Backmask; the sound of short film success

The creators behind the now multi-award-winning short film Backmask are no strangers to bringing unusual and surprising ideas to life.

From 2012, Chris Baker and Matt Fitch were two of the co-creators behind the indie comic publisher Dead Canary Comics, which released a series of graphic novels that took people on often weird, occasionally warped but always wonderful storytelling rides. 

Titles such as the Frogman trilogy, Reddin and Last Driver were beautifully realised stories that drew you into their world then slapped you round the face with their creative audacity.

Titles such as the Frogman trilogy, Reddin and Last Driver were beautifully realised stories that drew you into their world then slapped you round the face with their creative audacity. Dead Canary’s cage was finally swept out and confined to the shed in 2019 but, since then, Baker and Fitch, along with producer Charlie Woodall, have taken flight in a different medium. 

Backmask is a short film that Baker and Fitch wrote and which the trio brought to life over the course of the last few years. Released onto the festival circuit in 2024 it picked up a slew of awards, including but not limited to; Best Short Horror and Best Director at the White Rose International Film Festival, Best Director at the Birmingham Horror Film Festival, and Overall Festival Winner at the Black Country Horror Shorts Film Festival.

Above: The full version of the award-winning Backmask.

The three men are each advertising stalwarts with Baker currently Head of New Business at Park Village, Fitch a creative director at Pablo (alongside his partner and fellow Dead Canary alumni, Mark Lewis), and Woodall a Senior Producer at VML London. With a wealth of commercial filmmaking experience behind them, including The Guardian’s award-winning Three Little Pigs, which Fitch and Lewis wrote, there was no shortage of expertise, nor of ambition, but client-funded 60-second spots are a different beast to securing finance for a self-written film by debut directors. But then most things worth doing aren’t meant to be easy.

Client-funded 60-second spots are a different beast to securing finance for a self-written film by debut directors. But then most things worth doing aren’t meant to be easy.

The 18-minute short, which is premiering outside of the festival circuit here on shots, tells the story of a tortured rock star, Billy Chapman, looking for a new sound. Kicking out his manager and shutting himself off from humanity, Chapman attempts to find inspiration but, alone in his empty mansion, he unleashes a sinister force and ushers in the start of a terrible collaboration.

The film, which was shot on location at the historic Penton Park House in Hampshire, is a brilliantly chilling, quietly sinister story about the creative process and the darkness that it can sometimes release and, here, the trio discuss Backmask’s inception, the challenges they faced making it, and why a feature-length version of Backmask is next on the to-do list.

Above: The writer/directors and producer of Backmask, Chris Baker, Matt Fitch and Charlie Woodall. 

Why did you decide to make a short film?

CB: Matt and I had written and post produced a film called Bad Vibrations and it was a really fun experience, but we weren't the directors. We wanted to direct something, and I think we had reached the point where, while writing is great, we just wanted to see our work realised the way we wanted it. So, we wrote something, and the script changed two or three times, but the end result was Backmask.

MF: Chris and I have been writing together for the best part of a decade. Comics, short films for other people, screenplays for other people…  but once you've written and sold them, you kind of lose them. So, we just decided that, with the next one, we’d direct it ourselves. 

I think we had reached the point where, while writing is great, we just wanted to see our work realised the way we wanted it.

Part of why we’d given our other scripts to other people is that there’s always some doubt. I've directed a few commercials here and there, and Chris has done music videos, but we'd never done anything really narrative, and never together. A lot of people wanted evidence that we could do it. So, we decided to give them the evidence. And, of course, we needed a producer, and that's where Charlie comes in.

Above: Baker and Fitch had previously written graphic novels for their comic book imprint, Dead Canary Comics. 

CW: Matt and I worked with each other at adam&evDDB and had been on a couple of shoots and become friends. Then he ended up moving up the road from where I lived, and our daughters ended up in the same class at school, so we saw a lot more of each other. 

And Chris and I have known each other for years. We had dinner, and he said to me in passing that we should make a film. I sort of shrugged it off thinking, well, that's not going to happen. But then there was this feature script that Matt and Chris shared with me, I read it and thought it was cool. So, the seed was planted and, you know, seeds grow. 

