Creatives Grab Coffee - Growing with Purpose (ft. Chocolate Films) #94

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

In this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, Mark Currie from Chocolate Films (London, England) shares his journey of building a uniquely impactful video production business through strategic growth and meaningful community engagement. Mark discusses how Chocolate Films scaled organically over two decades, balancing commercial projects with creative social initiatives like filmmaking workshops and their ambitious “1000 Londoners” project. He offers insights on overcoming growth hurdles, managing a team of over twenty full-time employees across multiple locations, and developing effective internal systems that enhance productivity. Discover how Mark’s commitment to community-driven storytelling and fostering a positive team culture has become integral to Chocolate Films’ sustained success and influence.TIMESTAMPS00:00 - Episode Introduction and Guest Welcome02:28 - Guest Bio: Mark Currie from Chocolate Films02:38 - Background on Chocolate Films and its beginnings in London, England03:35 - Expanding the business to Glasgow and strategic location benefits05:54 - Insights on gradually opening and growing a second office10:45 - Advantages of a second location and genuine local presence14:50 - Company history and early stages of Chocolate Films16:29 - Growth through various studio spaces and overcoming early challenges19:14 - Adapting strategically to major industry shifts and new technologies25:03 - Building a large in-house team and navigating growth stages30:57 - “1000 Londoners”: A creative community storytelling initiative36:55 - Running impactful filmmaking workshops for schools and community groups39:09 - Systems and processes for managing a large team and diverse projects41:19 - Workshop outreach and community engagement strategies43:53 - Lessons learned from scaling to 20+ employees48:36 - Developing effective communication and management systems57:48 - Preventing bureaucracy and maintaining agility as the team grows01:01:03 - Importance of fostering an open, communicative company culture01:05:35 - Using passion projects to drive team creativity and client interest01:11:56 - Effective sales strategies and relationship-building for growth01:16:47 - The value of personal connections and client communication01:16:47 - Origin of the name “Chocolate Films”01:18:45 - Final thoughts and conclusionSPONSORS:Canada Film Equipment: www.CanadaFilmEquipment.comAudio Process: www.Audioprocess.ca🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8BdbkMQITFZmDJ0bo9🍏 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/creatives-grab-coffee/id1530864140 🎞️Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comTo learn more about the show, visit: https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

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And now, let's begin the show. Welcome everybody to Creatives Grab Coffee. Today's guest is from London, England, Mark Curie from Chocolate Films. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks ever so much, excited to be on here. So before we kind of like jump right into the meat of it, give us a little quick backstory

in who you are and your company. So yeah, I'm Mark. I run a company called Chocolate Films in London. We have been around since 2001. So yeah, we've been doing this digital video thing for quite a while now. We make content for a whole load of different clients, do an awful lot of museums and galleries

and especially being based in London, that's a really, really large part of what we do. We also do a lot of charity work, we work with corporates, work in education, work in healthcare and we've got two bases. We've got our main HQ and studio, which is in central London and then we also have a second base up in Glasgow, which is a little bit smaller, but it focuses on local content from up there. So what made you kind of like open up a specific location in

Glasgow rather than just simply sticking to one city and just moving back and forth? Was it like a certain client that kind of brought you there or certain type of work or? It was, it was a mix. I mean, very practically. I mean, I'm sure you find this as well. Your clients will be in Toronto, I'm sure. And if somebody's in Montreal, they're probably gonna hire somebody in Montreal. So having a second base opens you up to a second market.

Also, the UK is not that big a country. So Glasgow is probably about an eight hour drive from here. Manchester, Liverpool, the kind of whole Northern Belt in England, that's about a four hour drive from here and a four hour drive from here, Manchester, Liverpool, the whole Northern Belt in England, that's about a four hour drive from here and a four hour drive from Glasgow. So what it basically means is we've now split the country in half, any shoots that happen above Manchester, the Glasgow team do, any shoots that happen below Manchester, our team do.

And it just cuts down on overnight, it cuts down on travel, it cuts down on all that kind of stuff. And we've got an amazing team up in Glasgow. I was born in Glasgow and I love the city, my family is from up there so I have a real fondness for it. And the thing that really also inspired it was one of our team was in London and he wanted to move back to Glasgow so he literally quit and, the other director, and I sat down with him and said, look, we've got this idea.

Let's see if we can get this working. And that was seven or eight years ago, I think. And we've got a lovely team of four up there now who produce fantastic work for all sorts of people. Nice. So it's basically like it was a strategic move to be able to service all of the UK, not just specifically Glasgow or Scotland necessarily.

I didn't realize, I forget that England is, or the UK is that small in terms of country. Cause like for you, a five hour drive lands you in, or sorry, eight hour drive lands you in Scotland. For us, it lands us in Quebec. You know, it's not, for us, it doesn't get us too far. You know what I mean? We are a pretty small country, but, um, I mean, eight hours is, it's still a pretty long way to travel.

It just basically kind of balances everything up. I mean, I think one day it'll be really lovely to have that office in Manchester as well, because what that would essentially do is mean that within two hours away from the vast majority of the population. So everywhere we could do without an overnight, which I think would be great. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of opening up a secondary location? Organic, everything we've ever done

when we've grown has always been organic. So Ross moved to Glasgow and he got a desk in an office of a graphic design company there. And that was going really, really well until we started actually building up the work there. And then we hired a second person, and then we moved to our own office, a really small office, in a brilliant place called Glasgow Collective. And we've just gradually grown, and then we kind of put a third person,

now we've put a fourth person, and we're in a bigger premises now So I mean I think everything that we've done over the years has been Slow and kind of deliberate growth It's not it's not ever been kind of one of those things where we've suddenly hired ten people and Set up a whole new base with a big kind of glossy building. It's you know, it's bit by bit So and and it works that way. It always works that way. Because it means that the roots are stronger, I think. So when you opened that location,

did you have already like certain clients that your, that team would be able to start servicing and working with, or was it kind of like you moved it there and then it basically started working as its own operation to try to gain new business? A bit of both. We had two or three things to do up there, but what we kind of imagined from the outset

is that while we build it, then Ross can be cutting footage from London. So essentially if we shoot footage, then he can keep working on that while we develop the business up there. So we had two or three clients and Fairly soon after we after we got up there and we started promoting ourselves up there then suddenly we've got a bunch more clients and what it's also really useful for and that the end also suddenly become a big selling point for us as well because

If a company comes to us and says we need some case studies shot around the country That's a really big deal if you can kind of say, well, okay, well, the London team will do this. The Scottish team with perfectly replicated kit will do this. And it cuts down on the cost and it makes everything work better. So pretty soon we got more of those kinds of jobs as well. And then after a while things, you know, kind of big events kind of forced us to grow like COP26. We did quite a lot with COP26 which happened in Glasgow and that kind of helped us grow a little bit more as well. And again bit by bit it just can keep growing there as well. There's also different opportunities so like in London, you know, BBC is all over the country but there's

BBC Scotland up there which we do some things for. And there's, yeah, there is all over the country, but there's BBC Scotland up there, which we do some things for. And there's, yeah, there's all sorts of different opportunities up there, different funding routes and different kinds of work as well. And now having done, having opened one office and you now know what the whole process is like there, are there any other like maybe countries or locations that you think you, I mean, you did mention Manchester and some other locations within the UK, but is there anywhere outside of UK that you're thinking about or have plans

and works to kind of like expand to? I think we're going to stick to the UK for the time being. We do have a fantastic network of producers in different European countries as well who don't work for us full-time but we've had long relationships with so in Lisbon we do in Rome we do in Berlin we do and in New York we don't know so basically we've got we've got producers in lots of different countries who we can kind of phone up and say look we've got a shoot happening in Lisbon Can we organize this which is always really really helpful?

