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From Young Victoria to The Boxer Rebellion, Stonehenge to the Ten Pound Poms, explore the past with Timewatch.

20 August

James has been in the edit for a couple of weeks with John Wilkinson [Editor] putting together a rough assembly of the material we have shot thus far. But yesterday the crew returned to Normandy for an extra day of filming with Top Gear’s Richard Hammond, our presenter. Today we were at the observation post at Pointe du Hoc, from which you get an incredible 180 degree view out to sea to where the massive landing fleet would have been waiting on D-Day. Pointe du Hoc itself is rather extraordinary, like the face of the moon pock marked with huge bomb craters. James has written the PTCs [‘Pieces to Camera’] for Richard prior to filming, but we spend time rewriting some of these with Richard so he feels comfortable with the wording and delivery. This afternoon we do a ‘two-way’ between Richard and Simon, and James is particularly pleased with how this goes. Simon has bought with him a giant blow up aerial reconnaissance photograph taken at midday on D-Day of a section of Omaha beach. He shows this to Richard, pointing out hundreds of small black specks on the beach which he explains are individual American soldiers. He explains that those lying perpendicular, near the top-end of the beach are the wounded – like Ray – who have been dragged up the beach, but those lying horizontal are the dead, washed in on the tide. It is very sobering.

About the author

Timewatch is the world's longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC's flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.

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Blogging about

Timewatch

From Young Victoria to The Boxer Rebellion, Stonehenge to the Ten Pound Poms, explore the past with Timewatch.

23 July 

One of the most fun parts of filming is for the computer graphics (CGI) sequences. Timewatch has its own team dedicated to CGI (Neil Wilson, Steve Flynn and Colin Thornton) who have come out to Normandy with a car laden with Rangers’ uniforms and fake plastic guns. They are here for two days to film some basic drama reconstruction sequences that will form the basis of their D-Day landing scene. In order to catch low tide when the beach is at its widest, we head for the beach at dawn whereupon the three boys spent several exhausting hours dress up in the uniforms and run up and down the sand, as I operate the Z1 camera. They carefully plan it so that each run is in a different part of the frame. That way, when they are back in the office, they can layer these frames up in the computer until it looks like there are hundreds of men landing on the beach – rather than just three. Later they will drop in beach obstacles and landing crafts, based on images they have gathered from books – and also small explosions, filmed separately again. As well as the beach landing scene, they have to film a sequence of cliff climbing at Pointe du Hoc – to illustrate what Ike and his fellow Rangers had to do on D-Day. We find a small 10ft sand dune which the boys clamber up head-on into the camera. I help hold up the green screen making sure it fills the frame behind the boys. The green screen means that when it comes to the edit, they can drop in a different background – in this case, the sea and Pointe du Hoc cliff-line.

About the author

Timewatch is the world's longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC's flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.

Subscribe to Timewatch's posts

 

Blogging about

Timewatch

From Young Victoria to The Boxer Rebellion, Stonehenge to the Ten Pound Poms, explore the past with Timewatch.

Researcher Georgina Leslie's diary of the making of the Timewatch programme Bloody Omaha.

19 July

Having finished off our filming in the States with historians Joe and Adrian, we have now come to Normandy – and to Omaha beach itself – to film. Having heard the Rangers’ stories first hand, it is particularly chilling to stand on this beach and think what happened here. But it is very difficult to equate this beautiful stretch of golden sand, today bathed in glorious sunshine, with the horror of what happened here 63 years ago. We spend an afternoon filming at the American cemetery, the white crosses go on and on, as far as the eye can see – 9,387 Americans are buried here with another 1,557 names commemorated on a wall of remembrance. Again it’s really hard to get your head around; these sorts of numbers, how young so many of these men were. The cemetery’s position perched right on the bluffs above Omaha beach itself also makes it particularly poignant. We find the crosses for Ray’s friends – Joe Biddle, Ed Sowa and Joe Rafferty.

20 July

Today we take Simon to Maisy to meet Gary and see around the site for the first time. We film a new part of the site being dug up and it is a nice moment when we uncover a German ammunition store that has lain buried for more than 60 years. Simon is impressed by the site, it is large – complete with four concrete gun emplacements and two gun pits, an array of underground tunnels and rooms, and two miles of trenches which Gary has redug along their original lines. The site is very well preserved so it gives you a good sense of what it would have been like to be a German soldier here waiting for the invasion. Simon is yet to be convinced however that this battery has a direct bearing on the Omaha story in terms of contributing to the slaughter there, partly because the actual landing area of Omaha beach is too far away for the range of these guns. But we all find it exciting to see a genuine piece of forgotten history coming out the ground and it certainly serves to drive home how strong the defences were along this stretch of the Normandy coast and what a hard task the allies faced.

About the author

Timewatch is the world's longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC's flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.

Subscribe to Timewatch's posts