Dani Harmer VIP PEOPLE

Everyone craves greatness.

Everybody likes a winner, but success isn't a one-man show.

Order, order!

Behind every star is a team -

immensely talented, powerful in their own worlds,

invisible to us until now.

These are the stories of the stars

and the teams who strive to make them shine.

This is the world of the VIP People.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a TV comedy?

Well, you're about to find out!

We're about to take you behind the scenes with actress Dani Harmer

and the producers who brought you Tracy Beaker and Dani's House.

Dani will be working with her VIP People over the next eight weeks

to make a big hit of her new series, Dani's Castle.

She will work with the director who calls the shots,

she'll be made up for the cameras by the make-up designer,

throw some punches with the fight arranger

while the gaffer and the art department

get the set ready for filming.

Dani's agent will be on the case searching for her next role

and if it all comes together, Dani will spread her wings and fly

to the next challenge in her busy acting career.

With only a few days to go before filming starts,

Dani arrives in Northern Ireland to shoot her brand new series,

Dani's Castle.

I've just landed in Belfast City Airport.

Had a lovely flight but I did have to get up at five o'clock

so as soon as I sat down in my seat, I fell asleep

and didn't wake up until we landed,

and I was definitely meant to be reading scripts

so that's probably not good, but I had a nice sleep.

Dani will have to hit the ground running!

Not only has she not read the script

but she has yet to meet her fellow cast members!

I'm feeling really excited but I'm actually a little bit nervous

because I don't know the cast yet.

Luckily, I will see some familiar faces today

so hopefully I'll be a bit more relaxed later on.

In her new comedy series, Dani leaves her house

and heads to Northern Ireland when she inherits her very own castle.

Problem is she's got to share the place with her cousin

and a couple of other spooky inhabitants.

Dani arrives at the beautiful castle near Belfast

in the picturesque town of Killyleagh.

Dani and the entire crew will spend almost every waking minute

of their lives in this castle for the next eight weeks.

I am flicking through the scripts because I fell asleep on the plane.

We are all gathered because we are waiting to do the read through.

We're just waiting for Declan.

This is my castle. It's great. Have you seen it yet?

It's pretty cool.

Today, director Dez McCarthy

is giving the cast a tour of the castle and sets.

What we're doing is showing everyone the areas we're going to film in.

Dez's first job as director is to be sure

that everyone in the cast and crew knows exactly what's going on.

At the moment, Dez is taking us through

all the different sets we've got going on.

As you can see, it's absolutely fantastic.

Dez is the man in charge of the shoot,

and he's the first of our VIP People.

As the director of the series, he's the man with the vision.

He's got loads of TV experience and his skills are vital

as he works with the rest of the cast and the crew,

including the gaffer, make-up and the art department

to bring Dani's Castle to life.

He and Dani have worked together many times over the years

and without him, there would be no show.

The first series of Dani's House is when we first met.

Here we are now in Ireland and we've got a castle,

so we're going up in the world.

I've finally brought them back to my country.

Just move this chair around, then we can have a go at this.

My job as director is to imagine how the whole thing's going to look.

If you're reading a book, I'm sure you can imagine what you're reading.

No matter what the book is, you can visualise the scene.

If the book says, "He walks down the stairs and lifts something up,"

You can see that in your head.

We all visualise that.

Therefore that is what I do. Get a script and I'm going to shoot it.

I'm responsible for getting a performance out of the actors.

The actors need to practise what they're doing

before Dez even allows a camera in the room.

This is a major part of Dez's job,

but what are the most important qualities a good director needs to succeed?

You have to be a very good man manager.

You have to be very firm.

You have to be very dedicated.

You have to be a bit stubborn. It does help to be stubborn

because you're pushing people all the time.

You have to be full of enthusiasm and energy

and no self-doubt. You just have the confidence.

Confidence is everything if you're a director.

Ping, ping. Laugh and laugh and laugh.

See that's called proper acting.

The natural ability of the laughter was perfect.

While I've got a little break, I thought I'd be really nosy

and come into the make-up room. Sarah is doing Jordan's hair,

who plays Esme who's a ghost.