I don't think we're planning on any kind of permanent basis, but can never say never I think the UK I mean, you know helping to kind of shrink the distances within the UK is always a really productive thing and it's it's also the other thing is Working in you know, if we go up to shoot in Glasgow, it's always kind of element of being a bit of a tourist. But if you've got if you've got a Glasgow native crew, people who live there, who were born there, whose lives there, they know the city, they know how it works. They they understand the city.

So you generally kind of there's always a much better shorthand. This it's much easier way to shoot. Like the same as if we were to shoot in Toronto, that'd be silly. It'd be far better for us to kind of phone you guys up and say, you know your way around the city, you know how the city works. It's always better to be local, I think. One thing I'm curious about is that normally when people open up a secondary location, it tends to be like from what I've seen and like a much busier market or like much more competitive market. Glasgow from what I know is kind of like it's not that big, especially compared to London.

So I'm just wondering like why you guys chose to expand to there versus like maybe just opening up that Manchester office a bit earlier. Glasgow is pretty big. It's also a really, really exciting city. I mean, I probably get my figures wrong here. There's a couple of million people in Glasgow. It's a really, it's, I mean, it's Scotland's biggest city. You know, Edinburgh is the capital, but Glasgow is still Scotland's biggest city. And it's also a fantastically exciting city as well. There's so much new stuff going on there. There's so much creative stuff going on there.

There's a real energy there as well. I mean, Manchester would be fantastic. But again, if we had Manchester, then practically we're still a long way from Scotland. Having those two kind of poles at the different ends of the country really make it work for us and I think we have one person in Macclesfield which is just outside Manchester so that's that's our kind of tiny Manchester office but it's it's not really there just yet but I think having those three would really do the job and then after that then there's a couple of other locations that would be great but we we do kind of feel that

kind of having local people in the big cities is just a fantastic benefit for a company. So I guess it was almost like you saw that like maybe, was it maybe also that the fact that there weren't a lot of London based companies in Glasgow that presented itself as a sort of opportunity for you to kind of also target that market? Yeah, I mean I know that there are a couple of London based companies that kind of have have something on their website to say that they're in Glasgow

and Manchester and stuff but in reality they it's kind of maybe they're for a bit of SEO or maybe it's one person or somebody working from home. Yeah I mean it's it's a massive advantage to have massive advantage to have that whole office up there. It helps the company, it helps the business. And also, it works really, really well having the two bases because footage moves so easily nowadays. There's a real load-bearing side to it as well. They get really busy up there. We can take on all their edits down here and if they need extra people, then a couple of people can easily just get on a train and be up there in five hours.

It's not really a big deal. And likewise, I mean, and a map from Glasgow is coming down to spend a week with us down here next week. Because when we get busy down here and we need an extra person, it's just great to have one of the team from Glasgow. And it builds that bond much tighter. It's all about people really, isn't it?

And being in close proximity to a lot of your clients is definitely a big, uh, a big benefit, right? And it's, it makes it more valuable to work with you rather than a company that says that they're everywhere, but are really just like a pure remote office. Um, it, I, I know like one example of like one company, for example, in the US that markets itself is like such a massive, like expanded business that's in every single city in the US and even some cities in Canada. But in reality, they're just doing

like the Google algorithm saying like, yeah, we're a Toronto based company, when in reality, we don't even know where their actual home base is, which I think is in LA. And it almost seems a little disingenuous in a way when you kind of say it like that. If you could say that you could service these places,

you have remote teams that you can work with, sure. But it's to say that you're in these cities, but not physically there, it's a little hard for clients to sometimes wonder. It's like, okay, who are we really working with? Are they here or are they not here and also clients see through that straight away as well yeah I mean you know they're not stupid you know if a client from from Glasgow phones is up

and we clearly have no idea of our way around the city and we can't say yes sure somebody will pop out to do a site visit tomorrow. It's clearly not true, but we're really there. We've got lovely office with four people and they're all talented and they're all really local as well. So it really, I think it just really helps. It's just really good. I wanna kind of talk a little bit about your company's history.

Can you tell us about, I mean, you've been operating since 2001, it's almost quarter of a century. Can you tell us about maybe the different eras that your company went through? Yeah, I mean, the first three years were part-time. We set up as a company, but we had proper jobs. Not that it's not a proper job, but you know what I mean?

We had jobs and we made films in our spare time. And we were finding that it was taking a long time to make anything. And then we packed in our jobs and I think we had enough. We knew we could survive for about three months and the aim was just to keep going as long as we could and we're still going. So the very early days it was very much working from home, two of us working from home, trying to make it work

and then eventually after probably about a year or so of that then we got a very very small office and people started to come in and start working with us. Our first office was the size of, I mean it was the size of a cupboard, it was in a community of art studios and it had a dirt floor and it was the walls were so paper thin and we moved in and we were really excited it was like our first our first office and and nobody had told us that all the other studios around us were jewelers in fact no I think they had told us but it never clicked that jewelers might be noisy because you know I just imagined yeah that's true yeah whenever it got to

exhibition time literally there will be people above us to either side of us and below us hammering metal. I mean literally hammering metal from morning to evening and we just couldn't think. So then we moved to another studio in a different kind of set of art studios and that was kind of cool for about a year and then we finally kind of moved into an office very near us right now just on the south bank of the Thames and we've been kind of pottering around from space to space since then. I mean the space we're in now is is awesome it's taken us about we started talking to our local authority back in 2011 about being part of this new development called Nine Elms, which I don't know if you know.

On the south bank of the Thames, there was about two kilometres, which was completely undeveloped, which was crazy. It was opposite some of the most expensive properties in London, but it was just literally two kilometres of literally two kilometers of kind of urban wastelands essentially. It was kind of post-industrial, kind of not an awful lot going on there, lots of derelict buildings and things and the whole thing has been has built up now and we're right in the middle of that now but it's taken us, yeah it took us a good decade to kind of to sort out the space to get the studio built to move in and we eventually moved in about two years ago and I don't think we're planning to move in and we eventually moved in about two years ago. And I don't think we're planning to move from this particular space for London for a good long time. But yeah, it's so it's been quite a quite journey. We haven't moved very far from our first dirt floor office,

which is literally about half a mile away from where we are now. But yeah, the office. Do you still hear the jewelers? I was just about to ask the hammer sounds in the back. Yeah, that was it was kind of nightmarish. And yeah, the other woman next door, she's about five foot two and really slight. And she went in in the morning and she turned the radio on and just just sat down. There was literally somebody banging a cymbal all day long, literally all day long.

And yeah, it's just too much. But I should just play that sound effect River side every now and then Talking talking just do it slowly in the background. I mean you've learned to work through it. He'll be able to work through it So that's that's like kind of like your office location I'm more interested in like, because you've been operating since 2001, I mean, you saw different transitionary periods happen in the industry. Like I mean, even on the equipment side, going from like high barriers to entry to, you know, the SLR revolution to social media age.