We ended up deciding that, if we were going to make this feature, we should probably make a short first. 

We ended up deciding that, if we were going to make this feature, we should probably make a short first. That’s when they said they’d written this short. It was about two guys in a kitchen, so I thought, ‘great, we can make that. It sounds like a weekend shoot’. Then the following Monday morning they shared a revised version which was not two guys in a kitchen, but two guys in a mansion, and twice as many script pages! So, it grew exponentially, but we went on that journey.

Above: David Shields' Billy Chapman at work in his mansion. 

How did you go about raising the money for the film?

MF: Ha! Yeah, the hardest thing about film is finding the money. We’ve chosen an art form that, unfortunately, requires an army to bring it to life, otherwise a script is just a blueprint for a piece of art that will never exist. Initially we went around production companies trying to get the money or asking them if they wanted to come on board, and we got a lot of positive noises, but nothing really happened, so eventually we decided we just needed to get this done ourselves and stop waiting for other people to give us permission. 

We self-funded where we needed to and we begged, stole and borrowed for the rest.

We self-funded where we needed to and we begged, stole and borrowed for the rest. Working in advertising, each of us in different disciplines, means we've got three times the contacts, and between us we know a lot of talented people who were really supportive. And then there are the new friends who gave us their time and talent having never worked with us before, people like [DoP] Sy Turnbull and [First AD] Hollie Burton. I still don't know why they did that but I’m very grateful.

Above: The poster for the short film, which Baker describes as "Paul McCartney does The Shining".

CB: But also, if we had got all the money we wanted, I don't think it would have been any better than it is. For example, there’s not a single place in the film where it says it’s 1972. It's all down to Grace Power, the costume designer. She came onboard and took, like, a grand or something, and turned that into the whole wardrobe. And I think we got £700 back. Really, the only thing I think we would have liked more of was time.

It was simply a journey of, every day, saying, ‘right we need this’, and ‘how do we do that?’ and then we'd all run off and come up with an idea.

CW: As a producer, it's where you always start, with the budget and a schedule, and we did that. We just put a flag on a weekend and said, ‘this is when we're going to shoot the film’. And then when it came to budget, I sat down and very quickly realised that we didn't actually have any money. So, it was simply a journey of, every day, saying, ‘right we need this’, and ‘how do we do that?’ and then we'd all run off and come up with an idea. 

And it just grew until we had more or less everything that we needed in place. Then, a week out from the shoot, we lost one of the actors. It could have derailed the whole thing, but we ended up finding someone else quickly [Charlie Rix, who plays Billy Chapman’s manager, Angus], and it was out of necessity that we just pulled the trigger.

Above: Actor David Shields, who plays Billy Chapman in Backmask. 

What was the inspiration behind the story of Backmask?

CB: Matt and I, a long time ago, wrote something about a building in New York and we got quite wrapped up in the late 60s, and the magic of how music was made then, and there's this technique called back masking. You play something backwards and you hear something completely new. 

Some stories just get under your skin, don't they?

It's quite a mysterious thing and we got quite into that, and Matt had come up with this idea about a haunted recording studio. Sort of Paul McCartney does The Shining. It had always been in our minds that we were going to do something like that, and then Matt said let's just do it.

MF:  Some stories just get under your skin, don't they? We've both got music in our veins; I used to play in bands, Chris used to do music videos for bands, so it's just something we've always been into. So, merging vintage music with vintage films and vintage horror, it kind of feels like that's what we're about.

Above: Actor Charlie Rix, who plays Billy Chapman’s manager, Angus, and who stepped into the role at the last minute. 

Music and sound design are obviously an integral part of the film; how did you approach that? 

MF: Sound is so important for this film. It’s literally a character, it's a mood, and we knew it needed to be more than just some foley and a bit of music slapped on. String and Tins, Will Cohen and Adam Smyth, specifically, are people I've known for years and they won’t mind be saying they're absolute audio nerds. They really do love sound. They love playing with sound, with the kit and the machines, and I think [Backmask] appealed to their sensibilities. 

