Filming With Children and Animals

Photos by David Bridges. All rights reserved.

It was a precarious dawn, the sun just managing an orange glow through its ominous shroud of black raincloud. The small child stood shivering out of view on the other side of the hill. Huddled in a thin red cape, the 9-year-old waited patiently for her cue as, in front of her, a herd of woolly sheep grazed silently.

“Perfect,”, shouted the director. “Standby and… Action! – oh no, the sheep are off again – fetch the herder”.

Never work with children or animals, goes the old maxim. Last week we had both. We also had hailstorms, torrential rain and intense blinding sunshine: this was Spring in Northumberland.

The owner of the sheep, armed with tasty ewe nuts, coaxed the animals back into shot. “We only have 5 more minutes with Maia”, warned the assistant. There are strict rules on filming with child actors. Every hour they need a 15-minute break. A crew member was desperately clinging on to the rest tent, which was trying to launch itself skywards in the gale force winds. It started to hail again: the sheep quietly munched through the chaos.

Meanwhile our motley gathering of extras, dressed in grey suits from Asda, sat bored in our house with their muddy shoes, slurping coffee and swapping anecdotes about famous people they’ve stood behind. Jo was going frantic. “Never again”, she wailed, as she put up large signs warning retribution on anyone bringing mud, food or drink onto our carpets.

This wasn’t Hollywood, but it could have been the set of a film anywhere in the world. Except this wasn’t a movie that you’ll see on television or in the cinema. It was a film with a message, commissioned by a global energy company.


I hadn’t expected to be in the corporate communications business. I’m just a television producer, but a few months ago I was asked by a delegate at a seminar I was addressing why corporate films and websites were generally so poor. I told her, quite honestly, that I had no experience of the genre.

“That’s the problem,” she said. “Real producers don’t do corporate”. She persuaded and cajoled, and eventually we made her a string of videos and a smart new website, which last week won two major awards for Best Online Production. The gongs look good on the mantlepiece, but our real prize was that the global energy company saw it, and commissioned us to make a corporate film for them.

The message we were asked to convey was simple: when building a large scale project, like an oil refinery or a power station, it’s vital to know the precise origin and specification of every single part, down to the smallest valve. Apart from benefits of cost and efficiency, it’s essential that, if something goes wrong, the operators can get instant access to that information, even many years after it’s built.

Our film was designed to encourage suppliers and contractors to utilize effective information management systems. A dry subject seemingly disconnected from reality. “Shouldn’t you bring all your information into one place, so you can easily get at it?” asks little Maia at the end of the film.

But when we woke up the morning after we finished filming to the first news of the terrible catastrophe in Japan, saw the burning oil refinery in Ichihara, and then, all weekend, the fear and confusion about nuclear meltdown, the message of our film, shot at home with a child and a few woolly sheep, took on a terrible relevance.

The world we live in needs modern technology for fuel and progress. But our very survival depends on careful and precise management of what we build. For nature has a terrible habit of testing to the limit the structures of technology that humanity has created. And Heaven help us if we get it wrong.

Friends In Need

Hayley Westenra has one of the purest voices on the planet. I’d never heard her sing until this morning, when a friend posted a recording on Facebook. Ten minutes later Izzy toddled into my office and found me blubbering over my computer screen: she had to lend me her precious Peppa Pig to calm me down.

The friend who posted the link is a New Zealander, and the song was Hine e Hine, a Maori lullaby recorded when Hayley was just 16: the CD became the fastest selling debut classical album of all time. She comes from Christchurch and, at the age of 12, was discovered by CTV, the local television station. It’s the same station which, right now, is just a huge pile of rubble concealing the bodies of scores of victims. Among them is Donna Manning, one of the station’s presenters and producers. The world’s front pages pictured her distraught husband and two teenage children as they waited for news beside the debris until the police came and told them there was no hope. It’s one of many tragic images of that terrible catastrophe.

One can’t begin to imagine New Zealand’s pain: one of the gentlest places on earth, caught by a disaster sudden, horrific and unfair.

It’s one of the few countries where I could happily live. A few years ago I was invited to the country to give a speech. Fearing chronic jetlag from the journey, and because I doubted I would ever return, I arrived a week or two early and planned to spend some time exploring South Island on my own. No words could adequately describe the scenery – I’ve seen nowhere on earth to match it – but it was the beauty of the people that overwhelmed me. After a 13-hour flight from Los Angeles I arrived at my hotel in Queenstown to find an unsigned note on the bedside table: “Welcome, Tom, please come to Joe’s Garage at 9am tomorrow morning.”