Like I'm just curious how that affected your business as you guys were entering those periods. Like did you guys have any major shifts, any pivots? Like what did you guys learn? Yeah, every time, every time we kind of have to pivot. I think we are always fairly calm about when everybody says everything is going to change. We always sit back a little bit and think we'll just give it a little bit. I mean, because there have been things like 3D.

When 3D was suddenly the big thing and everybody started buying 3D cameras. It was really expensive. We just sat there and thought, when our first clients asks us for a 3d film that's when we'll think about we knew other companies who were going out and and Buying 3d cameras. Well, do you mean 360 cameras or no? I oh 15 years. Oh 15 years ago. Okay, that's before us. Oh, that was a thing. All right I know it was a thing and and companies were setting up We're kind of selling cameras with like a couple of lenses next to each other I mean it was it was a thing

You know when 3d films suddenly got really big in the cinema then suddenly the whole kind of idea of having kind of 3d films was was like a thing and and I literally know people who went out and bought the cameras I mean 360 yeah There were those kind of like big kind of 360 balls and things that people kind of got really into again We kind of held back a little bit and thought, well, you know, if this catches on, then we'll go with it,

but we might kind of hire for a little bit, but we're not really gonna go with that. We fell into the 360 trip. Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did it in 2016 when it was just starting to get really hot and it was everywhere. But there was also the era

where the technology would keep getting outdated every three months. So I don't know the technology wasn't even there. It wasn't there. But anything we did do would like not be practical after three months because essentially at the time what we invested in was this 360 rig of four GoPro fours at the time. And it has so many limitations. It was six. It wasn't four, it was six. Oh yeah, sorry, six, six GoPros. And, Karel, it wasn't that the technology was updating every three months, like it just was not there. Like it never got to there ever.

Because at the time, I remember the software they had for it, it just didn't work. Like, because that tech was really meant just for, um, 360 photos for real estate. And they were trying to convert it for video and it just, it wasn't there. It took like a couple of years before they came up with a simpler solution for it. But even that, like you could look at, I don't know how it is now, but I remember like you could look and you could see the seams of the lines on the, on the thing and it was too drastic. And I mean, even the platforms where it would be viewed on

weren't set up for it. Like there was YouTube that was pushing it, but it's like, from what I remember at the time, like they weren't even allowing like the full resolution you would need to be able to view it properly. And if you're not viewing it at the highest possible resolution, then it's like, it looks bad. It looks all pixelated, right?

And there was also the factor of like internet speed. If the person didn't have the right internet speed, the video just wouldn't load. So that was a disaster. And I wish I'm still bitter about the money we spent on that. I still think about that from time to time. The one benefit from it was that we essentially were able to make some good connections with some new clients where we may have not directly one connection 60 one video yeah but that one connection did bring us quite a bit of business for a few years and good portfolio work but the thing I've learned

through that whole experience whenever a new technology is coming through the best way to assess if you should jump right into it is what is the potential mass distribution or audience consumption for it, right? Because if you can't determine that, then what are you investing in? Because yeah, as Dario mentioned very, very well, like the internet was a big thing. Not everyone had like gigabytes upon gigabytes of data to just use on the go. So they would have to watch it when they're at home, at a certain

setting with a certain heads is like too many steps for the regular audience member, right? And that's probably what the same situation was with 3D at the time. It's like, yeah, maybe in the movie theaters, but who wants to get that like a spear going past them like right here in their desk at home? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I mean, I think the way just we always figure is that there's always a lag as well. And if you can, if you can stay on top of what's happening and watch what's happening and then hire as and when you need it. But then the moment you realize actually that this is something people are really looking for then didn't buy into it then and get everybody trained up in it then.

But I mean, realistically, there have been a lot of these different things over the years. But yeah, I mean, you're right. We started off with the first couple of short films made were on 16 mil. We shot on DigiBeta, Beatr SP, Mini DV, DV cam, XD cam. I mean we've done the whole shebang and yeah I mean I do sound like a very old man when I can complain to editors here and say oh my god you don't realize what it's like, you don't have to hire a deck like this just to get the footage in and kind of layer gen locks and all this kind of stuff just to kind of get the footage into your computer and you can edit it for I mean you know all this kind all this kind of stuff. It's simplified in a lot of different ways. It's simplified in all the good ways because it's made the creativity much easier and it's gotten much more complicated in the good ways because you can go so much further with everything now. So, I mean, it's always really exciting to see, but yeah, we just hold off until we're sure that we really want to move into that particular thing. What about with your employees? Because I think when you're we did the pre

interview, you mentioned that you have like, quite a few, like, I think you're one of part of like the outlier in terms of like, video production companies that have I was at the I'm seeing here 2021 people, right? As part of your team? Actually, I think it's up to 22. We had somebody start yesterday. No, Monday. Yeah, we had somebody start on Monday as well. Yeah, I think we're up to about 22 now. Yeah, that's all about the model of the company as well.

We're set up slightly differently to a lot of production companies. So, from the very outset, when Rachel was the other director, when we came up with the idea for the company, we wanted it to be a little bit different from the very outset. And the idea was we wanted to make really great looking content, but we also wanted the company to be integrated with the community and to do projects

that have social value. So from the very first year, we ran one video making workshop for a group of young people in Wandsworth Borough, where we are now, and we also made one film, and that was our entire income for the year. And as we've grown, we've kept the two sides of the company growing all at the same time.

So that when people come to work with us, they know that we're a social enterprise. They know that our profits go to support this big outreach project that we have now, which I think on an average year we work with about 3,000 children and young people in everything from animation workshops to documentary workshops to short film workshops to all sorts of different things and the same people who shoot our films are in general the same people who run those workshops. So basically what we do is we have, we do have, we have quite a large and versatile crew and they're all fantastic people

and one day they will be filming for, I don't know, Sony World Photography Awards, for example. And then the next day they may be running a workshop for a primary school. And then the next day they might be filming you know, a corporate event. And then the following day they might be working with special educational needs groups. So basically, it's the way the company works, it's the way it works best.

And it's never really occurred to us to work on a freelancer basis because realistically, we need these people with this set of skills. And obviously, if we were to do everything on a purely kind of commercial point of view, then we'd end up having to pay people far less for the workshops because we have to charge an absolute fraction of what we charge for shoots for the workshops.

And we'd be able to pay people far more for the productions. But having a full-time team means we pay people sustainably and given a sustain, everybody has sustainable jobs, but it just means that they balance their work. So one week they might be doing a really high production value thing, and then the following week they might be working on a kids animation workshop in a primary school. It's a bit different to most production companies, I'll give you that, but that's also one of the reasons why we do kind of retain this large crew, that we like it. You know, it's nice to have people around.

It's nice to have people around and to give people opportunities to grow kind of in a kind of sustainable fashion, I think. It's a very different approach, what you're doing compared to a lot of other companies. Like it's probably the first, you're probably the first company that I've heard that does such a heavily involved

like kind of community aspect where you go and teach all these workshops. And the one benefit also for you with that is that you're also doing a lot of outreach and community and brand awareness for chocolate films, which is huge, and you're getting huge social value as a result of it. So it's not like you're, it's not like they're these employees that you have are also just doing, like, you know, just some stuff on the arm at the same time.

You're actually doing good kind of like public relations and you're building up the brand in the community. So more and more people will know about you. Your name will be passed around more in such a positive light too, because of all these different social initiatives that you have. So that's one big advantage of what you're doing.

