The making of the making of Grande Designs.
📍 Beta Coffee – 76 Devonshire St, Surry Hills
Who? This post is mostly for the creatives – but also for the fans of my two episode series Grande Designs. We go into the creative process behind the series. It’s a little bit geeky but might be for you!
Episode 1
🔗 Link to Episode 1 (or scroll to the bottom of the page)
If you’ve ever planned to document a live event, you will know that you can only plan so much because unfolding events have a habit of unravelling plans – especially when they’re carefully made ones. As a documentarian, there are largely two choices you can make: plan and be ready to abandon said plan or; don’t plan.
At least this is what I’ve learned from my experience.
When I pinged Chris asking if he would be ok with me rocking up to 76 Devonshire St and doing some behind the scenes footage: that was the entire plan. Complete, new and wholly shaped – a gilded egg on now a straw nest of retrospective metaphor.
I had only the vaguest notion about how everything would come together when I turned up on Saturday 19 July and recorded the +80 clips that were to later become the first episode of Grande. The idea of series was some 24 hours away and at that present moment I was just wandering around filming whatever appeared in front of me.
While that may seem simple enough (and it was) the difficulty with this approach is knowing when to be recording and when not to be. I filmed everything on my phone: storage and battery were precious resources! I constantly needed to manage both when on site.
I’m no spring chicken though when it comes to covering live events. I’d say I’m more a summer chook*. That is to say that I relied a lot on instinct and my experience as a documentary photographer. Cue slow motion images of construction chaos – building materials narrowly passing by as I walk with a seemingly predetermined stride and yet with an unmeasured gaze snagged away from a scene about to unfold that my hands have framed up and hit record just before my head turns and something show-worthy takes place.
Grandmaster Shu. End scene.
It felt like that but was truly not like that. When it came time to edit, things were a hot mess.
When faced with a pile of random footage, the easiest path to glory is a voice over and a montage. The recipe is to pack the What, Who, Where and When in the first 15s of the video because chances are high that even if a viewer is hooked, they’re gone after 15s – scrolling off like a pest into aisles of flashier, more esoteric and obscure reels.
I call this – the aforementioned recipe – “front loading”. The first 15s is for spoon feeding. The viewer is spoon fed the easiest, most important, most digestible pieces of information, leaving the harder/ longer to explain gristle to those who’ve chosen to dine in.
The problem with using this approach for Beta was that Why and How was everything. Beta’s reason for being comes from Chris and Jess’s aspirations for the space. They put their literal sweat and money into it and I’d be damned if I didn’t give Why and How the air time they deserved.
Back to front loading. I never used to front load my edits. In my earlier videos on TikTok I would let the clips unfold with a cursory introduction. Considering these were +2min clips (which is like at least 1 metric eternity on TikTok), my choice to edit this way was Wild.
But ignorance is bliss.
I knew that for Beta, this was the right format: it needed to be a narrative. And it needed to hit the ground running: the content had to be both self-explanatory and recognisable.
One way is to do this is to make a reference to something that is in a community’s cultural memory or pop culture.
The UK TV series, Grand Designs was aired on the ABC – I remember watching it and finding it entertaining, insightful and memorable. It’s a series about people who embark on building their dream homes – often ambitious, first-time self builds on shoestring budgets and grossly, grossly misinformed timelines: the classic ingredients for Years of Ensuing Disasters.
The narrative arch of Grande Designs though is essentially the same as any other TV show about renovations or home building – it’s a race against the clock. And that makes good television.
Ironically, I don’t watch television. I watch the same clips over and over on Adobe Premiere.
Episode 1 of Grande Designs was an exercise in content and structure. There was a lot of information – good information – that I did not include in the final edit. Information that made the cut both informed and built curiosity..
I relied on my script to give the narrative some dynamism and I structured my shot sequence to give the viewer the feeling that they were constantly darting around scrambling and exploring the unfinished cafe.
In the spirit of Beta, Grande Designs was a series of episodic experiments.
Literally every clip was a test to see if the idea would work – from the voice over intro and theme song to the end sequence.
It was a theoretical question to which each edited sequence materialised part by part a realisation of whether it could be answered well. There was always a chance that after finishing each component that things just wouldn’t gel as a whole (as I would later find out in Episode 2).
Fun facts:
- The intro – the most important part (of anything) – was edited last.
- This wasn’t by choice – I scripted it but had no idea of what would go in it visually.
- I nearly went back to Beta to reshoot the intro but at the last minute decided to experiment with the clips I had.
Thankfully it somehow all worked. It was kind of a miracle.
