Location: Vilnius, Lithuania

What I learnt from the shoot: Risk Assessments are cool. Or at least, important.

This shoot is probably still the most epic one I’ve done for this programme. As you’ll see below, a man drives a small car in vertical loops around the inside of a metal sphere… Never has the phrase “you have to see it to believe it” had more relevance.

When my Series Producer and Production Manager sat me down in the office to explain what I was going to be filming, I won’t lie, I was a bit worried. Working on a programme called “Outrageous Acts of Science” you expect to be filming some pretty crazy things, but this sounded scary, dangerous, and most of all… AWESOME.

The first thing we had to do was film the steel sphere being built, it had been deconstructed since the original filming and took about a week to construct. I had to figure out a way to timelapse the construction over a week long period. I wrote some extremely detailed instructions on how to do a timelapse on a GoPro  and sent one out to Jurij, the absolutely insane but brave man overseeing the building of this thing, and driver of the car. I’d calculated that one photo every 60 seconds would produce 5760 photos over four days, a 32GB card can hold 7680 photos so we had some spare capacity. We shipped the camera (along with an external power pack to keep it charged) and hoped all would be fine.

Arriving on location on the day of the shoot the first thing I did was check the GoPro, and… SUCCESS. The footage below is testament to the power of clear instruction, planning, and luck.

That was the easy bit. Now we had to film this actually happening.

Mark and I arrived early in the morning at the location, a disused airfield just outside of Vilnius. On this trip we also had a colleague from the office with us, Adel, as she spoke Russian so would act as translator for the interview. Up close, the sphere was even more formidable than in the videos, solid, metal, and huge. We had a bit of time to kill while the sphere was being finished so naturally we took silly photos in an amazing location. Yes there are four of me in this photo.

We did the interview first, for the sobering reason that we wanted to get it in the bag before he drives upside down in this thing, just in case anything, you know… happened.

Interviews in foreign languages can be a real challenge. There is a frustrating to and fro as you ask the question: it’s translated, they answer, that’s translated etc. It literally doubles the amount of time needed. Also it’s very hard to convey commands, the classic “could you put my question in your answer” is hard to enforce when you don’t know what the answer is! After a few questions I noticed that weirdly, Jurij was turning up the inflection at the end of every first sentence in Russian. I asked Adel, and it turned out he was literally putting the question in the answer, one of the most frustrating mistakes a contributor can make.

Q: What did it feel like to drive upside down for twelve loops?

A: “What did it feel like to drive upside for twelve loops? It felt scary.”

Q: How long did it take to build this sphere?”

A: “How long did it take to build this sphere? It took a week” etc.

…is not a translation you want your series producer to see when they get it back in the edit. Always keep an ear out for inflection and tone, as even in a foreign language you can get a good gist of the answer by really focusing on how they’re saying it.

That problem resolved, we were approaching the moment where he was going to do this potentially lethal stunt. Or as I like to call it, the moment my career could have ended rather abruptly. I was genuinely concerned there could be a terrible accident, but this fear was of course totally irrational as we had completed a very serious looking risk assessment, and I’d never have gone ahead with this if there was a viable worry!

Suddenly a shot popped into my head, what if we could get a GoPro right at the base of the sphere looking up, so we could see the sky overhead, and watch the car driving over the camera and on the top of the sphere? Amazing! At least, that was the plan, rigging the camera proved a little more challenging than I expected…

GoPro rigged, and after scraping the mud off me (it’s a dirty job, television), there was nothing left but to let him go and do it. He got in the car. And proceeded to do a loop of the sphere, he’d told me he would just drive sideways to start with to get a feel for it.

This looked incredible, and I could hardly wait to see a full upside down loop. Jurij stopped the car and we went over to see if all was okay. And then I was face with a really tough decision, Adel translated for me that Jurij had told her he was feeling really light headed as he hadn’t done this in three months…

My first thought was to not let him do this, if his concentration was affected in any way there was a real chance he could over or under accelerate, steer the wrong way, and cause the car to lose contact with the sphere, falling and crashing with him in it. I was worried. I was really worried.

We obviously took a break. I got Adel to stress to Jurij in the strongest possible terms that I did not want him in that car unless he was feeling completely fine. And to cut a long story short, or rather, to gloss over the incredible turmoil going on in my head, eventually, Jurij told me he was ready. I’ve found you can only make decisions based on the evidence presented to me, and from everything I could tell, he was okay to do this, he was reassuring me that he felt fine and I could now see no evidence to the contrary (he was probably wishing he’d never mentioned feeling light headed, but I’m glad he did).

He went ahead and got back in, and I literally held my breath as he completed vertical loops of the sphere. Only breathing again when he came to a stop. He was alive. The car was fine. I had, thankfully, made the right call, and could continue to enjoy a career in TV for now. And the reward for making that call was awesome – the GoPro shot paid off spectacularly.

Risk assessments are cool. Or at least, important.

This is, to this day, and I expect for many more to come, the scariest shoot I’ve been in charge of. It’s also one of the most visually stunning, and that’s no coincidence. With great risk comes great shots. But if there’s one thing I learnt it’s that there is nothing worse than being faced with a risk you didn’t expect on location, that moment Jurij told me he was light headed sent my heart plummeting, I thought the shoot could be cancelled and we’d be wasting tens of thousands of pounds. It was horrible. And while I don’t think I could have planned for him saying that – it taught me that spending a good amount of time really, and I mean really, assessing the risks, is invaluable, and also powerful, it enables you to sensibly plan and film dangerous, and therefore awesome, things.