Yeah, and it's just what we do. I mean, I think it does kind of have a business advantage, but I don't think we've ever really kind of considered it like that. It's not really the kind of reason we did it in the first instance or we continue doing it. Every now and again, we suddenly kind of think, well, actually, this is the reason we got that job is actually because of this. But what's the funny thing is that sometimes it goes very much in and out of fashion as to whether companies with

social value are good to work with. We've had times when we've kind of almost we've kept going with the social work, not social work, but you know the workshops. But we haven't really promoted it because sometimes certain environments people aren't that particularly interested. Funny enough right now people are very very interested which is fantastic because you know we've got the impact reports from the last 20 odd years to kind of show how consistently and how committed we are to doing this kind of project. Um, but it's also, it's exciting. It's, and it keeps life really varied and, um, means we meet all sorts

of people and, um, and it's fun. It's good. Yeah. It must definitely make you feel good because you're doing something positive for other people. Right. So there's the positive feedback loop from that, right? Yeah, I mean, it's just good.

It's just what we do. And it's just what we enjoy doing as well. And speaking of projects, like it's not just the only initiative that you guys do. Like you have so many different types of projects that you're doing aside from your main business and client work one Really fantastic project you do is something called a thousand Londoners and I can you just give a little quick Overview of what that is for our audience so a thousand Londoners is a project we started in 2014 and We actually launched it in 2014 and we actually launched it in 2014.

We came up with the idea a couple of years before that and kind of in the aftermath of the riots of 2011. And we basically thought, well, London is this amazing city, but often it's misrepresented. And in films, you can kind of get the Hugh Grant London or you might kind of get the Guy Ritchie London, but is any of that really kind of the real the real city and we kind of came up with we started talking about is there a way that we can kind of almost do a portrait of a city in a film and then we

realised that that wasn't going to really cut it and then what we thought would actually be really interesting was to make a portrait but like almost like a mosaic like portrait where all these different pieces come together to make one big portrait of of the city. And we ended up researching a little bit about how many people you need to talk to to kind of get a random sample for a city of this size. And it turns out that if you want to kind of take the temperature politically of, or get an opinion about any issue in a city, then you need to talk to about a thousand people.

So we thought, well, why don't we go out there and make a thousand short films about a thousand different Londoners? Which of course raised raised its own questions. It's like, well, what is a Londoner? Is there a Londoner? Somebody was born here. And we thought, well, actually, no,

that's not really the kind of story we want to tell. We just want to tell the story of the people who live and work here, the people who kind of feel that they belong to the city. So we set it up from the beginning that people self-identify as Londoners. And we started making them and we started making them. We did a big launch at BAFTA back in 2014.

And then we started making them about once a week. And after a while, then we started thinking, well, actually there's really something in this. We're getting loads of kind of great positive feedback. And we started putting together seasons of them. So, and then we started putting those in tiny independent cinemas. So like 30, 40 seat cinemas at the beginning.

And then that kind of grew. So after a while, then we'd do like a season probably every three or four months. And then we'd do cinema screenings in, and the cinema screenings got bigger and bigger. So we started doing like, you know, maybe four or five big cinema screenings. And then often the cinema screenings and then often the cinema

screenings would kind of get quite busy and we'd have these amazing Q&As afterwards because of course if you do a season about, gosh that's just, I don't know, food in London for example and you've got somebody who is running a Aleppo kitchen, who is therefore a refugee from Syria, who is running a Syrian food kitchen, and then you've also got somebody who's doing super exclusive events for celebrities and stuff, but making food for them. You suddenly get these two people together at a screening, you've got a fantastic conversation there from two people who under normal circumstances probably wouldn't kind of get to hang out with each other. And this kind of kept growing.

And the final, the biggest one we did was we did a season called Goodbye Europe, which was around the time that the UK left the European Union. And we made one film about one person from every single country in the European Union and we based some of them Latvia remember Latvia was very hard to find some of them were kind of tricky to find and It was this wonderful screen lasted about I don't know it's about an hour and a half long But it was this kind of like voyage through all these different languages all these different people in the city and the Q&A is after that were absolutely kind of awesome. And then funnily enough about three weeks before lockdown hit and kind of COVID-19 back in 2020 we had our biggest of all which was we did a kind of

retrospective screening of the project where we had three different screenings in one evening at Tate Modern, which I don't know if you know, it's like the big kind of modern art gallery in London. And then about three weeks after that, everything shut down and we couldn't put a camera in front of anybody. So we've then, obviously we had to do a lot to kind of,

we built a studio and did all that kind of stuff, but now we've started collecting the footage again and we're beginning to start making the Londoners again and we've rebuilt the website and the whole thing is coming out so we're at 386 at the moment and yeah 387, 88, 89 have been shot already we're about to shoot 390 so it's all happening again. It's really exciting and the world has kind of changed. We basically had to take a five-year break in it and the world's changed an awful lot in those five years in so many different ways. So it's kind of exciting to be coming back to it and we're even doing a couple of films where we're catching up with a couple of the former Londoners to kind of

see where they are now as well. So it's a big old project but that's also it's the same way that the heart of the company is about being part of the community as well as doing commercial work and that's always been part of it as well because we've done workshops with all sorts of different people to encourage them to make films for Thousand Londoners. We've done workshops in homeless shelters, we've done workshops with groups of asylum seekers, we've done workshops with all sorts of different groups to kind of build this big, big kind of epic picture of a city. But as well as filming with multi-squillionaires in the city and all sorts of people.

But it's a great project. It's an exciting project. And it always it always pushes us off in new directions and allows us to do different things. So it's kind of cool. It's fun. What are your what are your workshops consist of? Like what do you just teach them how to like film or is it more than that? Everything. And we we do stop motion workshops, for little ones often it's stop motion workshops because it's so accessible, it's so easy to get into and everybody has a brilliant time

and then they watch their characters come to life on screen at the end. We do longer documentary workshops which can be incisive in all sorts of different ways. We also do things like make a film in a day workshops. So where often a group will come in either to our studio or we'll go to them. And working about groups of eight in a really structured and quite full on day, they'll play games to come up with a story, they'll storyboard their story, then they'll go out and shoot it and then they'll cut it and then at the end of the day we have a screening where they can see their films up on the big screen at the end of the day and they usually end up making probably about 60 second films.

But sometimes we also do workshops that are very specifically for a particular group. So you know it can be, you, we've done workshops that have been prescribed by the National Health Service in the past with people with anxiety. You know, we've done all sorts of things. We have groups of people on the autism spectrum who we work with. We've got homeschool groups.

We've got all sorts of different groups we work with. And it's always nice to meet new people, isn't it? It's always nice to... How often do you guys do them? All the time. All the time. So I mean, there are times of the year where it's busier, but there are times of the year where, you know, where it's a little bit quieter.

But I mean, I'd say at the moment, we've probably got, you know, three or four a week. Three or four a week? Wow. How do you have the time with with the workshops, the thousand Londoners and like all the client work that you have? I know you have a team of 22 people but with the amount of like the amount of work that goes into one even like short documentary film that you probably do for one thousand Londoners or like three to four workshops a week? Like how do you manage all that time? Like what's your process for that? I mean to be honest we've got a really good team. I mean our producers they run the workshops in the same way as they run the films, they're just super, super organized.