SHE SCREAMS

Just curious to see how she's going to do it.

Along with her starring role, there's no downtime for Dani.

She is busy with added responsibilities behind the scenes.

Being in my associate producer role, I just like saying it,

it's been cool. I always had an input, especially in Dani's House,

but it's just nice to be able to express my opinions

and people actually listen, which is quite nice.

The opportunity to have more input about what goes on in the show

as associate producer is giving Dani the training

to maybe someday becoming a fully-fledged producer.

I've learnt loads already and it's only about the second day,

so well chuffed.

Let's go and rehearse.

-Are you not cold?

-No.

-Are you going to be in shorts the whole time?

You're Irish, you're used to it!

It's time for the cast to assemble inside for rehearsal

with director Dez.

Rest of the day is basically one-to-ones with the cast,

running through their character. Running through the opening scenes,

how we're going to be shooting them, playing them.

Trying to make them feel relaxed so on the day, they walk on set

and everything goes very smoothly.

Guys, just do a wee line reading of the scene,

then we'll do a wee blocking.

The simplest scene in the world to start off with.

Dez and the cast set about blocking scenes on each set.

Blocking is where you stage it so Dez will tell us

where he wants us to stand and what props he wants to use.

It's much better to rehearse the scene and move the actors around.

You get a lot more into it and it becomes fun.

It should always be fun.

-In your face.

-In your face, actually.

I think it definitely helps seeing all the sets.

How you're going to work in them because the first time we came in

there was nothing so it's hard to picture where things are going to be.

Now that we've got all these things it's great

so we know where we can move about, we know what we can pick up.

It definitely makes our job easier, less stressful.

You vanish into thin air. Does that make sense?

Dez has a lot to worry about on set,

and he has his very own supporting cast

in the form of all three of his assistant directors,

or ADs as they're known in the biz.

Darren, the first AD,

is the lucky one who gets to shout everyone's favourite word!

Action!

But what exactly does a first AD do?

I'm responsible for scheduling the programme and ensuring that

whatever we schedule gets shot on time, hopefully,

so we stay within schedule and within budget

and also ensuring the flow runs as efficiently as possible

and the correct information's passed to the right people at the right time to ensure

a smooth workflow. If all that happens,

hopefully we wrap our days on time, and if it doesn't, we don't.

Helping the first AD is third AD Graham

who's constantly on his feet.

We are used as the technical management team of the set

so the first will control everything that happens

between the camera team, sound team. Getting the actors in place,

calling action, calling cut.

It's my job to back him up so anything he needs done,

I'm there to do. Also coffee runs and tea runs and stuff.

Make-up, you still happy?

Graham has put in lots of time finding the right job

to fit his skills and his interests.

For me, I started as an extra. I signed up with an extras agency

and just got little bits of random work on different TV shows.

Met the right people, started talking, asking questions.

Got to know what they did, found out which departments I actually liked,

and it went between camera, special effects, sound, editing,

all those things and I finally ended on AD work on Game Of Thrones

which has a big production in Northern Ireland. Through that,

just by pure chance I found some work, and I've loved it ever since.

Stephen, the final member of Dez's crew,

is the second assistant director.

This is top secret information.

This is everything you possibly need to know

about Dani's Castle in this one file.

My job entails organising the schedule

for cast members.

That's the actors. Taking them to and from make-up and costume

throughout the shooting dates

and basically looking after their welfare,

making sure all the actors are very happy and satisfied.

We're taking our two ghost characters

up to meet our costume designer.

They're going to try on their costumes

and see if it all fits and it all looks good on camera.

OK, guys, we're going to go in this door, please.

Jordan, who plays Esme,

one of the ghosts who lives in Dani's Castle,

is trying her costume for the first time.

Look what they made for me.

Is that the coolest costume you've ever worn?

Maryanne, the costume designer, has made the dress by hand

with loads of gorgeous detail to make it look ghostly!

He got me a costume and I want to try absolutely everything.

These outfits are all the rage in ghost fashion this season.

Does my bum look big in this?

Niall, who's playing Esme's older brother Gabe,

finds donning the costume helps put the finishing touches

to becoming his ghostly character.

