Bernie Langille Wants to Know... Who Killed Bernie Langille

Bernie Langille Wants to Know…Who Killed Bernie Langille

Produced by Peep Media, a female-owned production company based in Halifax NS, this 18 minute award-winning documentary tells an intriguing story in a unique way. As Peep Media puts it, Bernie Langille Want to Know…Who Killed Bernie Langille is “a crime story that uses historically researched, intricate miniature sets to investigate the mysterious unsolved death of a military electrician in 1968”.

In 2017, Jackie Torrens (writer/director) and Jessica Brown (producer) from Peep Media approached miniaturists Shelley Acker, Kelly Pinheiro and Iris Sutherland to create miniature sets to be used in telling the Bernie Langille story. It was an exciting new way for us to develop and showcase the possibilities of miniatures and everyone jumped on board!

Shelley (currently owner of Freedom Miniatures) and Iris are Nova Scotia based miniaturists while Kelly is from Ontario. Thanks to the wonders of digital communications, everyone was able to work together to determine the needs, the means and the results. Several sets were constructed and ultimately filmed in Halifax in the fall of 2017. The majority of the work was done in 1/12 scale but one set in particular needed to be done in a smaller scale. Kelly took on the task of building an extensive set in HO (1:87) scale – a common model railway layout scale. 

The story of the documentary takes place in 1968 and most of the locations are no longer in existence so all of the sets required research in order to create as much accuracy as possible. In addition, set construction needed to take into consideration the needs of the director and film crew – walls and ceilings needed to be removable so that filming could achieve a variety of viewpoints.

This was a project that was challenging, educational and immensely rewarding!

Director, Jackie Torrens was the recipient of the WIFT-AT Best Director 2019 Award for this documentary. And the documentary itself won Screen Nova Scotia's Best Short Film 2019 Award!!

To watch the trailer for the documentary and see images of the sets, visit Peep Media’s website here.