Backstage
 The Making of Much Ado About Nothing - page four
Diederick Santer is a producer for 大象传媒 Drama Series & Serials, where he produced the first three series of the hit hairdressing drama Cutting It. He has also worked as a script editor for Granada and for United Productions, where we worked on ITV series including The Last Train, Always and Everyone and the first two series of Where The Heart Is.
Here he describes the process of producing the 大象传媒 ONE updating of Much Ado About Nothing.
Filming
The shoot (in April this year) was incredibly tricky, as for cost reasons we had to do the whole thing in twenty-one days. We could have done with more time, but that's true of any TV production. We did our best to make a virtue of the speed, though, and I think that worked for the comedy. Brian had a really smart, fast crew, and there was no hanging around, enabling him and the cast to be truly spontaneous.
Although the drama is set on the South Coast around Bournemouth and Poole, almost all of it was filmed in and around London. It's a huge cost to take a film crew on the road - accommodation and transport costs soon mount up. In the end, we found that we could afford only one night away from our London base, and even then we couldn't go as far as Bournemouth - we would have lost too much shooting time.
So on the second to last day the crew drove to West Wittering near Chichester and we filmed the various sand dune scenes along the stunning beach. Then we travelled to Brighton where we had a very jolly and very long night of recreation, before our final day's filming around Brighton seafront, doubling for Bournemouth.
Despite the pressures, this was a really happy shoot, and I hope that shows on screen. If the audience experience even a tiny fraction of the fun we had developing this script and making this programme, then I'm sure they'll enjoy themselves tremendously.
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