I went out of curiosity and found a coffee shop where, sitting at a long table with one spare seat, were eight or nine complete strangers. They were local producers, who had heard I was in their country and simply wanted to welcome me. Outside was a Land Rover to take me into the mountains to see the locations they’d used for Lord of the Rings. They’d arranged parties and dinners in their homes: and yet they didn’t know me from Adam. New Zealand is a country where, if you stop to ask a stranger for directions, he’ll invite you into his house for lunch and remain your friend for life.

Kiwis are rightly proud of their homeland and fiercely protective of its history and traditions. There is no class structure: people don’t have large houses, because wealth and social status means nothing to them. Hospitality and good health, friendship and loyalty, imagination and creativity are paramount. I spent the most relaxing week – the empty roads and simple charm of an old-fashioned lifestyle reminded me of the best of Northumberland. At one point I actually rang Jo and suggested we up sticks from Los Angeles and move there. Instead we relocated to the North East: it’s not as beautiful but just as friendly.

Bordered in the West by the snowy peaks of the Southern Alps, and on the east by the ocean, Christchurch is a proud and historic city: green and fresh, sophisticated and lush.

Friends I’d met out there have sent me videos of the devastation. There are chaotic scenes inside apartments as the earthquake struck; footage taken moments later of rescuers rummaging through bricks. But through it all, a strange calm. These lovely people simply didn’t deserve this.

Our news reports have already moved onto the next big headline, but we mustn’t leave the Kiwis on their own. They need our friendship now.

Horror In Haiti

Our current domestic problems, from running out of heating oil because the lorry couldn’t reach us, to the continuing failure of American Airlines to deliver my mother-in-law’s suitcase, all faded into insignificance on Tuesday night when news broke of the calamity in Haiti. The horror of such human suffering instantly put all petty concerns into perspective.

We watched it unfold on CNN. It’s not a network we normally use, but we wanted to get close to the heart of the story and CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta is only a thousand miles from the tragedy.

It was brilliant coverage. While the BBC had a rather scared newsreader desperately waiting for any sort of expert to rescue him and Sky relied on a hastily drawn map, CNN was painting graphic images of what life must have been like at that very moment in the poverty-stricken country.

Satellite maps swooped into close-ups of thousands of tiny shanty dwellings. You wouldn’t be able to see anything from the air, said the commentator, because of the dust from the disintegrated reinforced concrete. It’s nighttime: the power is out so there’s no street lighting, just thousands of tiny braziers the locals use for heating, lighting and cooking. They spun the map across the devastated region: from presidential palace, across the desperate shacks in the sea plain (no sewage, no running water, two million people in a city built for 50,000) to the smarter hills where the diplomats live and where a hospital had just collapsed.

CNN found a correspondent in its newsroom who had family there, another who’d just returned from the city, then a UN representative, tearfully fearful for her colleagues in the collapsed mission. A reporter drew diagrams on a map with an electronic crayon showing how the plates of the quake had moved and which parts of the country were likely to be affected most. It was exemplary television journalism, but even they couldn’t begin to portray the terror that must have swept through the city of Port au Prince less than two hours before.

It’s impossible for those who haven’t felt it directly to understand the power and dread of an earthquake. I lived for five years in Los Angeles and used to joke how disappointed I was that in all that time I’d only experienced one wimpy tremor. It was in the middle of a meeting where the room rocked gently for a few seconds like the deck of an ocean liner. Everyone froze, then breathed a communal sigh of relief.

I mocked Jo when we first started living together because she made us keep a large plastic bin outside the house, with fresh water, tins of food, torches, a radio and a change of clothes. I thought it ludicrous at the time, but watching the news on Tuesday night, she and her mother recounted stories of another January night in 1994, when a 6.7 strength earthquake struck less than five miles from their own home in Los Angeles.

They told of being awakened in pitch darkness by the terrible volcanic roar of grinding rocks; of being flung like dolls across the room, their desperate attempts to cling together under a doorway, clutching their petrified howling dog; of the fear that the earth would swallow them up; of their relief in the morning to find their home largely undamaged, only to see that their neighbour’s had slid down the hillside to destruction just a block away.

That night just 72 people died: if it hadn’t been 4.30 in the morning, and if building regulations had been less stringent, the toll would have been far higher. The sort of concrete they’re digging corpses out of in Haiti has been banned in California for generations. Poor Haiti. We must give them everything we can.