If there's any ways that we can tighten up processes, either on the production side or on the workshop sides, we will. So, you know, some of the workshops are very structured, very kind of timetabled, because we've been doing this for a very long time. So we kind of, we have a workshop that we can deliver for a day rather than reinventing it every single time. I think we just have to stay super, super organized.

And fortunately we've got a really great team. So in the same way as the filmmakers will teach each other how the workshops run and they'll support each other, lots of processes just to kind of take friction out of the system. I mean, one of the big things we did probably about four or five years ago was we made sure that everybody had, well all our kind of shooter editors had their own kit, their own cloned kit. So that everybody's, I mean I think of it like packing your own parachute, which I mean so you know so basically if you've got

your kit and you know that a microphone's not working then you'll come to me or you'll kind of say look can I just get this extra bit to fix the microphone you won't leave it in the bag. You know that if you packed your bag this evening and you're gonna be the one using it tomorrow morning, then You'll know how it is. So we don't really do very many shared kits, which is a massive kind of advantage so things like that Just taking any bit of friction out of the system. I think is It's kind of the rule the rule of thumb you know if you need to come duplicate bits of kids or if you need to kind of replicate things then then come

so be it just There's anything that's gonna cause a glitch then Just try and get rid of it as quickly as you can Do and do people come to you for these workshops? Are you outreaching to get people to come to them? People will come to us Okay, so you guys will just publish it and they'll just join the event and then show up? Oh no, it happens in all sorts of different ways. So schools will get us in, youth clubs will get us in.

We'll also advertise workshops in the studio so that people can just come join in and come to us. Sometimes, somebody else will be kind of like running a festival and they'll kind of ask us to come in so that people at the festival can come join in. Well, basically every way and anyway, you know, as you find with production companies, every organization is different. Every school, every youth club, every charity is different. So, you know, we have to kind of align with the way they do things really. Do you do any ongoing workshops, like say, like with one of the several particular schools, do you have something where you do a workshop with them every month or every week or how do you,

do you have any of those types of relationships? Yeah, we've got schools we, it's often we go back to every year. We don't really come to Yeah, we've got schools we often we go back to every year. We don't really kind of do kind of going back every week or every month because often for schools it's kind of like, it's almost like a bit of a treat day or it's something that's very specifically linked to curriculum. So some people doing film studies or media studies sometimes it's kind of very linked to their curriculum. So we'll get us in in that way. But we do make our own films as well. We don't just do workshops in a thousand places. Don't worry about that. We do make an awful lot of films as well. So it's so

but the whole thing is holistic. It all has to link in together and everything has to kind of like link tightly together and it's the way it all comes together and works really. and link tightly together. And it's the way it all comes together and works really. I wanna explore a bit, again, getting to 22 plus employees. Because again, it's almost like you guys, you know how like in the Fermi paradox, there's those extinction barriers that you gotta go through? Like I find that a lot of companies

will be kind of like, Kirill and I, where it's like, I think the majority of people we've had on the podcast are like single owners or partner owners. And then the next level after that is like getting to around five to six employees. Then anything 10 plus is like an outlier. I'm just curious, how did you guys grow to become one of these companies like Was it a gradual process?

What kind of pushed you guys to this current level? No, I mean, you're absolutely right. There are stages and each time you hit a stage, then you have to kind of reinvent the company. And sometimes that's not so comfortable and you have to rethink things quite a lot. Basically when we started off there was two of us and then and we're married as well so just in case, just in case you didn't know, so we're married as well and we were kind of quite happy being just the two of us for a little while. And then when Rachel was pregnant with our daughter, quite quickly she was a little unwell. So she couldn't come to work anymore. She couldn't go and shoot.

So suddenly I was kind of on my own. And after a couple of months of this, I was literally like, look, we just need to hire somebody. And then by the time Rachel came back, there was four of us. So basically when she came back, then when she came back after maternity, then suddenly there was, it was a company of five people.

So that's how we got over the first barrier. So yeah, if you want to grow, then Dario become pregnant somehow magically. I think I'll have Carol become pregnant. So I think that that did give us the push because I said, and you're right, it's difficult because of course the first person you hire, you're increasing, if there's two of you, you're increasing your entire workforce by 50%. Now, we're 22 people, if I suddenly said tomorrow,

I'm gonna make it 33 people, that would be mad. So that first one is really, really difficult. That's the most difficult one to do. So basically what we just kind of figured was, so long as we could cover her costs, Anna was the first member of the team, so long as we can cover her costs and as long as she means it means that I can sleep a little bit more then suddenly that's

going to be okay you know so we didn't try to kind of we didn't hire her with some big idea of of her generating a large amount of income it's just literally like let's let's just keep the company going let's keep it good. I think the other thing you realise as soon as you hire your first person is that founders work in slightly different ways to a first member of staff because, I mean, I remember projects that me and Rachel did when it was just the two of us where, you know, we work 16-hour days, 18-hour days and the moment you hire somebody, you very quickly realize actually that's no good,

that you can't ask people to do that. So, suddenly it wasn't just one person we needed, it was two or three people we needed. So that was the kind of first level. I think there was another surge where we kind of grew from five to 10, I think that was another surge where we kind of grew from five to 10. I can't, I think that was probably, I'm trying to remember when that was. Um, and 10 was quite a comfortable number.

Getting over 10 was the one that required us to reinvent lots of systems, um, about, you know, resourcing with kit, about managing time, about finding ways to stop us having to come talk to people all the... that's the wrong way of saying it, not talk to people all the time, but allowing people to be independent to kind of find out the information that they need about things coming up because you can't have that same kind of one-to-one relationship with everybody all the time when you can get over about 12 people in my experience.

So what we tried to do, and it took us a couple of years to work out the right systems, but to find systems where you know what kit you want to use, then just look on this platform and you'll find out what kit you're taking out today. If there's maintenance needs to be done, drop a note in there and then it will be sorted. So all these kind of things where you don't need to have a conversation with somebody, you don't need to kind of say, oh, can I take the gimbal out today or whatever it is, just look on and say, oh yeah, it's available, I'll just check to see if I can get it. And so just automating as much of those I'll just check to see if I can get it and so it just automating as much of those

Things as possible enabled us to grow again there. I Don't know how you get above 22. I'm not sure desperately want to right now Yeah, you're getting there you're getting there systems Systems that are great when this when there's two people are not so great when there's five systems that great when there's five and not So great when there's ten systems are not so great when there's five. Systems that are great when there's five are not so great when there's 10. Systems that are great when they're 10, you know, when there's 20, they just break, they just break under the weight.

So, you know, we just have to keep reinventing quite a lot. And communication is a good one. Sorry, Carol, so the systems would break at certain numbers, but not at others. Yeah. So is it because you needed like man, like people to manage the people? Is that because you were, you're finding that as a need? There was a bit of that, but it's also, I don't know if it's, I don't know if I can

kind of express it correctly. There's probably people who've written books on all of this stuff. It's just the kind of the proximity that you can have to people. So, I mean, again, one of the things that was difficult for ages was allocating kit. You know, we had, we had like this, we had like a Sony kit, we had a Canon kit, we loved having all the different bits of kit.