Sound is so important for this film. It’s literally a character, it's a mood, and we knew it needed to be more than just some foley and a bit of music slapped on.

There were some really weird, funny briefing sessions where Chris and I were trying to explain what we were hearing in our heads and we must have sounded crazy but somehow Will and Adam took that and made sense of it. It was very much a partnership with them.

CB: The sound didn't feel like post. It felt like we were just we were making another film all over again, to be honest. I mean, if anyone plays the film backwards, they’ll know.

Above, from left: Fitch, David Shields and Charlie Woodall. 

Apart from the financing, what was the biggest challenge you faced in making Backmask?

CB: For me, the biggest challenge was the edit. It was a scary, rollercoaster ride. But we did have an incredible editor in Phil Currie over at Stitch. In the first cut I just thought, ‘what am I doing here? What have I done with my life? What did I do with those three days?’ But, by the end of it, it was just how we envisioned it. But that, for me, was the emotional challenge. But Matt's done [edits] a million times. So, I think he was just more serene about it.

MF: Yeah, I've got no problem with ‘killing darlings’, it’s part of the process and I'm used to it thanks to my day job. Probably the biggest challenge for me was pre-production. How are we going to do this, or overcome that, without compromising the story? But even that was a baptism of fire, and we just made it happen because we had to.

I've got no problem with ‘killing darlings’, it’s part of the process and I'm used to it thanks to my day job. 

CW: Yeah, it didn't feel like we ever hit a wall where we couldn't find the door or a window to pass through. I think one hard thing was that we had to employ a lot of patience at the post stage. Just because we weren't paying for anything, but we had this film and we were dying to get it into festivals, and we were missing this festival, missing that festival. 

The hardest stage was the festival circuit, to be honest, because that was the one landscape that we weren't experienced in at all. And you hear horror stories about continual rejection, but we believed that cream rises to the top, so if the film's good, it should get awards.

Above: Baker and Fitch on location. 

CB: And we were entering into a lot of horror festivals and if you look at the landscape of horror right now, it's very much blood, guts, jump scares. And Backmask is not technically a horror film. It has dread, but it's more of a supernatural drama.

MF: It's not about gushing blood or skeletons jumping out of closets. It's about people. It's about friendship. It's about creativity and what happens when an artist goes to a dark place. It's a music-based drama that happens to go to some freaky, horrible places.

You said you made this short, in part, as evidence that you could make a feature; is that next on the list?

CW: After the edit we realised that the short needed to be a better blueprint for feature investors, and for people to understand what the hell we're talking about. Character names and locations were different to the feature, it made it slightly confusing. The guys did a bit of clever rejigging to make the feature script more aligned to the short, which was a really smart move.

You have to work really, really hard to get yourself into a position where you've actually got the finished product to sell. 

The reality is that we need to raise quite a significant amount of money [for the feature]. We had to do a proper budget, it started quite high, and it's got lower and lower based on reality. The independent film space is very challenging. You've got your big streamers and the blockbuster market, but you've lost that DVD market, so things have got a lot sparser in terms of being able to distribute your film. 

Above: Fitch/Baker picking up one of the many awards they won at the British Horror Film Festival which included winning Best Short Film, Best Cinematography, Best Music, Best Supporting Actor for Charlie Rix, and a finalist as Best Director.

You have to work really, really hard to get yourself into a position where you've actually got the finished product to sell. And you have to be able to sell it. So, yeah, it's really tricky. But even though we're going to need money on this one, I think we're taking the same approach, which is that we're going to stick a date in the calendar and we're going to shoot it then, come what may, we're just going to keep going. 

The short film has helped us because people have seen it and they want more, and they can see that it's a certain quality and we don't want to drop that quality.

If we have to push the shoot date back because we didn't get the money that we needed, then that's no skin off our nose, we've lost nothing. It worked for us on the short, and I think we have to apply what we know and what we've learned.

CB: The short film has helped us because people have seen it and they want more, and they can see that it's a certain quality and we don't want to drop that quality. We want to embellish it and go deeper and bigger. It's maintaining that can-do attitude. We don't want to make something less good than what we already made.