On Location
Below are a few insights into some recent sequences I’ve worked on.
For a current showreel, please get in touch.
Upcoming Series:
‘Expedition Killer Whale’ is due to air in Winter 2024, ‘The Americas’ in February 2025, and ‘Secrets of the Penguins’ on Earth Day, 22nd April, 2025.
Once they broadcast I’ll be able to share more about some of the incredible experiences they involved . . .
Frozen Planet II
I spent one month sitting in a tiny hide on the Mongolian Steppe, as silent and as motionless as possible, before finally catching a ‘filmable’ glimpse of a Pallas’s cat.
Seeing this elusive feline venture out in search of Mongolian gerbils and Brandt’s voles was absolutely worth the wait. Despite having the densest fur of any cat, the pads of their paws proved quite sensitive to the freezing cold, with temperatures often lower than -25°C. As narrated by Sir David Attenborough, and perhaps owing to their unique faces, Pallas’s cats have a reputation for being ‘the grumpiest cat in the world’.
I shot for this sequence with Pete Cayless and Hector Skevington-Postles. Director Sarah Titcombe wrote this article for the BBC, chronicling the experience.
From 01:23 all shots (excluding one wide of a jumping gerbil) were filmed by myself.
PALLAS’S CAT, MONGOLIA
ANTIPODEAN WANDERING ALBATROSS, ANTIPODES ISLANDS
To hear the iconic ‘sky-call’ of courting albatrosses, whilst tucked into the tussock grass with my long-lens rig, is a thrill I’ll never forget. For one month I lived on the sub-Antarctic Antipodes Island, cross-shooting long-lens behaviour with acclaimed cinematographer John Aitchison.
Along with director Rachel Wicks, we had joined scientists Kath Walker & Graeme Elliott, in this otherwise uninhabited location, after a three day sail from New Zealand.
The Antipodes has lamentably become an ‘island of widowers’, with three times more male albatrosses than females, due to the feeding habits of the females bringing them close to long-line fisheries. It was incredibly moving to witness tender courtships between male-male pairs, seeking companionship and a life-long partner.
Although primarily filming long-lens behaviour, I also worked with a range of other kit - moving across the tussocks with a gimbal rig, sending a drone out into the high winds for opening shots of the island, and using a parabolic microphone and Mix-Pre recorder to capture the extraordinary vocalisations of the courting albatrosses - behavioural audio which is used throughout the sequence.
Rachel Wicks wrote this article for the BBC about the plight of the Antipodean Wandering Albatross, Kath & Graeme’s tremendous work studying them over three decades, and how we can help.
PUMAS, PATAGONIA, CHILE
I think I can still hear the wild, whipping winds that dominated this shoot - drowning out radio comms and wicking the sweat from our faces as we hiked for miles each night to observe and film young pumas, newly independent, attempt to hunt guanaco.
It was a shoot full of new experiences - filming using thermal technology, rather than our usual RED/CN20 long-lens combination, and seeking heat signatures in the pitch black. Working with Dawson Dunning, a cinematographer fully seasoned in tracking pumas, director Joe Treddenick, and a local team of expert guides, we traversed the slopes.
Dawson captured beautiful footage on the SELEX Superhawk, and I filmed with the SELEX Horizon. Both long-lens cameras are hefty rigs - designed for military and scientific use. I tracked the pumas using the thermal Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced, and deployed a heavy-lift DJI Matrice 600 with a thermal gimbal rig.
Watching the silent hunters on my camera monitor in black and white added to the surreal magic of filming at night, and being able to ‘see in the dark’ whilst scanning the landscape almost made up for the sudden loss of peripheral vision when glancing away from the bright screen.
I wrote this article for the BBC about the experience of filming pumas under the stars.
AMUR TIGER, RUSSIA
Over three winter shoots I journeyed out to the snowy forests of Russia, to deploy 4K camera traps in the hopes of capturing footage of the rare Amur tiger.
On the first two shoots, I was learning from experienced camera trap expert, Declan Burley, and director Poppy Riddle, before heading out solo on my third shoot.
Our local team shared valuable fieldcraft knowledge as we rigged sensors and cameras in -30°C, necks prickling with the eerie feeling of being watched.
My favourite shot from this final trip was a large male passing by and scent-marking under a fallen tree. It was a rewarding end to this learning process to have my footage shown in the sequence alongside that of Sergey Gorshkov, whose beautiful cave shot is seen in the trailer for Frozen Planet II.
One of the many joys of spending three years working on Frozen Planet II was learning from such a wide range of incredible cinematographers and local experts, whose efforts are showcased in the above trailer.
GLACIER CALVING, GREENLAND
After weeks of staring out at Greenland’s Store Glacier, obsessively monitoring for any sign of calving, letting go and turning our eyes away was a strange feeling.
Camping in 24-hours of daylight in a location only accessible by helicopter, we relied on team work to ensure the ice was under watch. I worked with director Sacha Thorpe to keep vigil, along with local guide Jakob Markussen and ex-Sirius camp manager Silas Petersen. Cinematographers Raymond Besant, Olly Jelley and Sam Lewis shared a rotational shift on the RED/CN20, and I spent most days flying our drones kilometres out, capturing the crash of falling ice as newly formed icebergs breached like whales from the water.
During our main calving, in addition to flying the drone, I filmed our second camera shot (above), showing the scale of the spectacle. On arrival I’d rigged long-term timelapses on scaffold structures, which worked alongside satellite imagery in the sequence to show the river-like movement of the glacier over time.
PERMAFROST, CANADA
The sheer scale of the sprawling permafrost slumps was hard to prepare for. They permeated the landscape, with individual trees and whole forests disappearing into the sinkholes.
On my first trip to film the permafrost in Canada, I was working with director Will Lawson and cinematographer Olly Jelley. Our goal was to capture this thawing process over time.
To do this, we needed to set up long-term timelapses and keep them stable on literally moving ground. I experimented with various solutions in the UK, and we were able to track the change in these sites over 6 weeks.
I headed back out solo to de-rig the timelapses, and flew the second half of the drone time studies, which Olly had been piloting, using the Litchi waypoint software to reveal an aerial perspective on the progression of the melt.
We’re pictured above celebrating the successful rigging of the kit (photo by Olly Jelley), but the transitions we captured and the implications behind the accelerating release of carbon are far from cheerful.
BAFTA TV Craft Awards 2023
A slightly different experience ‘on location’ at the BAFTA’s.
I was very moved to have been put forward for the ‘Emerging Talent: Factual’ award by the Frozen Planet II team, for my cinematography on episode one, ‘Frozen Worlds’, produced by Alex Lanchester (pictured).
It was an honour to be nominated, in the company of three excellent factual producer/director nominees.