The moment you got like four or five people sharing that many kits, it was an absolute disaster because you're doing a shoot, you're shooting a Sony one day, the next week you've got a Canon, you haven't got a Sony because somebody else has taken the Sony, all that kind of stuff gets really, really confusing. So then suddenly realizing that, you know,

at that point you've got to actually rationalize what you do, you've got to get a little bit more organized, almost like with the kind of fleet of kids. So things like that, getting good IT systems set up because you don't want somebody leaning over all the time kind of asking about this and asking about that. It's far easier for them just to look on it. So it's all that kind of stuff of trying to make sure

that the organization systems are there so that everybody can actually be creative on top of it rather than spending their entire time worrying about logistics and, you know, and come fiddly annoying things because there's no way any of us do it. None of us do it to kind of just to fill in spreadsheets or whatever do we mean. But why did you say it works at like I might have misheard but did you say it works at like five people but it doesn't at ten is that what you're saying or the systems you have at five don't work when you get to ten oh okay I misunderstood okay sorry I was pretty unclear but yeah I mean if there's

five people that's almost like a little family you know you're talking to each other all the time once it gets to ten you just can't do that because it's just too much noise and nobody will ever get anything done right Right, right. I misunderstood. You mentioned like it once you get to that certain number of like 10 or 15 people, a lot of the communication has to change like in the business, like you said, because if you were to take a 30 minute call with each person in a 10 person team, that's, that's five, six hours of your day immediately just gone if you were trying to do it all in one day, right? So I like how you pointed out that a lot of logistical conversations that you might have

when it's just like a team of under five, finding systems to kind of get rid of those after 10 people is so key. And like it got me thinking about like how much time could be spent just in like, as you said, just asking like, Hey, is it possible to use this on this day? Right? Like the amount of time that would take for you to also answer that question, you have to go double check something and then go get back to them. Like that's all time that can be used, as you said, to focus on creative stuff. And I think that's a very key thing to be able to free up time to do

so many of these different initiatives and did you find that when you were starting to as you were growing and you were developing these new communication systems or or logistical approaches did you find that it got easier and easier as it kind of went as well because you got so accustomed to finding new ways to to solve these issues? Yes, but I'm also not saying that they all worked. We've had systems that we've tried to bring in that have been absolute disasters in the past as well. So, you know, but I think that... What was one that didn't work? I'm curious. The one that was awful, we had... we basically realized that we needed some way of managing what kit's going to be where at any time and we got a system in which was the best one we could

find at the time and I think maybe it was that there wasn't the right one available at the time. But we ended up getting a kind of warehousing system which was a system which was it was it was very non-intuitive and every kit was listed by all the parts so basically that wasn't just like you can just kind of say you know so-and-so bag it was like it would list every single thing within the bag and then you had to check every single thing in and check everything the single thing out and it was just really slow and it was really clunky and non-intuitive.

And what I tend to find is that if there's a system that people just don't end up using, then it's probably the wrong system. It doesn't mean that you don't need the system, it just means that it's the wrong one. And that one we kind of persisted with for about, probably about a year or so. And no matter how many times we reminded people,

look, can you check things in when you get back and check things out when you go people just wouldn't do it because if you know you get back from a shoot the last thing you want to do is sit on some kind of funny system clicking boxes for about 10 minutes it's just it's no fun so um so we end up getting rid of that and doing a whole load more research and now we've got a really lovely kind of really kind of responsive system that works for us and helps us manage where people are and where kit is and and Kind of book things out in advance and can know what know what how it's how it's all working And that's really responsive and people use it all the time and they refer to it all the time

So that basically means that it's working So the first one identified that basically means that it's working. So the first one identified that the need was there, it just wasn't the right solution. So, but I think it's that thing of always trying to find those new things all the time and keep everything moving forward all the time. You know, the name of the system you're using currently? Yeah, it's Resource Guru. Resource Guru. I'm a fan. But I think if there's two people, you probably don't need it just yet. But we actually can talk to each other.

He's checking for later. But no, I'm good. If I get an I'm Google Keep note, I'll check it five years down the line. But no, I mean, we find we find it works really really well for us And also sometimes you get a system and you don't use all of it So it's kind of way of pulling back from things like that But that's one system that it took us a bit of trial and error But now we know that it really works for us

However, I don't know if it will still work for us if if we do grow by another 50% We might need to find something a little bit more Buying new kits for every single team member that you bring in, you know, it doesn't get a little pricey over time It really does it really does however There is Yeah, it certainly does get pricey. course it does there's no way around it it's an investment though right it is in the team and and also when you replace

bits you don't have to replace the entire kit you know so long as the lenses still fit then you can keep the lenses and replace the back end and then you know I mean so it's a commitment but what that does do is it just means that everybody can act independently, you know, and it just keeps it gives everybody kind of makes a really much corner. Especially for last minute stuff, like we've had situations where some someone has gotten sick the day before a shoot or something like that, where you're then scrambling to find someone who can help replace them. And this was obviously like a big thing also during like COVID

right where we started seeing a lot of that especially and so having people that are ready to go on hand is like hey so-and-so can't make it tomorrow if you're not working on any other client projects we need you to go there to cover for them. And it's a lot faster and easier than them like going in, trying to get the kit from that person or whoever. Well, not even that, even the consistency of the equipment, right? Because if they're all shooting on cannons, for example, at least the footage is all gonna look the same

and it's not gonna look different and whatnot. The producers, when they're talking to a client, the client says, you know, will they have this with them? Everybody knows exactly what's in all the bags. So, you know, the producers don't have to kind of check with somebody Well, you know, you're gonna have one of those you can Everybody knows exactly what's in everything so that that communication just doesn't need to happen I mean again is keeping all the communication to the important stuff, which is Which is the work really, isn't it?

It's not the logistics. Getting to a company of your size, I imagine, I mean, companies, once they get past, I would say like a couple of people, like bureaucracy is probably like something you have to keep an eye on, especially at your level. How do you keep your company from getting too bogged down with processes or just things of that nature? I mean, we do have a bunch of processes.

I mean, we do. I don't mean processes, but just in terms of of like, you know bureaucracy like just too many like hoops and hurdles to to hop over You mean like people relationships Dario like no like I mean like because I mean if you talk to any anyone that's working at a company they always talk about how like it's slow and this and that so like You know coming from you know being an owner where it was just you and your wife And if you want to get something done You just don't do it. How do you make sure that?

Especially at your stage now You don't have too many things that might slow your company down I think I Think practically what we do is whenever we see that there is something that's slowing us down to try and fix it Practically what we do is whenever we see that there is something that's slowing us down we try and fix it. Or if there's something that's making people's lives not happy then we just try and fix that one thing.

And then generally if it works and it sticks then that becomes part of one of the processes. There's no, I mean, you know things like I mean, we've got things like the financial side of things. You know, we've worked quite hard with our accountants, especially even over the last year, just to try and speed up all those processes so that nobody has to sit down for days and days counting receipts or whatever. systems nowadays that if you I mean the way I can see is that usually if you can imagine what would be helpful and then you look hard enough then there's something that will do the thing that you need it to. So I think realistically what we ended up doing what we end up doing quite a lot is trying to find try to find the pressure points and then we try to do something to relieve the pressure which means we're not trying to change everything all the time, but as things kind of move forward, we suddenly notice, oh yeah, hang on, maybe it's vehicles.

