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I’m cleaning up my old laptop to move everything to the shiny new Mac that should be arriving any day now (yes I’m becoming one of those people).
In an effort to quell my excitement about the imminent defection, I thought I’d post this very cool video that I found on my old PC desktop. It’s an advert that National Geographic Channel made for the new series of ‘Locked Up Abroad’ that I’m producing for Raw Television.
The ad was shown on a huge video billboard in Times Square, New York, which is definitely a first for any series I’ve made. The UK version is called ‘Banged Up Abroad’ and can be seen on National Geographic Channel in the UK on Sky, Virgin and Tiscali. Find out when on the Nat Geo website.
Since I’ve spent the day writing about TV shows and doing scripts for Locked Up Abroad, I thought I should update the blog on where I got to on the ‘Adventures of Mark and Olly – Living with the Mek’. This is a show I did for Discovery Channel and Travel Channel a couple of years ago. I’ve documented the journey we took to find the Mek tribe in the mountains of West Papua so far in the blog and this is the next instalment.
Day three and we’d made precious little headway in the appallingly hot, steep and sticky conditions. We were averaging about a mile a day but despite this and the fact that we were heading deeper into Mek territory, with threats of attacks from warriors and witches, we seemed to be pretty happy in this picture. The left to right is myself, the series producer; Olly Steeds the explorer; Associate Producer, Toby Paton and Olly’s fellow explorer, Mark Anstice.
First encounter with the Mek
After a hard days march we came to our first Mek village. It was called Tohamak and after the appropriate show of strength the villagers let us in.
Olly shakes hands and offers tobacco
Things seemed to be going well until the village chief asked Olly and Mark for $800 to kill a pig for a welcome feast.
Tohamak Mek Elders
We politely declined and spent an awkward night camped in the village before moving on early the following day deeper into the jungle.
The village chief
Locked Up Abroad
It seems strange that I haven’t mentioned what has been pre-occupying a huge amount of my time for the last year and a half. I’m right in the middle of producing another series of ‘Locked Up Abroad’ for the National Geographic Channel, (it’s called ‘Banged Up Abroad’ in the UK). You can watch the trailer here.
Last season I produced thirteen shows from around the world and this year I’m doing the same. They are action-packed drama/documentaries that recreate the true life testimonies of people who have found themselves imprisoned in far-off places. In some cases the contributor has made a stupid attempt to get rich quick, while in others they’ve have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But either way, most of the films attest to people’s inner strength and resilience in extreme situations. The shows are a bit like ‘Midnight Express‘ on speed except as a rule we make more of the dilemmas and decisions that lead to the subject’s capture and less of their incarceration.
The series gets great reviews and a really good audience (“One of the most compelling and riveting series TV has ever provided” – New York Post). This season we’ve found a new range of incredible stories in Iraq, Cuba, Sierra Leone and as many other far flung locations we dig up to test our tight schedules and preposterous ambitions.
Producing this series with all the possible permutations for problems is a rock n roll journey but it’s one I make behind a desk in the East End of London. My home is a five minute cycle ride from Raw Television who makes the series, and the edit suites at Envy (where they are being cut) are a fifteen minute cycle ride from Raw. I love my job and living in London, but having been the director sent off to the far-flung place many times before, I do get a touch of adventure-envy when I hear the experiences of my teams when they return from filming.
The new series is broadacsting just now in the US on Wednesday evenings at 10pm EST, but its also available on Video on demand from NGC’s site (and the last series is on Hulu – watchable only in the US).
Some of the many people involved in making Mission Africa
I’m trying to get my old PC and scanner up and running so I can begin to tackle digitising my enormous archive of negatives and transparencies. Lo and behold when I finally got the PC up and running, I found a disc of images from Mission Africa (MA) in the CD drawer. I’ve mentioned MA before in my blog. Mission Africa resulted in a series of documentaries for BBC 1 (there are lots of clips on You Tube) on the trials and tribulations of building a game reserve for the Samburu people of Sera in Northern Kenya.
I can’t remember seeing this disc of pictures before but looking at them now, I’m reminded of how crazy the project was. Fifty degree celsius heat, wild animals, seriously remote locations with real life bandits and a show to make every two and half days were just a few of the problems we had to overcome. I was employed as series producer but with so many shows to make and too few able bodied personnel I had to pick up the camera as well.
