It turns out 4.45am wasn’t so bad. Today Levi – and therefore
I – woke up at 20 past 3. (It was impossible to keep Levi awake beyond about
7pm last night, so little wonder – and as I write this, 6.45pm Tuesday, he’s
already asleep. I am shaking in my shoes L)
So today was our first day of filming. What a weird
experience! We and our empty suitcases got picked up at 7.45 and taken to the
airport. At the airport we met the director, Gavin, while the sound and camera
guys (Michael and Seamus respectively) got set up. Then we had to channel
Sunday night, walking from the arrivals door across to the airport exit as if
we’d just arrived. We did a couple of takes of that, trying to look nonchalant
as the camera guy came round in front of us and pointed the lens in our face –
it’s so hard not to look at what’s happening, as if this is some sort of
everyday occurrence! Really quite surreal!
Then we drove up to Larne, and parked at a service station
just before the beginning of the Coast Road, so the guys could get set up.
Microphone wires/kits for me and Levi, and 2 cameras in the car: one facing me
and the other attached to a rear headrest looking out the windscreen. Then the
director hunkered down in the back seat with a blanket over him to hide him
from the camera, and with me now driving we started on our way up the Antrim
Coast Road. The idea was to get our reactions as we saw the road and the coast
for the first time – it’s known as one of the most beautiful scenic routes in
the world. I hope the initial impact wasn’t lost, as unfortunately it was very
foggy – the road itself was fine, but out to sea and in the forward distance it
was just fog.
Happily, it cleared up beautifully later, and it was
lovely. At various parts of the day we drove the southern (and properly
coastal) part of the Coast Road, which links the southern and middle glens (of
the 9 Glens of Antrim – where a glen is a U-shaped valley opening to the sea, formed
in the ice age). Glenarm is a gorgeous wee town, and Carnlough looks like a
jigsaw puzzle picture from across the bay! Initially we drove up to just before
Carnlough, and then later in the day we went up as far as the Red Arch at
Waterfoot/Glenariff - a very unusual shaped arch, parabolic rather than
inverted U, and which doesn't look like it really needs to be there.
After Carnlough we went on to the old, inland road,
and met up with a local amateur historian who was interviewed separately the
other day. We talked about why the coast road was needed, and what
a feat it was to design and build. This bit of filming was done by Pathfoot, a
(now derelict) property at the bottom of the steepest bit of the old road,
where the family made a living by hiring out extra horses to help carts up and
down the hill. And it is steep! I twigged during this chat that the
design/planning of the coast road must have been done from the sea, as there
was just no access by land to some of the bits, especially the headlands.
After lunch (at the Londonderry Arms hotel in
Carnlough, which was owned for a time by Winston Churchill http://www.glensofantrim.com/our_history.html)
we met David Orr (former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and
who used to be the engineer responsible for the maintenance of the Coast Rd).
I'm not sure who was most excited to meet who :-) We went to a headland just
south of Glenarm where there's a pile of big limestone rocks on the seaward
side of the road, and talked about William's "big idea" of blasting
the rocks to form the road, and again about what a feat of engineering it was.
Then they had a photographer take some still pics of him, me, us together, and
me and Levi - "for the press", apparently!
The whole filming process is fascinating. The driving
bit involved trying to chat naturally to Levi about what we were seeing (fog L), as if there was no
camera (or director crouched in the back seat!). In the interview-y parts (which
were natural-ish conversations, rather than Q&A interviews), each time
they'd follow that by doing a few long shots while we just chatted, and at one
point we had to do listening shots, haha! When I was talking to David Orr we
had to pause quite often while buses or noisy motorbikes went past, and the
director would ask us to repeat or start a sentence over again to get the flow
going again. A few people going past tooted their horns - most annoying to the
production crew! And then at the end Levi and I had to drive up and down the
stretch of road a couple of times so they could get footage of us going past in
the car. Just weird, funny experience :-)
Levi really enjoyed the day, but boy we're both tired.
Levi has been asleep for a couple of hours now, I woke him up long enough to
get a bit of food and half a sleeping pill into him, so I desperately hope he
sleeps beyond 4am tomorrow. I'm buggered! Tomorrow we're being picked up at 8
to go up to the north coast and hop on a boat across to Islay to meet Dr
Margaret Storrie, a geographer who researched and wrote academic papers on
WIlliam in the 1960s. Can't wait! But now I'm off to bed, maximise my sleep in
case Levi does wake super-early again.
No comments:
Post a Comment