That's the problem at the moment. And how we, I mean, like we had a thing where, I mean, this is a few years ago when all the cars were on petrol, where it was actually really annoying for the team because if somebody was going out and driving a lot, then they'd often have to kind of be the one paying for the petrol and then claiming it back and then and these could end up being quite large amounts of money so we ended up

finding a fuel card system so that basically all the cars had a card on it and they could just go in and they could tap that on any petrol station they go into they would tap that and it would charge it to an account and we'd pay the account at the end of the month. So nobody had to claim expenses for that, which meant that from their side it was far less annoying. And from our side, it was easier to kind of collate all the receipts at the end of the month. But that's a very, very boring kind of example.

But you know, all these little things, you know, if you notice a little thing, then you fix it and then you move on and then there'll be another thing. There's always going to be something else but it's always going to be something else but i guess i should have worded it because i was more interested in like how did you like how do you not fall into that trap like um because that that's kind of reactionary in a way like are you have you been doing any um uh have you been like do you guys like every six months just sit down and maybe ask the team about like feedback on what you guys can improve or like? because i'm assuming at the beginning you did maybe fall into those traps where

Things were like holding you guys back and then until it became a problem you guys did something about it, right? So do you guys have a process in place now? Uh to make sure you guys can avoid these issues. Yeah, we do we in place now to make sure you guys can avoid these issues? Yeah, we do. I mean, Rachel has a monthly meeting with the Glasgow team. We have post-production meetings, we have production meetings, we have meetings with the crew. And when we get everybody together, it's usually just to go out for drinks or dinner or something.

But everybody kind of knows their department much better. So it's much easier to sit down with the people who are working on post-production to talk about post-production and any processes we can improve there than sitting around with everybody, because they're the ones who are doing it all the time, and then we can feedback from there. But also, I mean, people do, I think people do contact us and talk to us about things quite well. We've got we've got some really good and forthright members of the team who will say, look, we need to have a little think about this now. And then we can work it out from there. I'm trying to think of good examples and failing miserably. It seems like you guys fostered an environment that's very open so that your employees do feel comfortable enough to come to you and say hey

Let's fix this so that at least it helps everyone right? We try to I mean we do our very best to We wanted to be a nice environment Have a good time here And we won't give it to stay as well We want people to kind of just and because basically as people, they can get to know all the processes really well. And then people can suggest things that are improvements. So I'm actually curious about that. How long has like your team kind of or like on average, how long does it? How long does a team member typically stay within the business? Is it like

five years? Do you have some that have been there since the very beginning What is that like Nobody's been here since the beginning of apart from Rachel myself And our first employee moved back to New Zealand. She was with us for about five six years We've had I think two people who've hit the decade six years. We've had I think two people who've hit the decade so Ali who then who left us a couple years ago she was here for a good decade and Ross has been here for about 10 years. We've had we've got a couple of people who about eight years some who about five six years quite a few who are three to four years

now so I mean people tend to stay for quite a while and that's really good thing. Sometimes people don't stay for it. I mean, we had somebody turn up for a day once and then go on their merry way again. Oh wow, really? It just wasn't for them. And we thought it was really nice.

We thought you had a lovely time time but you kind of phoned up the next morning and said no it's not for me and then just didn't come back so you know it's not for everybody but you know yeah. No but that makes sense like but like it sounds like from what you've described it sounds like people would want to stay and that's what I was curious about because obviously in our careers in our in industry, some people like sometimes to try different things or like move around in their career and like try different types of projects. And so some would stay for like a few years or something like that. But it sounds like you've really fostered a community environment in your business where it encourages people to stay

longer. And that's probably why you're able to have this kind of translate into all the other initiatives you do as well. Right? Yeah, I mean, we do our very best to we've had a couple of people go away for about a year and then come back, which is also really nice as well. And of course, generally, if people ask if they can come back, then nine times out of 10 ago, yeah, willingly, because I mean, because we'd like them to come back. So yeah, I mean, we try to, obviously, you know, nobody's perfect and we're all human,

but we try to build an environment that everybody's enjoying being in. What do you guys do to keep your employees, well, I guess you guys do the workshops and everything you meet like once a month. Do you guys do to keep your employees, well I guess you guys do the workshops and everything you meet like once a month. Do you guys do anything outside of that to like help your employees grow and develop? Oh gosh, I mean the funny thing was one of the early things about 1000 Londoners that we really liked was the fact that it was a free project. So I know that some companies do that passion

project thing, so if they think of a short film or whatever they go off and shoot that. But that's kind of what Thousand Londoners is, but generally what... All Thousand Londoners films have been shot in teams of one or two, most of them, I mean very, very small crews, but the best ones are always the ones where some say look I've got an idea, I want to try it out and then they've gone and tried it out. And because generally that's, that's their way, that's a brilliant way to try new things. I mean we, we do, we definitely do training when people arrive and we try to encourage people to grow and also everything's always changing all the time so people are changing and trying new projects all the time. We don't have a formal training process which is something

that we should probably look into. People do definitely grow and A Thousand Other Nights has always been one of those things where it's allowed people to grow and A Thousand Longinus has always been one of those things where it's allowed people to grow and develop. Even we've even set up an animation strand of it. We've got two animations coming out for it too which is a great way to help the animators just kind of develop and grow as well because they can try new things when you haven't got when the client is is us then we're much more open for for people to try new things and to be brave. Sometimes if a client comes to us with a very specific brief, then we're hitting

the brief. That's the goal of the job to make sure that the client's absolutely delighted. That means there may be some kind of ideas that aren't being tried out. And the funny thing about Thousand Londoners is also it means that sometimes people come to us and say, look, I really love that film. Can I have something a bit like that? Which is always fun as well. Yeah. It's a good opportunity for everyone in terms of what the potentials could be. Your team's creativity can really flourish and grow from that. It's team building. It's like figuring out your own processes sometimes on a project that isn't a client is great because then you can work out kinks without having a project suffer as well, especially when people are fairly new to the team and you can introduce them to how your whole workflow is. And like you said, once you get a creative piece, you never know who might see it and think, this could be something that we would wanna pay for as well, right?

But I think the informal approach in our industry is really good. Like obviously there are some small things that you can give formally in terms of like technical things that you can teach. But I think one of the biggest benefits is sometimes being just thrown in the deep end and being like, Hey, go shoot this. Like I found early on, anytime I was able to kind of grow or elevate my skills was because I was thrown sometimes in the deep end a little bit to force me to, to, to solve problems in ways that I hadn't thought of before.

So I think, yeah, maybe if you want to explore some formal ways, but I think the approach you're doing now is definitely working great. I mean, I kind of agree. I mean, sometimes there's, there's technical things that often need to be done. But I mean, I often think that I went to university, but there wasn't a film course. And there wasn't a drama course or anything like that but what there was was there was a brilliant I mean amazing film society where people learned from each other and I look back now and I kind of think you know I never went to film school however I was part there was a film and drama society I mean this is going back years now they were next door to each other but um but I look back on the people who were in those environments.

