Had a bit of fun yesterday. We caught a rib from Lymington to board a ship in the Solent to then crane an Oyster yacht off and into Hamble. A new one for us, but perfect conditions
Documentary craftmanship
Hillsborough - VeryMuchSo #Bafta
The enormity of the subject and the unfathonable burden of time families have had to endure for Hillsborough, would have been too much for many to wish to tackle as a documentary.
Simply titled "Hillsborough" is available to view on BBC iPlayer now and I urge you to do so.
It's beautifully crafted with a hugely sensitive touch that unravels the story with immense stark, heart-wrenching clarity. The lack of music and voiceover is supreme in allowing the voice of the tradgedy to be told louder and more sharply. In the realms of Searching for Sugarman (Passion Pictures) and Deep Water (Darlow Smithson) Hilllsborough is a masterclass of documentary.
A supreme, yet unwanted job, from all involved, most notably the families. Too much to endure.
Daniel Gordon, Producer Director,VeryMuch So
Andy R. Worrboys, Editor
Professor Phil Scraton, Factual Consultant
#Bafta
Very Much So in assoc. with Passion Pictures, ESPN, BBC
Sign o' the Times
Music has always been central to my life, it's always on in the car, home and as often as not whilst writing up treatments and stuff whilst working too. However, despite trying and wishing to play a few instruments, just one would have sufficed, the piano, trumpet, drums and the violin, they were not to be. My violin teacher quietly informed my mother that the violin was probably not my thing, especially as I was more keen on keeping biscuits in the handy case compartment that should really should have housed the bow resin.
Amongst an orchestration of talents, Prince was a virtuoso upon any instrument he cared to choose. Astonishingly, he played almost every instrument on all his albums, in addition to writing, producing and performing them too.
For me, I graduated to immersing myself in radio, recording the Top 40 on Sundays and listening to stations all over including RTL, and even the Police, as you could then.
Soon my friend and I pretended to have our own pirate radio station. We recorded our own radio shows on cassettes, rigged the tape player wired to an Exchange & Mart MW transmitter and strapped it up in a bag in the nearest forest.
It was only a short step from here to 1987 where I found myself in Mandela Street setting up MTV Europe and was engulfed in the immense widescreen sounds of the '80's. From Ska to Punk, to Disco to rap to progressive rock to New Age to Independent and er, Chas and Dave. The ever increasing breadth of charts in that period must have accounted for the culling of several forests in order for NME to keep up.
Prince was one of the biggest stars of that period, releasing Sign o' the Times shortly before we went to air. Despite my being a huge lover for all that was the '80's, Prince never quite did it for me. I probably wasn't cool enough, I was more into the unfashionable progressive rock.
However, many moons later Prince did a residency for one month (21 days) at the O2 and a cousin had a spare ticket. It would have been churlish and dumb not to go and I was transformed to a follower.
It was an astonishing performance by someone who was so on top of his game and in control, he was just playing about clearly having a ball and enjoying the freedom of mixing it up throughout the night and every other night. No two nights were the same, many people went to every show and remained struck by the excitement and extraordinary level of his performances at each.
There were two blow away moments, first the sheer number of hits which I had forgotten yet were deeply entrenched in my psyche. These were being teased by Prince, by playing just a few bars before he changed and went to another, then another, then another. He never liked playing old stuff, but the tease was joyous for us and clearly him too.
The second were the aftershows, the encores. The show ended stage lights off etc. then a classic reprise and the band, Prince and light show returned for another short set. But they all went off again and house lights came up, 80% of the audience left and Prince came back on again delivering another 20mins or so and it happened a further 3 times on our night, just Prince with the house lights. Each one was astonishing and pure fun.
The media had painted Prince as being a very inhuman, withdrawn and a self obsessed character. On stage, the very reverse appeared true. In each element of this show, he spoke often, and seemingly ad lib, very charming indeed.
Prince who died today, an astonishing, endlessly creative and immeasurably talented artist. He was so packed full of talent, everything he did appeared effortless.
Enjoy your life, do what you love.
Great Telegraph article by Neil McCormick: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/prince-its-hard-to-accept-well-never-see-him-on-stage-again/
Orchestral V8 pleasure
Have you ever seen any car racing as crazy as this?
This is extreme rock crawling combined with desert racing, better known to those in the know as King of the Hammers. It's a race series designed for Ultra 4 vehicles which I was over in Yukka Valley, CA for recently.
