Rigging a camera 48 metres up and leaving it there
Nine months, four rigs, one lightning strike. The full method, the failure rate, and the two things we would build differently next time.
For eighteen consecutive days we filmed nothing we could use. The herd had shifted to moving at night, which is a sensible response to forty-one degrees and no shade, and an impossible one to film honestly at four hundred metres.
The temptation at that point is to move the camp, or to close the distance, or to light something. We did none of those things, because the policy we wrote before the first shoot does not have a clause for a bad fortnight.
On day seventy-nine they crossed at first light. The sequence is four minutes long in the finished episode and it is the reason the film works.
