April 2024 - Aerial Filming in Glencoe for a BBC ALBA Documentary

A nice few days with Solus Productions filming a revisit to a documentary from 8 years ago with a lady called Gladys. She was born in Ireland then adopted and brought to the west coast of Scotland and speaks Gaelic. She has been trying to find her original family all her life and some things come to light since the previous documentary.

Tony was directing, Phil on the main camera and Rowan producing. I was doing drone then some second camera during the interviews indoors.

Classic drone shot Glencoe

Speak Bridge

Great Grannie and Grandads house:)

MARCH 2024 - Filming Beluga Lagoon's concert in Stirling

What an awesome venue for a concert in the heart of Stirling. Great to be filming great mates as they sell out concerts. Andrew is keen to make a bit of a documentary of this year as Beluga lagoon start filling bigger venues. I pop along to enjoy the music and film a little bit of BTS as the band gets ready and then during the performance and them coming off stage.

Nerves within the band seemed less that Aviemore at this gig. Not that you’d notice from the audience:) Had a friend shooting some wides for me while I did a bit of steady cam and just hand held. Andrew wanted a bit more crowd in these shots so got in amongst the crowd. The crowd was a little more sober than Aviemore and most likely because Scotland had just won against England in the Rigby moments before the Aviemore concert lol.

Lovely interview with Iain ‘Fingers’ after the concert. Mainly unusable footage from Gregor and Willy after the concert lol:)

Very good vibe in this venue and a great night for all:)

Beluga Lagoon in Stirling

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FEBRUARY 2024 - Filming Avalanche rescue film

A fun few days filming an avalanche rescue film with several mates. The film is a collaboration of several people including Scottish Mountain Rescue and Glenmore Lodge (National outdoor centre) plus others but I just met the ones involved in the filming bit on the mountain.

I was booked over a month ago and amazing that the day we come to film there is snow (tricky these days in the Highlands it seems) and sun and not to bad wind. We had a script pulled together from the different organisations and we went about filming it on the mountain. Always fun trying to get non actors to act but they did a pretty good job of it. Felt good to be out in the mountains too. Just working through the edit of it now.

Small team searching our man made Avalanche debris

Probing a grid over debris

FEBRUARY 2024 - Filming instructional film with Dark Sky Media

A fun week filming Dave Macleod doing climbing coaching at his place in Roy Bridge. I was working for Chris Prescott here of Dark Sky Media ( www.darksky-media.com ) who does a lot of climbing filming. I was the second camera here and using his Sony kit. I have worked with Chris several times on a variety of projects so was fun to work with him again. The client was https://altitudeclimbing.com and the films we were making were for increasing your performance in rock climbing.

I’ve known Dave and Claire Macleod since university days so was good to catch up with them again. The last time I actually filmed Dave was in 1999 at Dunbarton rock on a Nick Tarmey film ‘Cutting Loose’ :)

Chris and myself had quite a bit of standing on crash mats not being able to move incase we wobble our tripods. Probably some form of torture standing still like this. Not sure how the Buckingham Palace guards manage it lol. But we battled through it. Hopefully be some great videos from the edit. Certainly Dave is massively knowledgeable and amazing at breaking down the tiniest bits of climbing to produce advancements for his students:)

Dave describing his different boots. Although one of the pairs he uses 90% of the time.

Chris Prescott and myself filming Dave doing his stuff.

JANUARY 2024 - My most viewed film I've made from start to finish to date.

This was fun film to make. I made it with Warren from Casio Watches. He had some ideas and was looking for a drone pilot here in Aviemore but after chatting for 30 minutes on the phone or so he decided that maybe we could make the film together.

So we came up with a storyboard and script. He mainly wrote the words as he knows the watch and will have to speak the words himself. I decided on locations and how we could shoot it and make a story out of an instructional film. Trying to keep the editing interesting and flowing.

Warren then arrived in Aviemore and we started filming the different bits which started with a walk up Sgor Gaoith (1118m) a munro nearby, The weather was nice and cloudy allowing us to film the navigation parts with the watch. But I desperately wanted a view too. It didn’t seem to be happening. Then we reached the top in the cloud doh. We were just starting a sandwich when the cloud started dropping down. Sandwiches stuffed away and a mad rush as we started getting our filming done in one of the most stunning days I’ve ever seen above the cloud in the Cairngorms. We got some great drone shots and speaking to drone shots too. A theme of this film. Means trying to match lines afterwards which is tricky but fortunately Warren repeated the words back exactly to the ground camera mic after. We got our bits and the cloud came back in and was gone. It gave us 30-40mins. I heard from friends who are Mountain and Ski guides that day that they unfortunately never saw a view so we were so lucky!!

The comments on Youtube here about all the crew that must be on the summit behind the camera is hilarious, worth a read lol. It was just me carrying the camera and drone and my winter kit and Warren carrying his winter kit and our lunches:)

We then headed down to film the next bits the day after. We had three locations for the cliff. The top of the cliff was Uath Lochains, the cliff was Farletter crag a couple of miles away and the frozen loch at the bottom of the cliff was Loch Morlich, 6 miles away haha. And yes Warren did actually throw the watch off the cliff from 10m up, a few times. And he had to post that watch to Milan for a high end budget advert (not watched as much as this one lol) straight after our shooting as only two in the world at that time.

Filming the mud fall was interesting only had one go at it and also had to try our best to stop it from looking totally cheesy which it had high potential for! I think we got away with mild cheese lol

The final bit was in front of the fire in my house. Pretty good to have all these varied locations on my doorstep.

Then I went at it editing it together and matching swipe pan edits etc. Then a colour grade and sounds added in and sent over to casio who were very pleased. Its got some nice views too, 1.6 million.