stage.

For me the most difficult thing was being away from home but that also had its advantages in that it kept me away from distractions like festival submissions or spending whole days depressed about yet another bill that I can't pay, or whatever (of course, all of that stuff bashed me over the head with a vengeance when I returned home for Christmas).

One of the biggest differences from making shorts happened very early on, in the casting process. I hadn't ever really 'auditioned' people before and I had certainly never worked with a casting director (Victoria Beattie). It all took some getting used to because I would be so mentally exhausted at the end of the week. Seeing 30 people a day for a range of disparate characters was all new to me. Fortunately though, Victoria has the energy and enthusiasm of a whole army so it wasn't too disastrous when brain-strain started to set in.

She also has a very keen eye for fresh talent, which was perfect for me because I wasn't interested casting familiar names and I certainly didn't want southern actors doing northern accents (performers doing accents is one of my pet hates so this inevitably made certain choices easier from the start). Victoria was also trusting enough to let me cast some of my regulars in the film without having them audition, which I shall always be grateful for, so the cast was ultimately an amalgam of familiarity and new blood, and that was really exciting for me.

I could write an essay about the casting alone but in the interest of brevity I'll wrap it up by saying that it was an extremely thorough and satisfying process that I learned a lot from. The cast were absolute magic, every one of them, I love them all bar none.

Production was as exhausting as expected, shooting three weeks of days and two weeks of nights with one day off each weekend. I think the subject matter was largely responsible for keeping spirits up as we were tested with all the usual strains. If you believe everything you read then it would seem that feature film shoots attract unique obstacles. Every production has its share of war stories, so I shouldn't have been surprised when, one week into shooting, eight of us were involved in a minor accident as our car ploughed into the back of another crew vehicle on the ring road, or when a house that eight crew were living in was burgled by dickheads who were looking for a life, or when one of the action vehicles that we had just started featuring in the film was stolen by another dickhead who was also looking for a life, or when I almost burned the house down with myself, the first assistant director and the DOP inside (we were spared by the smoke alarm waking us all).

In the end you have to laugh or you go mad. Said laughing then helped me prepare for the weather turning ugly, which we had been lucky with up until Whitley Bay. I always knew the roughest weather would be at this location, being December and freezing cold, but I wasn't quite prepared for the shocking wind, horizontal rain, falling (and exploding) lights... you have to take it on the chin or you may as well walk into the sea. I have a particularly fond memory of Jane Hooks (producer) chasing a huge polythene sheet across the entire breadth of a car park, attempting to stamp on it with every other stride, before it swirled into the sea.

As with my UKFC/Film4 short Soft, I very much enjoyed working with an extremely dedicated crew who weren't scared of getting their hands dirty. I often found myself wondering where I would be if any one of them started grumbling and infected the others because, quite simply, the film wouldn't have been made without the fighting spirit that the shoot was blessed with by all involved. No amount of rain or wind stopped them from getting stuck in and there were always random moments where I would realise all of this and feel terribly humbled, something that eventually proved to be quite distracting when time was a killer.

Shooting at actual dogging locations where people pootered in hoping for some action, only to be confronted by a film crew (and on one occasion a police car), kept things amusing when conditions became too rubbish. I was very lucky to have found yet another DOP (Rob Hardy) who is not only a hell of a talent, but great to work with. He has similar sensibilities to me and always respected the fact that I judged each shot with a view to how it might function in the edit. I could give him the briefest of direction and disappear with the actors, safe in the knowledge that I'd be happy with what he had set up. Alternatively, he might disagree with my ideas and come up with something better. Either way, the balance worked a treat. He was also very fast when speed was so crucial as we chased the sinking daylight every day.

It was a new experience working to such a fierce schedule, which was down to the skills of first assistant director Matt Baker. Despite his experience and SAS-like determination to stick to the plan of attack, he managed to accommodate every change or new idea that I came up with as the shoot progressed.

The incredible amount of graft that went on in the production office was all too easy to forget when you were out sulking in the gloom, deciding how to best compromise the shot you wanted. How we managed to get some of the kit we needed, on the teeny budget and at such short notice, is beyond me. I'm more than used to doing a lot for a little with low or no budgets, but when you're on a project of this scale you don't realise what an achievement has been made until you hear other crews boasting about what they did (and for how little) on other films - before discovering that their budget was three times yours.

These accomplishments are testament to the skills of Jane Hooks, Louise Killin and other unsung heroes in the bleak indoors. It was all a particularly trying experience for Jane and myself, in terms of our long-standing working relationship, as we basically took a budgetary step backwards after Cinema Extreme. Suddenly we were having to pull all manner of tricks again where time or money simply wasn't available.

The biggest and most unexpected thing to cope with, without doubt, was the sheer emotion when it was time to pack up and leave Newcastle. A lot of things in life are (sadly) only learned in retrospect, and it was like being hit by a sledgehammer when it came time to pack my bags and return home. I don't think I ever felt as alone as I did on that day.

So, I'm now in the thick of editing and fully expecting the biggest challenges delivering a final cut that everyone is happy with. I don't really do the traditional process of rough assembly editing. If anything, I prefer to over-edit to begin with, to get as many ideas as possible into the cut, however incoherent or abrasive the flow may be, before stripping it back down to the nuts-and-bolts.

Vertigo Films (the production company) have been exceptional, leaving me to edit unsupervised, as promised. Their whole thing when they first approached me with the project was that they didn't want me to change anything about my working process, and so far they have been true to their word. Nobody is more aware than me of the possibility that I might eventually lose perspective on the edit by doing it myself but, for now, things are ticking along nicely.

Dogging: A Love Story will be released in UK cinemas later in 2007.

Simon Ellis | Published 15 Mar 07

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