RReal
Lives
What’s it like to cut up a dead whale? How
do you organise a Victorian séance? And does
telepathy really exist? Jessica Griggs fi n d s o u t
Windfall Films produces a wide range of
programmes, from the Christmas Lectures to the
first ever live surgery on TV. Which have you been
involved with?
Most recently I was working on a series called
Inside Nature’s Giants (ING) where we filmed the
dissection of an elephant, a giraffe, a whale and a
crocodile. The idea was to show people how some
of the world’s largest animals evolved by exploring
their anatomy. I’ve also worked on Big, Bigger,
Biggest (BBB), which is about the development
of structures like aircraft carriers, oil rigs, ferris
wheels and skyscrapers.
A documentary producer is one of those jobs that
lots of people dream about. Did that make it
difficult to get into?
There are certainly a lot of people competing for the
same jobs, and typically you’ll only get employed for
the duration of a programme, so you might be in a
company for only a few weeks before you need to
look elsewhere. Fortunately I somehow managed to
land on my feet and I’ve been working at Windfall for
about two-and-a-half years now, so I’ve avoided the
struggle to constantly find new work. I guess I was
good in my interview!
Documentary Produ cer
Alex Tate
What’s an average day like?
There isn’t one really – it depends where you
are in the production schedule. First there is
pre-production, which is where you call the
scientists, research the material, and scout
8 | NewScientist | 24 October 2009
for filming locations. On BBB it was about gaining
access to aircraft carriers and bridges, and for ING
I was calling up zoos and trying to convince them to
donate their dead animals.
Then comes filming and you might be away on
location for a few weeks. Finally, you spend up to
eight weeks editing the material you’ve collected,
condensing it down into a 45-minute programme.
Do you write a script beforehand or make it up
as you go along?
It totally depends. For most animals on ING we knew
in advance the pieces of anatomy we wanted to
show the viewer and the order in which we wanted
to reveal them, but when we filmed the whale
dissection it all happened in the space of 24 hours.
We heard about a whale stranded in southern
Ireland at 10 am and set off a few hours later. I was
sitting on the plane trying to regurgitate my zoology
degree. It was like, “oh yeah, don’t they have hind
legs hidden inside their body? That’s cool, let’s look
at that. What about the blubber? OK, lets do
something on body insulation.” We constructed
the story in a matter of hours, whereas normally
you have weeks.
So come on, what’s your secret to success? I don’t
believe it was just your interview technique that
swung the job for you…
I have a degree in zoology from the University of
Nottingham, where I also studied photography, as
well as a Science Media Production masters degree
from Imperial College London. Work experience was
invaluable, though, and it can turn out to be a job
interview in itself. In between my degrees I took
two years out and did some work experience at
the BBC’s natural history unit on their Planet Earth
series. I also worked at the Natural History Museum
in London as a science communicator, and set up
a small business making videos for internet sites .
What’s the best thing about your job?
Definitely the situations you find yourself in while
filming. One of the most bizarre moments was
listening to a choir sing a cheesy song I had
co-written in the back of a Land Rover as they
walked in front of a 100-foot-high church that
was being moved 10 kilometres down the road.
We were making a programme called Monster
Moves, which followed the church’s move to a town
in Iowa where there was a larger congregation.
Plus, there’s no denying that going to Japan or
South Africa on location is one of the perks, and
dissecting a stranded whale on the beach is an
unrivalled pub story.
So is it all fun and games? There must be
some downsides, surely
The preliminary phone calls can be tough. When we
were doing BBB it was my job to get us access to the
world’s biggest aircraft carrier. I was on the phone
to the US navy press office for months. In the end
I had to go to Los Angeles for a half-hour meeting
to convince them to let us use it. Persuading zoos
to give us their dead animals was also tricky, as was
ringing freezer companies and asking them if they
had a freezer big enough for a giraffe – you have to
prepare a really good opening sentence!
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