Building Burning Wick Productions

Around April time 2010 Nick Hayman and myself (Louisa 'Wizzi' Seaton) bumped into a chance opportunity to go along to the shoot of the Abertoir horror movie festival trailer and make a behind the scenes documentary. Having discussed, at length, the possibility of one day working together in the real world of moving image we jumped at the chance and named ourselves Burning Wick Productions.

The point of the documentary was to give the public an idea of how horror movies are made; Hopefully resulting in the creation of a budding bunch of horror movie makers to enter the festival and give a generous range of choice for the organisers to show.

http://abertoir.co.uk/

As I arrived on set with the self administered title of 'documentary director', my Canon XM1 in hand, a list of peoples names, the trailer script and absolutely no idea of what I was doing, I calmed my exterior with a false film of confidence. Pretending I directed documentaries all the time I took a deep breath. Nick set up the camera and away we went, throwing ourselves into the opportunity to learn on the job.

By the end of the day a general exchange of business cards was occurring amongst the trailer crew members and to my surprise people were approaching us. 'We are Nick and Wizzi from Burning Wick Productions but unfortunately have no cards on us right now. We are happy to take yours and will be in touch.' The words seemed to trickle professionally out of my mouth as my heart beat along with my head, thoughts such as 'Surely they know we're bullshitting, we're only students, we don't know what we're doing, and shit we should get business cards' tried to penetrate my cool surface face.

Plans for Burning Wick productions date back to my Godalming college days when Nick and I would team up and create short films and documentaries together for a laugh. Nick has always been focused on his plans to become a professional camera man/editor and I have the habit of leaping at any chance to be in the spotlight or position of creative control. Three/four years after the completion of, a less than impressive, 'day in the life of Wizzi' video to Pendulum's 'Fasten Your Seatbelt' we decided to get serious. With an understanding of the unfavorable ratio of employed to unemployed creatives in the UK we thought why not create our own jobs and begin our career climbs now.

At the time we considered Burning Wick productions to be a plan for the future, a far off dream of running our own production company. Something to strive towards once university was over. However, since 'Abertoir April' this dream has speedily morphed from the future to the present. Now it seems that rather than waiting two years for a paid or unpaid job or two we are actually faced with the task of choosing which jobs to turn down and deciding how much work we can realistically take on without jeapardising our degrees.

My summer has been packed with schedules, phone calls, meetings, producing, directing, filming, interviewing, editing, emailing, law research, legwork and thinking. To my pleasant surprise my plans for Burning Wick have already begun to materialise and now, back from my welcomed week of holiday, I, along with Nick, am on the final push to get our summer project, 'The Guilfest Documentary', finished and book the premiere before going back to uni to begin my second year.

We now have a properly set up edit suite with our post production equipment. The fabulous Canon 550D which, no matter what anyone says, you can believe shoots beautiful video, and a range of other essentials. In time our equipment will expand to include all we need/want (if that is humanly possible!) but at present we resonate in the Guerrilla film world making do with what we find and own. It's an interesting world and I love every minute of it!

Abertoir: Behind the Scenes can be found below.

Abertoir Trailer Behind The Scenes from Burning Wick on Vimeo.

Other Burning Wick productions can be found at www.vimeo.com/burningwick with our most exciting yet on the way. Check out our facebook page for the up coming premiere date which we are holding this October.
To contact me email Wizzi to: burningwickproductions@googlemail.com
We have a website on the way.