Our School 2

Ahead of the second series of CBBC's fly-on-the-wall documentary series Our School, we find out a little bit more about the trials and tribulations of filming the pupils in a secondary school for a year and how the hard work paid off.

So – where do you start when it comes to making a fixed rig series in a secondary school?

We’ve all seen One Born Every Minute, 24 Hours in A&E, and various other fly-on-the-wall documentaries where fixed rigs are used to capture the majority of the content.

For the epic 15-part production that is Our School 2 we had 24 remote control cameras fixed in place around the school.

Luckily TwoFour Productions come with a huge amount of expertise from making the successful Educating... brand for Channel 4. We don’t have big budgets at CBBC and we are telling a rather different story.

We make this programme in order to show Year 6 students that everything will be OK when they make the move to ‘big school’.

We also wanted to empower the Year 7s that we worked with – they’re the little ones in their new school, and through their involvement in Our School, they grew in confidence. It’s the students who are at the centre of this series, not the teachers.

For this series we worked with a school in the Castle Vale area of Birmingham. We immediately fell in love with Greenwood Academy and the head teacher, Mr French, was hugely supportive of the project.

It’s a smaller school than Conyers which featured in the first series, which was an advantage in terms of filming and there is a real sense of community across the school from the moment you step inside. For the first series, we filmed the Conyers pupils from September through to December so this time we thought we’d do something different.

We ‘embedded’ two producers in with the Year 7s for the first term with no fixed cameras. The producer/directors did some shooting but were primarily there to get to know everyone and to work out which storylines to follow. Just as importantly they were also there for the parents, teachers and students alike to ask any questions or air any misgivings. There were a few, there always are, but as everyone came to understand our aim for the series, they soon came on board.

The fixed rig was installed in the winter half term. We set up 24 cameras in three classrooms, two canteens, a ‘pastoral’ space, and various corridors and exterior entrance areas.Despite making 15 episodes, we used the rig for just three weeks – it’s the most expensive part of the process. A very tall order!

The entire team was really prepared. They knew who they were following and why. Four streams were recorded at any one time during a day’s filming and they were being logged as they went along. We also had roaming cameras to pick up certain events where we knew there were no fixed rigs.

There were people from the production team all over the school swapping mics from one student to another at a moment’s notice, all working off an enormously complex schedule.

Across those three weeks there were 30 people involved from TwoFour Productions – all working flat out. The ‘gallery’ was a porta-cabin hidden out of sight and the children’s interviews were done in a small room in the school building.

Those three weeks were the most intense of the entire production as 25% of the series needed to be shot using the fixed rig. During this time the story meetings went on well into the night.

Filming continued until July, culminating in the end of term talent show – which forms most of episode 15 and is a viewing must; but do have a hanky handy!

All of the staff and key children that featured in each episode watched the footage with their families and the students really enjoyed their Our School 2 experience.

They’re a feisty, eloquent and very funny bunch who ooze enthusiasm and get up to some great stuff across the series so please do make the time to get to know them.

Kez Margrie is Executive Producer of CBBC independents

• Our School 2 launches on CBBC at 5pm on 5 January 2016.