Me shooting in Kenya
With about two weeks to go before we finished filming on location, we had to dart a mature bull elephant to fix a tracking collar round its neck. Darting this enormous beast with tranquilisers was tricky. Trying to follow a fully grown drunk elephant rampaging through the bush was dodgier still. But it was when we finally found the animal that the real fun began.
It had eventually succumbed to the tranquilisers and had stumbled and crashed to a halt amongst trees on the side of a steep hill. As I ran through the bush, checking all the time to make sure my camera was running and I was ready to capture the scene, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Nothing prepares you for five tonnes of wild animal legs akimbo, snoring louder than twenty old men in a dormitory. I was overcome with emotion. Stunned by the magnitude of what lay in front of me.
Five tonnes of snoozing bull elephant
The group caught up and all stopped dead. No-one moved until the Rangers from Lewa broke the spell and started shouting orders. Although the animal was blissfully unaware of its predicament, it was actually in mortal danger. The dose of tranquilisers required to knock out an elephant has to be so powerful that an antidote must be administered quickly or the animal will die. It lay awkwardly with it’s legs uphill and needed to be rolled down hill so the collar could be slipped under its enormous neck.
It’s not something you get taught in first year at school, but while some of the rangers attached ropes others gave a crash course to our trainees on how to flip an elephant. Soon, some were pushing from above and others from down below.
The sight and the sounds were incredible. The animal snored and grunted as they shouted and heaved. I raced around trying to get as many angles as I could. My heart was in my mouth as I ran to the down-side of the hill to capture that final moment as the elephant finally reached its tipping point.
I looked at the animal, working out its likely trajectory and stuck my eye back in the viewfinder. Looking through lenses is a rewarding but dangerous job at the best of times. It’s a well known phenomenon that a photographer’s sense of danger is diminished by the act viewing rather than participating. This is exacerbated by the myriad of decisions that go through the filmmaker’s head. Am I running? Am I framed and sharp? Do I need an establisher again? Which of the characters is telling the story best? Is that a boom in shot? Where is my sound recordist? Have I all the shots I need to do the story justice? Where should I be next? How much tape do I have? How will I wrap this scene…crash.
Filming the elephant as it is being turned over
We used the shot in the title sequence. The elephant reaches its tipping point, starts to roll toward camera then, woosh, there’s a blur of colour and light. I may have positioned myself to miss the animal but I failed to notice that its huge sharp tusks were lying on either side of a tree. The momentum of tonnes of elephant flesh snapped the tree at its roots and hammered it down on my head.
Apparently I came to quite quickly. Took the viewfinder which had been smashed off the camera stuck it back in my eye and started filming. The only problem was, it wasn’t attached to the camera. I have vague recollections of plugging it back in and getting the camera working after a fashion. My AP tells me she held me round the waist as I alternately filmed and blacked out. You can watch what was broadcast of this event in a clip on You Tube – keep an eye out for 2:05, which is the tree landing on my head.
I still have little memory of the rest of the events of that day. Even the following day when we were darting lion I was still blacking out.
The end of filming Mission Africa
From then on until the end of the shoot two weeks later, it’s all a bit of a blur. There is a book in the adventures we had on this shoot but on the last day, when the people from Sera gathered to take possession of their new lodges, wells and animals it all seemed worth it… or at least I think it did.
The Leg-end Bob Pelege's hat.
The West Papua adventure began in earnest when our expedition left Welarek. We planned to travel deep into the rainforset in search of the Mek tribe. The people who live in Welarek and the surrounding area are from the Yali tribe. They are the traditional enemy of the Mek people who live to the east, across a fast flowing river. Led by our mountain guide – the ‘Leg-endary Bob Pelege’ as he called himself – after two days of hard walking, we arrived at a long rattan suspension bridge.
The border between Yali and Mek territory
The bridge is known locally as the bridge of suicide and spans the river that is the border between Yali and Mek people. In the past, women threw themselves off the bridge when their husbands died and many people have died in accidents. So we were all nervous when we crossed. But despite it being in a bad condition we managed to cross the bridge safely and by day three of the expedition we were in Mek territory.
Mark Anstice and Olly Steeds heading into Mek territory
Yali Porter
The porters were now uneasy as they were not only in the land of their enemy but this was an area renowned for flying witches.
I cross the repaired bridge into Mek territory
As producer of the shoot, I’d factored in risks like crossing bridges made of vines, but I’d made no allowances for flying witches in my health and safety plan.