When you get the costume on, that's when you finally realise.

You come alive, your character. Your character comes alive.

Definitely, the costume makes it.

I can't wait to get going in this costume.

The characters' looks aren't finished yet.

It's time to get into make-up.

Today, we're doing all the test make-up on all the main characters,

and establishing their looks for the series.

As make-up designer,

Sarah is one of Dani's key VIP People.

Using make-up wizardry, it's her job to transform every actor,

including Dani, into the characters you see on the TV screen.

Dani's make-up is very interesting because for this,

they definitely wanted to have a step up style-wise.

She's to look more grown-up, capable-looking,

and just a bit more mature.

Getting made up takes time,

so the make-up room serves as a good place for the production team

to get together and make important decisions.

Hello.

Sarah's requested a meeting

to discuss a few of the characters' looks

with series executive producer Elaine and director Dez.

What I was really concerned about

was all speaking about the Gabe character.

Oh, right, OK.

Just make him look really attractive.

-Intangible where you can get a hand through.

-Justin Bieber.

As executive producer, Elaine has a lot of input

into how the show looks and runs.

I don't think a modern girl would particularly fancy him,

whereas if he had longer, softer Johnny Depp-ish hair,

she might fancy him much more.

Elaine has known and worked with Dani for a long time!

I met Dani when she came in to audition for Tracy Beaker.

She was one of five or six finalists.

The minute she walked in, we knew she was the part.

we couldn't do better.

I've had my face done, which can only mean one thing.

I have to go to costume now, put my clothes on

and be Danified. I'm very excited. Here I go.

A visit to wardrobe can be a bit of an adventure.

Morning!

I am just having a costume fitting for a ballroom scene.

I don't know whether this dress might give that away slightly.

It's really, really heavy and uncomfortable.

We're just trying to figure out logistics of moving.

I've got a lot of running around to do after a pig in this dress.

Only on Dani's Castle can this happen.

Looking good, Dani, but time is marching on,

and the cast are rolling with the punches.

One of the VIP People showing the cast punches without the pain

is Carter, the fight arranger.

Carter has fought his way on to lots of productions,

including ones starring Dani.

It's his job to teach all the cast members stage combat techniques

and to help Dez the director and his camera crew

film scenes safely in which characters have to fight or fall.

The fight arranger will come into a television programme

or a film or a theatre show and look at staging violence safely.

You're going to aim short, you're going to aim past here

and just like that. A little bit higher for me.

He'll make sure we all know what we're doing and we feel comfortable

and that we don't hurt ourselves,

because that's the last thing we want.

One of the things I was doing there

was teaching them how to punch for camera as well.

Camera on the hook can be all the way around here.

Look at it anywhere here.

With an uppercut, the camera's really got to be here

because the further you go off, the more air you can see.

You ready?

And that can sell.

We showed them to make a nap sound.

-Try a nap on your leg.

-On my leg?

-Try it.

A nap being when you fake a hit sound with your hand or your body.

Sorry, just hit your mic.

Don't punch each other in the face. See how that works.

It's only in showbiz that there could be any practical use

of such unusual skills!

I'm just off a horror film where I was mostly killing zombies.

I killed 63, in fact.

Can you kill a zombie? I'm not sure but you know what I mean.

That's a whole different show, Carter!

So that's the show rehearsed with director Dez,

the cast have learned to safely hit each other

under Carter's supervision, Sarah's make-up and the characters' costumes

have been perfected, but the crew isn't ready to roll camera just yet.

Still to come, it's a battle to get the sets finished on time.

-And Dani's agent's got some good news.

-# Come dancing! #

Before cameras can roll, Dez and the cast have to vacate the castle

so the sets can be readied and completed

for filming day number one.

We've got three days until we start shooting.

I kind of think we're almost there, actually.

Looking around some of the rooms of the castle is a little bit scary

because they're not quite finished yet.

The next VIP People are the Dani's Castle art department.

Jason, Nigel and Mike are the art department

who work closely with Dez the director.

They hire, borrow or make every thing on set.

Jason is the man in charge of the overall look of the castle.