Some of the vehicles have 4 wheel steering and a suspension travel that even Bowler would be proud of, but most impressive is the raw of their 160 GM V8 engines, yes 160 of them. In a time trial line-out start, all vehicles start in a creeping procession before all hell breaks loose in an 8 hour endurance race across the desert, which allegedly, is also the Crystal Meth capital of the U.S.
The race is a true war of attrition, though it does go on a bit, a bit like Le Mans, though here you quite literally have light from classic California and shade from your RV. In a pop-up "town" that numbers in excess of 30,000, "Hammer Town" as they call it, the RV is the temporary home of choice here, as everywhere in the U.S. However, the dust that is kicked up here is immense, so this is not a place for those of you with asthma or a propensity towards ADHD for cleaning.
With that aside, come for the sonic orchestral pleasure of all those V8's, racing for 170 miles over 8 hours.
This year the series makes tracks in the New Forest, England 7 - 9th October.
http://ultra4racing.com/
Scottish Stelvio
Whilst hunting for locations, one often finds locations which whilst aren't right for the current project, can be useful for the future.
These frames I took after a chance encounter with the estate owners at the Applecross Inn, having traversed the much traveled Bealach na Baa pass. This pass is one of the highest roads in the UK and offers superb views towards the Cullin mountains and Skye.
However, it wasn't delivering what I needed so we, myself and Location Manager Sean Barclay, decamped to the pub for lunch, which was worth a trip in itself. Having ordered, we soon got chatting to some other guests who just happened to own an estate, as you do, which sounded like it may be ideal and more importantly was closer to my other locations.
That's the other devil in location finding, finding them all within relative close proximity. We soon scampered off to the estate and found the tracks you can see here.
This was an incredible find as it offered an amazing array of shots from a multitude of heights all within a fairly small landscape. It was like an off-road Stelvio.
Though not quite right for my Subaru shoot, this location is absolutely perfect for an SUV or WRX type film or a Press launch event, as the estate has extraordinary luxury accommodationwithin the main house.
Should you be interested I would be happy to share the details.
Of Snipers and Burt
One of the great privileges with a factual broadcast project is to meet and interview the pioneers of our generation, particularly in fields of such specialisation that our paths would not cross in many lifetimes. One such project is “How we invented the World” for Discovery, for which I Directed two episodes on Planes and Guns. A' heady' title which, mainly due to the lavish drama and CGI elements, was said to be the most expensive series that Discovery had ever commissioned.
One of the contributors was a bit of a hero of mine - aerodynamicist Burt Rutan. At a time when most of us were fumbling with Lego, he was building flying model aeroplanes. He honed such a mathematical knowledge of aerodynamics, that he was soon able to simply set about building aircraft that flew beautifully and broke records without sitting down and 'designing' it by putting pen to paper. He is simply a 'doer', he doesn't do small talk, or concern himself with fiction and he ran his business only affording meetings to be standing only for a maximum duration of 7 minutes.
From embarking on his career as we landed on the moon, Burt is now enabling us all to go into space with the design of Virgin Galactic. He also pioneered the use of composites in the 1960's, personally demonstrating how simple the process was to homebuilders of his kit planes and was the first to use winglets, again in the 1960's.
Now in retirement, Burt is embarking upon yet another incredible project which he was gracious enough to tease us with, but that story is sadly not mine to tell. He also has a policy of not talking about projects until they are delivered and proven.
A story I can tell however, is of ex- British Army sniper Frank Fletcher and Accuracy International, a company that specialises in manufacturing sniper rifles and featured in the episode on Guns. This is a subject about which I truly knew nothing previously and perhaps why I found this shoot so engaging.
The result of Accuracy Internationals precision engineering is quite astounding, and frankly frightening. In theatre they have delivered target accuracy at 1500m, (1.5miles), the entire length of Oxford Street, from Marble Arch to Holborn.
To illustrate this on television is quite tricky as it all happens so fast. However, despite the bullet travelling at over twice the speed of sound it still takes 2.5 seconds to reach its' target and I decided to attempt to capture a shot for real at the maximum distance.
As you will understand, there are precious few locations where won can legally take shots of this distance in the UK, but we found one in Wales that gave us just under 1000m. We're still talking Marble Arch to Centre Point here, so watch out.
