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“A lot of our most interesting projects shine a light on an area of human life that’s been hiding in plain sight – in this case, that extremely vivid and fulfilling relationships come out of working in care. It seems obvious after you've told the story, but it takes a script like this to show it.”

Tom Tagholm, Various Films director and former Channel 4 network creative director, describes Adult Social Care UK’s ‘Made With Care’ as a “big, important bit of work.” And it is – it represents the Department of Health and Social Care’s mission to attract a new generation of carers into a business they may have never considered was for them. A business that needs them to provide absolutely essential support to hundreds of thousands across the UK.

The script, sent to Tom by MullenLowe senior producer, Vanessa Hunt, centred around the relationships that emerge between a carer and recipient. “I loved the balance of the writing,” says Tom, “because it wasn’t about altruism necessarily, although there are altruistic elements to the work. Nor is it really about creating sugary friendships. It's practicality and robustness, but also thoughtfulness and kindness.” 

Major government campaigns of this type can often feel set in stone long before shooting, coming with rigorous testing and a laser-focused eye on budget; but MullenLowe’s creative director Dave Cornmell, creatives Luke Gray and David Fleetwood, and producer Vanessa loosened the reins, understanding that this would be a project that keeps evolving well into production. 

Tom calls it ‘letting it breathe.’ “You could be tempted to start writing and engineering and inventing scenarios based on what you think you know, but in the end, the work is so much stronger when you go out and let the world come to you. You approach it in a curious way, let it breathe, and find the truth inside all those human beings.” So Tom got out on the road the day after the job was confirmed to kick off the most influential stage of this film’s making: the research.

Together with producer Gwilym Gwillim and researcher Debbie Impett, Tom helmed a different approach to production, which the trio had fine tuned while at Channel 4. “I have a set of principles that I stick to, one of which is to go out and not try to work too early. Put the cameras away and be aware of the life around you, rather than trying to capture a series of shots.” 

Ditching creature comforts, the team jumped from train to train, transit van to transit van, on a giant road trip unearthing human stories from the far north down to the south coast.

“There was an immense amount of travel, an immense amount of cheap hotels, an immense amount of biscuits to find the people who made their way into the finished film, all of whom I'm really proud of and all of whom had never really been in front of a camera before.”

The team got a feel for the human landscape through sharing stories over tea, quietly making observations and connections. It was a reciprocal process, with all parties opening up to foster a feeling of trust and mutual interest, and forge relationships that were real; one young man, with whom they bonded over music, even had them in tears for an hour thanks to his guitar playing. “Then you become familiar with a vibration in the air that you tap into quietly as you approach the shooting.”

When it came time to get the cameras out, total spontaneity was the recipe for success. “We probably didn't know that half of it was going to happen in the way it did, but it happened because we were all having a good time together,” Tom comments. As with more traditional storyboarded work, Tom looked for equal and opposite energies, framing, landscapes, movement, and stillness, intuitively finding that structure of the build and reveal as he shot.

Working with DOP Ole Bratt Birkeland, Tom favoured how these stories were told on hands, an open book, or a pair of feet. “I’m fascinated by how human stories manifest themselves in the places that you might not have storyboarded.” Rather than manufacturing overtly emotional situations, some of the most interesting human interaction came during practical processes – including cutting an onion for the first time. “It might seem small, but it was a seismic, fundamental gear change in a life.”

The crew’s attentiveness to the importance of this moment is a testament to the genuine respect for one another fostered on set. That Tom’s subjects felt comfortable and safe as a result is clear: “A care recipient encouraged me to keep shooting. She could see that I was concerned for her – she’d had a hard day, she was tired – and she said, ‘Go ahead, keep going.’ I won't say which beat it was, but it made the final film for that. It moved me a great deal.”

With footage captured, Tom collaborated with Stitch Editing’s Tim Hardy to find the flow and colliding energies between all these apparently disparate vignettes, cutting to Blur’s ‘Good Song’. “There was a tenderness and a heart and a sense of forward movement in that music that killed all of us,” says Tom, explaining the song choice. “The collision of music and image, the way that one can unlock the other, is a bit of alchemy. We'll always be thankful to Blur and to the people at MullenLowe that made it happen on this project.”

Specifically, Luke made it happen – once the team had all fallen in love with the track, he wrote a letter to Blur and was actually given the go ahead to use it. “That’s just one case in point of a creative going beyond the call of duty. We shot for the moon because we were fighting for work that we care about,” Tom reflects.

Asked about the most rewarding part of the whole process, Tom replies emphatically, “Every bloody bit of it was the most rewarding part. Completely honestly, I love this. It's fulfilling for me, and it's fulfilling for us as a production company."

“I think it's completely okay to say that a project that might have appeared to be extremely serious and worthy was also just fun to make. We met human beings that are now friends. I think you feel that in the texture of the filmmaking.”