Episode 2
🔗 Link to Episode 2 (or scroll to the bottom of the page)
I intended to be in front of the camera in Episode 2 (like Kevin McCould in Grand Designs UK). That’s why there’s the clip near the beginning where I’m shaking Reagan’s hand. It’s the only clip I kept where I’m on camera. I got rid of the rest.
Putting together Episode 2 was waay different from putting together Episode 1. It was more complex. There were around half a dozen “sub stories” that could have been woven together with a main story to form an episode. And these were swimming in a mess of around were over 400 clips shot over a total of 3 sessions.
Also part of the plan was to film the concluding sequence two nights before Breaking Bread so we could see the greatest change in the cafe’s development. Even when I was planning this I thought that it was nothing but a recipe for No Sleep on a Deadline and I didn’t like it. Of course I went through with it anyway because I like a challenge.
More fun facts:
- Filming Episode 2 spanned 7.5 hrs over 3 days
- The first cut was produced on 6 hrs of sleep
- In that time, the total length of the episode grew to ~8 mins before 2 mins of the ending ended up on the cutting floor
- That 2 mins of edited film = 4 hours of planning, scripting, voice over recording and assembling = 4 hours I could’ve been sleeping – tis the life of a content creator
When you’re a zombie, killing your babies isn’t so difficult.
The sections I dropped were from Tuesday evening – the last filming session. Things were still very much in progress on site.
A lot of work scheduled for Wednesday morning and though I wanted to film it, it just wasn’t possible. I had to post Wednesday evening and didn’t have time to edit.
The scene at Beta on Tuesday night wasn’t the grande change that I envisioned.
I found myself working hard to find meaningful threads in the last 121 clips that could be woven into the main edit. Ultimately three sub stories were wrought out of these clips but when I put everything together, I felt like they detracted from the main story. So I dropped them (despite spending 4 hours shaping them).
Even more fun facts:
- The only clip from Tuesday night that made it to the final edit was the ending clip where we “zoom out” of the cafe.
- I had to walk backwards across two light rail tracks to the other side of the street while keeping the cafe in the centre of the frame and not get run over, trip or bump into anyone/anything. Not easy.
- Most of the clip was usable but I had to trim a bit at the end where the cafe was out of centre.
- Unfortunately the trimmed clip was too short for the voice over – so I extended it by slowing it down by about 85%. You may have not noticed it. I reckon it gave the end sequence a subtle but dreamlike quality – don’t you? Nah? Maybe just me then.
The editorial decision to structure Episode 2 the way I did was definitely one of those “oh-kaaaay good luck with that one” ones.
Who edits a nearly 6 min video knowing full well that doing so by default makes it a hawkish proposition in The Attention Economy?
Even Instagram protested the Episode length. When I went to post, Instagram told me “bruh your video is over 3 mins. fr tho imma not recommend it – you still wanna post?” Uh yeah… of bloody course I’m gonna post – to hell with your suggestion algorithms.
Despite Instagram not being on pimp duty though we managed to get +4.6k views for Episode 2!
That means all those view counts – that’s all you guys baby! Everyone who watched until the end and everyone who barely watched more than 15s – you ain’t no algorithmic puppets – you’re all beautiful organic data generators ❤️
Calls for More – When Episode 3??
I did not expect Grande Designs to resonate the way it did. I mean yeah – I half suspected that it would find an audience because who doesn’t like Chris and Jess? And yes, the Spro Bros accepting me as a collaborator also meant a viewer boost.
Still – views, shares, likes – these are just metrics. What matters most is how the audience feels. And the realest feels is when, unprompted, people told me how much they loved watching the series and that they’ve watched it A Million times.
Also being recognised as “Oh! You’re Grande Designs!”.. it was one of those moments in life that lyrically already was Vance Joy’s Rip-Tide-lump-in-my-throat bit.
I didn’t expect this level of enjoyment and enthusiasm.
31 July – Breaking Bread. Some people asked “When Episode 3?”. The answer was: I only planned for two episodes. Beyond them, Beta Coffee is open to the public. Episode 3 is metaphorical – perhaps allegorical – it is the open-ended experience of you the patrons.
Anyway I have an idea for Episode 3 but be patient – this one will need a bit of time.
Grande Designs – Beta Coffee – Episode 1
Beta Coffee is Chris and Jess’s first cafe and it promises to be different in more ways than one but time’s running out.
Grande Designs – Beta Coffee – Episode 2
Triumphs, mishaps, jubilation and heartbreak as Jess and Chris race against the clock to get Beta built before Breaking Bread.
*A chicken that survived spring eating and has gone on to become a summer dish. Spring chicken goals I suppose.
brewmanshu 
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