None of us did film degrees because there wasn't one. But Eddie Hamilton, who's just edited all the Mission Impossible films, he was there. Harry Bradbeard, who directed Fleabag and Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes too, he was there and I did a bunch of plays with him. Christopher Nolan, obviously he was there. And you know, you can't think these people, none of them, Nolan did an English degree

and all the people in his first film were all the people from university when I was there. You know, it was all, it was all basically with a bunch of Bolex cameras that people had access to and they would go out and they would Shoot films on these bolex cameras There was like you had to kind of pitch and there was like two films a year that could be made one We get free film stock and stuff like that, but it was a weird thing You know people doing biochemistry and and going off and shooting films and I look back

I mean, you know that over here, like, you know, EastEnders is the biggest TV soap opera. Executive producer of EastEnders. He was in the Drama Society with me. And there's a whole load of people from that time, none of whom were taught anything about film or TV, but have did amazing things. And I do kind of think that learning from each other thing and having a kind of positive environment is a terrific way of learning. So you learned with Chris Nolan, same class, is that what you're saying? No, no, no. I did a French degree, he did an English degree. Although saying that, I had an old VHS camera back in the day,

and my dad found it and brought it around the other day, and my brother-in-law Dave, who does need to be name-checked and everything he was at university with me and he shot some of following which was Nolan's first film and he saw this old VHS camera and said you used that a bloke called Bill used that I used that and Nolan used that and I don't think anybody else has ever used that camera so yes so I have this very old VHS camera that I can happily say one of Nolan's early films was shot in it But um, wow on eBay eBay Need like DNA testing or something wouldn't you?

Following still on on the tape So, but I do kind of I do like that and I think it's also So but I do kind of I do like that and I think it's also Forces you to kind of find it if you need to know something. It's great to go out there and find it out for yourself Isn't it? We're getting near the end, but I then get a chance to touch on this earlier I wanted to talk a little bit about like sales with you because again Again, you're one of the outlier companies out there

Because again, again, you're one of the outlier companies out there. Regards to your sales process and everything or even because I'm guessing you did all the sales for your company, right? Especially when you guys started ballooning essentially. Yeah, yeah. And yes. Oh, sorry. Like, yeah, I was just curious if you could tell us a little bit about that. Like what, how did you go about it to be able to grow so much?

Like we've spoken about your office, the team and everything, but now let's talk about like the money. Yeah. How did the stuff that makes it happen? Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing to know that the neither of us have ever worked for another production company, so Everything that we do is we've worked out but it's not like we work for somebody else and lick their processes It took us

Right, so basically so on the sales side thing Rachel is very, very good at going out and talking to people and building those relationships. So she often does that kind of, she does networking really, really well. And our very first job was because she went and found somebody who would hire us. From that, a lot of our sales came from early jobs leading to other early jobs, which was really exciting. And, you know, we do, I mean, we've worked with every big museum and gallery in London, we have worked with at some point over the

years and a lot of those do come down to some of those very early contacts we made because you meet an organisation or you get a bit of a reputation in a particular area. So much of it relied on contacts and being referred from one person to another. When it comes down to things like pricing, I think one of the things about working in the kind of art and museum world is that you're often working to a kind of tendering process, a public procurement process,

which basically means that they will literally say how much the job should cost. And then you have to kind of work back from there to make sure that you can deliver everything in a very sensible way. So often it's actually really useful, and especially in those early years where you kind of know, well, hang on, this project needs to, the maximum they will pay for this project is 10,000 pounds. So how on earth do we distribute the funds from there to make sure that everything is covered and paid for? So things like that were very, very useful. We didn't start marketing ourselves until much later.

So I think we were probably, yeah, we were probably about six or seven people when we started thinking about marketing ourselves and then probably when we got over about ten people that we started doing things like SEO and advertising and stuff like that. I mean the simple process is that our producers will build relationships with the clients and then they'll be the ones dealing with that client so when there's returning projects coming back to them, they deal with those directly.

And then Rachel and I are often the ones who deal with potential new clients. And still, I think the heart of it is that, we try to value every client equally. So sometimes we know that there's a small charity that needs a film. We will value them just as much as we'll value a big commercial client.

So basically we want to give everybody the best possible value that we can do. And so, gosh, I don't know if I've answered your question. Any specific things about sales? I mean, I think we always try to talk to people, to get them on a call as soon as possible. I think those briefs that come through where it's just like, can you send us a quote for this brief? You know, generally what they're just looking for is the lowest cost. And sometimes it's virtually impossible to work out exactly what they want because it's

better to talk through a brief with somebody to find out which bits of the brief are the important bits and which ones are actually the bits they just kind of wrote in there thinking, well, that might be a nice little extra or something. And also then once you get them onto a call, you can see if there's any added value that you can offer. I mean, I think the more personal, the more human the approach, the better really. I wanted to do a deeper dive, but unfortunately I got another meeting in five minutes that I completely forgot about. So we got to end this off pretty quick. So, well,

Kier will ask him about the name question, but we got to keep it to like a minute answer. Yeah. So just how did you come up with the name Chocolate Films? That's one thing we ask all of our guests. Rachel thinks I came up with the idea. I think she came up with the idea. Neither of us knows. It's too long ago in the past. He's a good husband.

It's always he's giving credit to the wife. It's good. It's actually been it was at a time when there were lots of kind of like edgy names of companies that we actually went for something that I think everybody likes and makes people feel warm and makes people feel kind of nice so yeah I mean how sweet so so it's kind of worked for us and I think it's memorable and I think people just like it really honestly like every time I read it it makes me a little hungry so yeah yeah there's probably something there. That's good, that's good. Have you

worked with any chocolate companies as a result or not yet? It took us 12 years but then one day we were hired to make a film about making a Georgian chocolate cake which was really fun oh, that's delicious and And then we've done we've done a bunch of other things with some fair trade chocolate chocolate companies and things But yeah, we'd love to just make films about chocolate all day long Sample the goods to right It'll be dangerous So sorry again, I wanted to explore the sales bit a bit sales conversation a bit more

But I completely forgot about this meeting guys if you want to find mark go to chocolate video production dot-co dot UK and For social media. It's at chocolate films, which I'm surprised no one took Let's get you guys got it. And also I can I also just say to you two one of the best things about what you're doing is I have I never speak to people who run other production companies and I've been listening to loads and loads of the different episodes and it's fascinating because you know I've been doing this for a quarter of a century like you said

but but you know I don't phone up, you know, the bloke who runs another production company down the road and say, let's go and sit down and chat over dinner, because people are like, you're mad, I'm not gonna do that, because you know, you're the competition. So, but it's fascinating and I find it all amazing. I find it amazing that between Canada and America

and the UK, that so many of the different experiences are actually very, very similar. Every now and again I get there are some things that completely blow my mind like you've had lots of people who want to work with outdoor clothing companies. It's never occurred to me ever in my time in my life to think I'd like to work with an outdoor clothing company but maybe I'd love it I don't know but no I think what you're doing is actually something really valuable for for this particular niche of the market It's um, it's a great thing. It's fascinating

Thank you, but you would be surprised like a lot of people are willing to talk I mean the first season we did of this show it was just Toronto focused and Almost all of them said yes with the exception of maybe one or two So like people are willing to talk. Yeah, people want to talk. People are lonely in their own bubbles. You know, that's what it is. We're all going through the same through the same problems at the end of the day, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's all the same experiences, but you know, I probably did a bit longer than some, but no, it's good. It's really good what you're doing. And please keep doing it.

Thank you. Thanks, Mark. We appreciate it. And thank you for joining us on the show and sharing your experience. Fantastic. I will be sharing it wide and sharing laps. Next time we, next time anybody asks about somebody in Toronto, you'll be our first call.

Oh, we appreciate that. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee. Please make sure to follow and engage with us on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and your favorite podcast app. Creatives Grab Coffee is created by Laps Productions, a video production company based in Toronto, Canada. Creatives Grab Coffee is also sponsored by... My name is Mehran, welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique

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