Anglesey, North & South Wales

November 2023, I spent a week scouting locations in North Wales working with a very talented scout Imogen Forbes. We only had an outline script and the director Claire Oakley was vague about where she wanted to set her original script ‘Under Salt Marsh’. She knew the region but only from short visits and in her mind’s eye the fictitious town of Morfa Halen was an amalgamation of a few places see saw in passing.

We scouted the whole coastline first documenting town and villages from the North of Anglesey to mid Wales building a visual database for Claire to work from. The sea or water was the overriding element in all the location briefs either being close to the coast or with a view of the sea. We came back again in February 2024 for a two week period scouting with defined briefs. The setting of Morfa Halen had quickly materialised from the initial scout so we based much of the next period of scouting around this town. We also had to consider South Wales, for logistical reasons as our studio base was here, we scouted around Cardiff for North Wales looking locations which proved much harder than we expected, it has a very diffident look! While all the time Claire was writing the script, looking at our incoming locations and redefying the briefs for character houses, places of work and the spots where a crime had taken place. This was fed back to us on a weekly basis to a creative loop was between director and us.

Finally in April we went full time and then in May we started preparation for an October and December shoot in the North with a two week period in November in South Wales before a further two months in early 2025. Meanwhile the designer, Stevie Herbert, needed to build a replica part of the town which could be flooded for the final episodes. Filming in October in North Wales we had some beautiful days but equally the weather could change very quickly. Filming in December was a much harder event with two names storms coming on shore from the Irish Sea resulted on one day having 90mph winds and a ‘shelter’ warning on our phones, filming on that day was curtailed!

I would like to add a big thank you to the village by the sea which became our Morfa Halen, they really where invaded by the film crew and I hope they enjoy this exceptional piece of film making.

London

This film was to be filmed entirely in London, so we had an initial scouting period looking for about 20 locations and then the industry strikes happened. Which put the project on hold for about 10 weeks. When it restarted a refinance had also taken place and suddenly London was too expensive for the production, eventually they relocated all the interiors and some exteriors to Bristol and I was left with about 6 exteriors to film in iconic London.
 
Our director did want one major interior…. The Natural History Museum. The tricky thing was in his script he wanted the actors to find a stuffed Ostrich in the museum. They do have an ostrich in the museum but behind glass on a corridor and our director wanted it to be somewhere more prominent! The museum is film friendly with filming taking place out of hours and we could be there all night if necessary, but the Ostrich relocation was a problem. They don’t allow stuffed animals from outside the collection to come into the building in case it brings in bugs which could infest the other stuffed animals….. unless we could freeze it for 48hrs killing any infectious bugs!
 
Well, who has a freezer that large…. The Natural History Museum. So, I asked. If the bird came from a known supplier – which it did. The NMM were happy for it to be dropped off three days in advance for a freeze and thaw, they also installed it for on the bridge in the Hintz Hall as soon as the front doors closed to the public. As soon as the last member of public left, our collection of trucks and vans entered the forecourt to off load with lighting having to swiftly install and light this huge space. With a minute by minute timetable planned and managed by ALM Imogen Forbes the camera was rolling an hour or later.
 
The film also took us to Leadenhall Market, Greenwich Park, Little Venice, St Dunstan’s in the East and The Windmill Club.

London, Stirling, Lincolnshire & Norfolk

London & West Coast Scotland

Who would want to make a film about in a flood in a drought!
 
The summer of 2022 was a hot one, perhaps the hottest on record with some days touching 40 degrees.
 
We started on location in London, one of the major sets was a London Street with post flood detritus across the whole road across gardens and up the fronts of houses. We had started by scouting for disused residential streets, perhaps ready for demolition or redevelopment. We checked with many city film offices and commissions. I had seen streets like this in Hull previously, whole terraces boarded up ready for demolition but this was in 2013, I checked with the Hull film office but all had since been demolished. We decided to find a willing street in London which we could set dress.
 
It started with finding an empty house which the owners had just bought but had not started renovations in Hackney. We needed it for about two months to make it look like an everyday home for the early scenes in the film then set dress it to look like a flood had swept through it. We found a suitable house and owner and then started to scout locally for a dead end street with similar architecture. By having a dead end it would be easier to close and block with our flood detritus, the designer wanted overturned cars so we needed a very complicit community for such an undertaking. Surprisingly we quickly found a street nearby and with willing residents.
 
Each house was contacted and let’s say 50% where up for it. Cars from both sides of the street cleared and for two days we dumped water damaged furniture, waste and upturned cars! During this process some of the house owners dumped their own bulky waste into our street set dressing (as we promised to remove everything for official disposal), water pipes where threaded through make it look like water was still running through and drains blocked to create pools of water.
 
Throughout the whole shoot the weather peeked at 40o and we constantly carried with us 20’000lts of fresh water as each scene needed rain or wet downs. As it was deemed a drought the water supply company had to get a licence to source and use water like this. This did situation did cause a few complaints from residents as their gardens where dying and we were watering our sets! This was soon remedied with a hose down of parched gardens around the locations from our water bowser.