The Dover boat reconstruction I have been working on and blogging about over the last 8 weeks is pretty special and so we get lots of film crews around. The best record will be a Time Team special on the bronze age and particularly bronze age boatbuilding. It is as always fascinating to see the team work and crafting a TV program is not dissimilar perhaps to crafting a boat. They have a big picture of where they are going with various stages that can be planned and have to be done at certain times but also they never really know just where the good footage will be and so are continually responding to the material, just as we are with our material. Anyway this is Richard starting to split a big oak log for the cameras, it was a gnarly second length and was hard work, would have been easy enough with time but when the cameras are running in your face everything gets much harder work and however much you try it’s impossible just to carry on as if they are not there.
This is a different crew interviewing Kieth the archaeologist who discovered the bronze age boat, he popped out on his lunch break to check the construction site for the A20 and an underpass and 6m down in the peat there was what he instantly recognised as a boat timber, the mechanical excavator had already taken one huge bite out of it so he was just in time. Construction stopped for the day and they ended up with 7 days to excavate and recover it.
This was the official press launch of the building project, we have 5 French film crews on site but only local BBC from the UK, our PR department are clearly not as good as the French partners.
This is Richard our team leader clearly relieved at the end of the day filming steaming a timber with Time Team
The real eye opener though was the day Tony Robinson came to film. They had to pack so much into the day and worked really hard. I am used to working with film crews where if they don,t like something you do it again and if they like it then it’s wrapped up and we move on. With Time Team it was the other way round, one of the first things we filmed was Richard and I splitting a big oak log with Tony trying to help here and there. They really liked the take so we had to do it exactly the same again 3 more times so they could film from different angles to cut it together. I had no idea where I had been standing, where I moved, what I said but it all had to be repeated. Tony was a past master at it and helped us out when we forgot, by the end of the day we had got the hang of it but it was pretty strange. Anyway here is Trevor with Tony explaining all about how the cleats work.
Graham who is filming/directing is a wondeful guy who’s first film was a documentary of a 4 month canoe trip on the MacKenzie River finishing in the Arctic. He later went back to live with and document the life of the Inuit there and is full of incredible stories. One of his more recent programs was the BBCs Around the World in 80 Faiths.
and just to show how draining filming days can be, someone snapped me at the end of the press day flaked out.
