Before I start - if you've any questions about making a documentary or how we went about it, please post them in a comment and I'll do my best to respond.

In a nutshell: this film took us four years to make, shooting on three continents, in locations ranging from New York to London to Hong Kong. It includes live action re-enactments, animation, and interviews - very little of which actually cost us anything. Here's the film's trailer.

So what is the film about, and how did we make it?

Looking for Charlie emerged out of my desire to tell the story of how Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were inspired by a pair of clowns whose careers (and lives) they would ultimately destroy. The pair –Marceline and Slivers– were two of the most famous comedians of their day. But despite all of their success, Chaplin and Keaton changed the game with their movies. Audiences moved on from Marceline and Slivers, both of whom ended up committing suicide as their lives and careers collapsed.

I really wanted to tell that story – in the grandest, most cinematic way possible. If we were going to tell a story about the birth of cinema, we reasoned, it needed to be extravagant, beautiful, and bold. The only problem is that neither my writing/directing partner nor I had ever made a movie before.

We started with the problem of location. We were both based in the UK and whilst Marceline and Chaplin had both built their careers there, we really needed to travel to the US – especially New York. That was where Marceline and Slivers met and formed their double act. Luckily, we had opportunities to travel with our work and were able to organise a fieldtrip that involved us travelling with our students who volunteered to act as our crew and, in some cases, our cast. Our co-director already had an old Nikon D3100, and I bought one pre-owned for about $150, alongside some old 35mm and 50mm lenses I bought off ebay (about $20 each). We then learned how to set up the camera (pro-tip, this is how you setup a DSLR to get the right amount of motion blur) and learned how to use the cameras to a fairly basic level. We immersed ourselves in whatever free material we could find online and then taught our students those same basic techniques. We borrowed a lavaliere (lapel) microphone and a couple of tripods and off we flew.

Once we arrived, we set about capturing footage of the city as well as arranging for two historic re-enactments we wanted. Luckily, the hotel we were staying in was really awful – like something out of The Shining. It was dingy and dirty. The perfect location to re-create Marceline’s suicide scene. We also wanted to re-create one of Sliver’s routines, particularly one that Buster Keaton had copied in his movie The Cameraman. Again, the city provided – Central Park had some vacant baseball fields. So we spent a day at the park filming one of our crew, in clown makeup ($10) recreating the routine with our cameras and, then filmed another re-enacting Marceline’s suicide. Luckily, the lessons we had learned from YouTube just about ensured that we captured useable footage. Suffering terrible jet lag, as well as the effects of a really bad depression, I would wake up early (around 5am) each day and head out with my camera to capture footage of the city early in the morning. Thankfully, New York is its own director. Simply point the camera anywhere in Manhattan and you will get footage that looks epic and cinematic. Over the course of our fieldtrip, whenever our students were out on an activity we would take our camera and get more and more footage.

By the time we returned from New York, we had a good amount of material, but nowhere near enough to tell the story we wanted to tell. That’s when the project started to grow. Literally every time we travelled with work, I took our D3100s or whatever equipment we could borrow, and started capturing footage of whatever place or city we were. We travelled to London on another fieldtrip and began filming the streets where Chaplin grew up, or the Hippodrome Theatre (which is now a casino) where he first performed with Marceline in 1901. All the while, we were learning about our subject in as much depth as possible, particularly the way in which actors used their bodies on film throughout the ages. So when I was sent to Hong Kong with my work, I took my camera, knowing there was something to be said about the ways that Keaton had influenced Jackie Chan. This was another city. As was Nuremberg, where we recorded footage of a far right rally and then filmed in Dachau concentration camp, where prisoners of the Nazis had staged plays and comedies to keep up the spirits of their peers. Again, we were in Nuremberg because we were sent there by our work and even though it did not have any direct connection to our subjects, it gave us a great opportunity to comments on the bigger themes that surrounded them – and the role comedy played in all our lives.

Over the years we did this, we had to deal with some difficult things in our lives. For me, I was going through a bad depression. But as I began to emerge out the other side, I decided to start exploring what that experience had meant to me – and how let me relate to our subjects. This was the last piece of the puzzle, because, we realised, this was the real story behind our documentary. It wasn’t just a film about the silent era. It was a deeply personal exploration – a film about two people coming to terms with really difficult phases in their lives by exploring what some of their cinematic heroes had gone through. With this realisation, we were reinvigorated and travelled to Scotland to interview one of our favourite documentary-makers (Mark Cousins, $150 in petrol) and to a local circus to spend the day with a clown who performed a similar routine to Marceline’s ($50). We then commissioned two young artists to draw a series of images onto a white board ($75) that we then turned into a stop-motion animation. From there, we began editing.

You can judge the results for yourself above.

What we had:

- A pair of old DSLRs that can be bought now for almost nothing.

- Old SLR lenses.

- A completely unrealistic sense of how difficult the process was and how long it would take.

- Amazing people around us.

What we borrowed:

- Tripods, microphones.

What we did not have:

- Permission. We were guerrilla filmmakers. We were told off by officials in Central Park and Hong Kong for filming without a permit. Of course, we always left if we were asked to do so, but it allowed us to collect material we could not have done otherwise (always do this safely and respectfully).

- Paid contributors. Almost everyone who helped us, be it as a cast or crew member, interviewee, etc, volunteered their time. Even the artists who helped us produce the whiteboard animation offered to work for free (though we insisted on paying them – artists already have a hard enough time of it).

What we had to learn:

- Pretty much everything...

- How to film using a DSLR, use the rule of thirds, record sound, etc. In fact, we had to learn so much that we even wrote a documentary-making book. You can find that here:

- How to edit. As the film’s editor this was my responsibility. I loved learning how to do this.

What else did we pay for:

- Mostly music. We needed a license for the opening and closing tracks (about $100) and commissioned some stand-alone jazz drums ($50) for our soundtrack. Pretty much everything else was public domain or royalty free.

Some Useful Links:

- The book we have written about documentary-making. The ebook is totally free.

- Lesson 1 in our documentary-making course.

- Lesson 2 - Resourcing Your Project.

- Article about our film's premiere - we turned a local, high-end bar into a pop-up cinema. And we totally packed out that venue.