Production design is basically realising the space

that the story exists in,

so with Dani's Castle it would be creating the environment

that Dani and the characters live in.

Today I started work at six.

It's now 7.20 in the evening.

I most likely won't finish until 8.30, nine tonight.

Right at this moment, it's a bit tense but were getting through it.

Time is ticking away, and the art department will spend the weekend

making the finishing touches.

There's a lot of finishing off.

There's a lot of things that are partway through tasks

that need finishing. The dressing,

there's putting lumps of stuff into spaces. Lots of that.

The man responsible for making some of those "lumps of stuff"

is prop-maker Mike who is working on a rather unusual prop.

I need to make a laptop for a ghost. That's what I've been asked to do.

Cos it's for a ghost, it needs to look old.

I believe 250 years old.

We've had to hide it in a box to cover the outside of it.

We're going to cover the outside in clockwork just to give it

an old treasury kind of feel, I guess.

On the inside, we'll open up, we're going to cover the keyboard

and make it look like old scrolls, old parchments.

It will still function as a fully working laptop

but it'll look like it's from the past.

To be a prop-maker, you need to be able to think on your feet,

problem solve and find out where they hide the biscuits at teatime.

That's the key one there.

With the beginning of the shoot looming,

what's the worst that could happen?

The first week, on the very first day of Dani's House,

one of the leading actors came down with appendicitis.

That's pretty hard to beat that for a worst day, worst first week,

so I really hope that nothing even remotely that bad happens.

We're working with a fantastic bunch of people

so nothing will go wrong and it will be perfect,

and if something does go wrong, we deal with it.

What we're trying to do now is deal with everything we know about,

so we'll be ready for the things we don't know about.

Dampening everyone's expectations is the changeable weather.

I can't open it!

Electricity and water are never a good combination

and on this production there's a lot of both.

These go really well when the weather's brilliant.

As soon as it starts raining, not only have you got the problem

of trying to do what you're doing, you've then got the problem

of trying to keep the rain out of everything electrical.

Amongst our VIP People is Hayden the Gaffer,

or head of lighting.

Hayden works closely with the cameraman and Dez

to arrange and position the lights throughout the castle,

so he's a busy boy.

Our busy period is literally between the filming.

Take this up to the library set.

Our days are sprinkled with these high bursts of energy

and then other periods when the cameras are rolling,

we're just sitting around doing nothing.

We're thinking about what's coming up ahead.

If you look up here, we can't fire this up

because of the pouring rain at the moment.

You're always beholden to the weather

and we have to wait an hour until it clears before we can start

so it has a knock-on effect that we'll be working over the weekend,

probably until late Sunday night and then we shoot first thing Monday morning.

Beneath this calm exterior, someone's having kittens

but were not saving lives here, just having a bit of fun

and we love doing what we do, so I love it.

I love being out in the rain, secretly.

Doing what I do is a skill and it's a trade.

In my instance, I trained as an electrician

but I also went to college as well.

I got a bit more information about what it is the other departments do,

the creative side.

Not all of our VIP People are on set being creative.

Dani's in Kent to meet with her agent.

Hello, darling!

-I'm good, how are you?

-Very well, thank you.

-How are rehearsals going?

-Really, really good, thank you.

Stuart Piper is Dani's agent and one of Dani's vital VIP People.

Stuart needs to be looking ahead for Dani,

reading scripts and finding opportunities

she hasn't got the time to look for,

while she focuses on her current acting jobs.

Dani needs Stuart to advise her

and make sure she's always got a job to go to.

Morning.

Our work involves suggesting clients for projects

and then dealing with problems that may arise

when they're working on those projects.

Generally, we're just here for whatever the actor needs.

Stuart has experienced first-hand how challenging it is to be a working actor.

I came as a performer and I acted as a child,

first of all as a child on CBBC and then film and TV,

and then when I became an adult,

I decided to change course and I became an agent.

Dani is someone who's been a star of children's television

for a very long time and she grew up on screen

which is amazing and it's probably why her audience love her so much.

They grew up with her. The only thing is

a lot of those people who grew up with her still think of her

as that child. What we're doing at the moment is establishing her

as an adult actress.