As you may already know, snipers work in teams with a spotter who together work out the maths of the shot, taking into account the windspeed, distance and even earth rotation I'm told. No sooner had they worked this out, which barely took a few breaths, Frank was ready to take his shot.
The target we had set was a simple piece of white steel measuring 18” square, with a central ring roughly the size of a grapefruit and this was only just visible to the naked eye.
One breath held, the trigger was squeezed and the very first shot hit within the central ring.
This was truly astonishing, but what made it a running joke of the series was a subsequent indoor range shoot we did in Washington with an ex-US army shooter. I won't give you his name but, he had a current assault rifle and was unable to hit a target from just 1m. I have to impart the fact that he did bear an uncanny resemblance to our Winter Olympic mascot Eddy the Eagle in the glasses department, so quite why we given him on our Risk Assesment remains a mystery – he was supposed to be a sharp shooter.
I should add that following the 911 call the DoP did only require 12 stitches and once we man handled him to point in the right direction he did indeed hit the target, the fact that it was a target on a range in the next neighbourhood he maintains is down to his prowess, but we decided not to argue that one and retreated quietly.
"How We Invented The World"
Discovery
Chris Hook, Director
1 car 2 days 3 crew
“It must be pretty nice driving around the countryside for a few days” This is what my client said to me whilst location hunting in Wales recently and of course it is, particularly in the Spring when everything is so lush.
I love Wales, it has such an incredible richness and diversity of landscapes, all of which are man made of course, from the obvious scarred regions of mines and reservoirs that lubricate the midlands and Liverpool to the vastness of countryside which has been nurtured over centuries of farming, landscapes that Capability Brown and Humphry Repton emulated in the great estates, but these natural landscapes are ones that we can all enjoy and it takes little opportunity for me to return to.
The client was Lotus and I was searching for roads on which to exhibit the Exige S. However, the problem I had was an unbelievably small budget. Really, I should have been shooting at their own test track, but the brand got the better of me. I grew up with the Roger Moore era of Bond, hence Lotus and incredibly, was lucky enough to have a trip round the Hethel circuit in the “Spy Who Loved Me” Esprit when I was a kid, so I was particularly keen to do the best we could on this job. Also, we know all Lotus cars go well round a track, they're renowned for their engineering and it's what the brand was built upon by Colin Chapman. I personally found this out when laying out the Top Gear circuit at Dunsfold. Whatever configuration of bends I hatched out with bollards, the Elise, driven by Lotus test driver Gavan Kershaw, effortlessly drove around them and barely slid. These cars are truly stickier than a sticky thing. I soon found out that Gavan was also the Autocar powerslide champion, so I wasn't really helping myself in finding out just where our “star” drivers may come off and which bits of runway architecture we had to remove. I eventually drove the bends myself and the drama revealed itself.
After scouring roads in North and South Wales I eventually plummeted for the Breacon Beacons, as it was marginally quicker to reach and offered several options for both tracking and dynamic up and bys in close proximity. The scenery there is quite breathtaking.
Tracking is pretty fundamental in filming cars, so due to our tight budget my DoP (Paul O'Callaghan) recommended using a Steadicam which I hadn't used before in this set-up – the results were remarkable. Sadly due to rain though, we only had a short test session with it on our travel day, but unbelievably we managed to use it with a 135mm lens. Whilst Paul struggled a little to hold frame on this lens, the Steadicam did its' job and thankfully we did capture a few shots from this session before we were rained out and the shots saved the sequence.
I'm now hoping to shoot a Drama short on the back of this.
Lotus Exige S - Cinema commercial
Producer/Director: Chris Hook
DoP: Paul O'Callaghan
2nd Camera and Stills: Oli Tennent
Precision Driver: Giles Mallard
Editor: Joe Orr
An Epic Reveal
“I recently used the Red Epic on a Ford Fiesta ST film for Imagination, supplied by Brownian Motion - it was a revelation.
This camera truly offers a revolution for our industry; designed by Oakley to deliver what the industry was holding back, small, huge 5k frames, Billboard / Vogue cover quality at 25fps, immense latitude and shutter range. The usual suspects of Sony and Panasonic have lost any edge they may have had.
The Epic is a real leap. Once you’ve paid for the Pre-production and logistics to place your crew where you want them it makes littles sense using anything else.
Ford Fiesta ST reveal film
Imagination
Chris Hook, Director