Animals in film
A couple of weeks ago I did three film jobs in a row and thought I'd make a quick post about it to illustrate how varied working with animals in film can be.
Monday was for a BBC programme, Natures Weirdest Events, so I was lucky enough to work with one of my childhood heros, Chris Packham, while he presented a walking catfish, lobster, ducklings and giant snails, to illustrate some unusual news stories from the natural world. Fish jobs are always hard work as they are nearly always up several flights of stairs with no elevator (sods law), and to keep the aquatic animals happy, we must bring with us all the pretreated water we require, especially in the case of marine animals.
Tuesday saw me taking a lot of rats into London to the set of a comedy/magic/quiz panel show presented by Matt Edmondson. the rats had to wait inside what we call in the game a "fear box"- unwitting contestant puts hand into box and has to guess what's inside or retrieve some object, a la "I'm a celebrity". It's these types of jobs that we have to undertake with great care as they are high stress risk to the animals and high bite risk to the contestants, so we use experienced animals and high levels of control in order to keep everyone safe. We also popped a rat down a chaps leotard which went really well and was very funny. The rat was well practised and performed exactly as I thought he would, crawling around a bit and then poking his head out of the top to have a look around, very cute.
On Wednesday I took our bullfinch Rosco to the set of a feature film about the life of Stephen Hawking. The finch had to hop about in a certain spot on the outside of a hospital window. Luckily I'd always been on a recce a few weeks previous and had instructed the team to net off the outside area of the window, so I was able to safely work with the bird from the window ledge inside a safe area so I could cue Rosco and get the shots we needed.
Quite a nice selection of jobs I thought, showing some of the variety of work we do with our animals.
Monday was for a BBC programme, Natures Weirdest Events, so I was lucky enough to work with one of my childhood heros, Chris Packham, while he presented a walking catfish, lobster, ducklings and giant snails, to illustrate some unusual news stories from the natural world. Fish jobs are always hard work as they are nearly always up several flights of stairs with no elevator (sods law), and to keep the aquatic animals happy, we must bring with us all the pretreated water we require, especially in the case of marine animals.
Tuesday saw me taking a lot of rats into London to the set of a comedy/magic/quiz panel show presented by Matt Edmondson. the rats had to wait inside what we call in the game a "fear box"- unwitting contestant puts hand into box and has to guess what's inside or retrieve some object, a la "I'm a celebrity". It's these types of jobs that we have to undertake with great care as they are high stress risk to the animals and high bite risk to the contestants, so we use experienced animals and high levels of control in order to keep everyone safe. We also popped a rat down a chaps leotard which went really well and was very funny. The rat was well practised and performed exactly as I thought he would, crawling around a bit and then poking his head out of the top to have a look around, very cute.
On Wednesday I took our bullfinch Rosco to the set of a feature film about the life of Stephen Hawking. The finch had to hop about in a certain spot on the outside of a hospital window. Luckily I'd always been on a recce a few weeks previous and had instructed the team to net off the outside area of the window, so I was able to safely work with the bird from the window ledge inside a safe area so I could cue Rosco and get the shots we needed.
Quite a nice selection of jobs I thought, showing some of the variety of work we do with our animals.
posted by Grace at 10:50 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home