It's so different to anything you've done before.

It's just it'd be really good for me just to play other characters

and something a bit more grown-up.

You know what I mean, just spread my wings and fly.

-Lovely to see you.

-And you.

Dani's diary seems well looked after but back to the job in hand!

It's Monday, the first day of filming,

and the weather is not very Irish. The sun is out

and all is calm at the castle...for now!

This is where Hayden is going to be living during the shoot.

He seems to have built himself a little tent there.

That campervan, I've had her 13 years now,

and she's still going strong

so she's my little companion, if you like.

She makes me feel safe and at home. Not only have I not filmed

in a place like this before but I'm staying in it.

I get to watch the sunsets, I get to look at the beauty of the castle.

It reminds you why you're doing the job

other than just physically doing it.

You get a chance to actually enjoy the environment you're in.

Such a lovely, sunny day to start filming,

surely it must be a good omen for the production.

Everyone is on hand. Dez is with his camera crew,

Sarah has make-up ready,

ADs, producers, Dani and cast are all waiting to go back to work.

But apparently the weather's a little too good.

The sunshine here's killing us.

We're not going to be able to shoot for continuity reasons.

Work will be picked up on another day.

Let's go as quick as we can, please.

Because scenes are filmed out of sequence,

you can't have one shot in a scene in direct sunlight

and the next shot in cloud cover because it would just look weird!

So, its First AD Darren's job to get the crew moving inside

to set up for the next scene in today's schedule, and fast!

The opening scenes of the show will have to be filmed another day.

Instead, they'll move on to scenes that they can shoot indoors,

away from the sun.

When we change scenes because we have to unexpectedly,

it takes quite a while to get all the equipment from outside

back inside, but these guys move really fast

so it shouldn't be too much longer.

And action.

The cameras are rolling and our first scenes are in the can,

s they say in showbiz.

Prop-maker Mike is on set with his finished product!

His Ghost Book is about to make its first appearance on set.

Mike will find out if this delicate work of art

will stand up a gruelling day in front of the camera.

Jordan seems to like it!

It's well cool.

I'm on the Ghostly-Book.

In the world of Dani's Castle, Ghostly-Book

is the ghost world's equivalent of Facebook.

These are your friends, are they?

Evil, Knievel, extra evil.

Oh, a friend request!

Cut there, thank you.

It's survived its first day!

Still in one piece, it's all good. And it's working.

With the kinks worked out and everyone settled in,

it's full steam ahead for eight jam-packed weeks of filming.

Action!

Cut!

Absolutely fantastic day, I'm very tired.

Bye!

A good day of filming.

With the project nearing completion,

Stuart is on the case to see where Dani will be reporting to work next.

Dani, it's Stu calling.

We've had some really exciting news.

Dani found out yesterday.

She's been offered a place in this year's Strictly Come Dancing.

I have just found out that I'm going to be doing Strictly Come Dancing!

Which I'm very excited about because I've wanted to do it for years,

mainly to wear the pretty dresses and to do the wicked dance routines

and I'm so excited, I cannot wait.

It'll give the parts of the Strictly audience who don't know Dani as well

a chance to get to know her better.

I think that will improve her chances of getting bigger and better

screen work as an adult actress.

I do think it's a life and career-changing opportunity for her.

It's the final day of filming on Dani's Castle.

There's only one thing left to do!

Cut!

Well done, everybody, that's a wrap!

We've just finished the last scene of Dani's Castle.

It's been great, it's been hard, hard work,

but we've had a great time.

Lots of tears, lots of comedy, lots of humour,

lots of very wet weather in Ireland.

We've got a brilliant show.

The VIP People have done it.

They're packing up and going home for a well-deserved rest.

And Dani is away to the next chapter in her career.

Let's get out of the way so we're not in everyone's derigging way.

Helped by two months of hard work and the expertise of director Dez,

make-up artist Sarah, the art department,

Carter the fight arranger, gaffer Hayden,

and the entire cast, Dani has not only starred in the show

but has also succeeded in her additional role

as associate producer.

-Goodbye!

-Bye!

Run, quick, run!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd