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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.

25 June 

I have touched base with Joe Balkoski, another D-Day expert and the official historian for the 29th Division, recommended by Simon. What is exciting about Joe is the work he has done on casualty figures for Omaha. The received history is that 2,000 Americans became casualties (killed, wounded and missing) at Omaha on D-Day. But Joe has for the first time come up with a more exact count – and astonishingly it is more than double the accepted figure, nearly 5,000. This makes Omaha even more bloody than people have thought. What I find astonishing – coming from a generation where information is so readily available – is that such a fundamental and important figure could have taken more than 60 years to arrive at – and even then only after such painstaking work in the archives as Joe sifted through thousands of documents counting names. Joe agrees to be interviewed for the film in his archive rooms at the Fifth Armory in Baltimore. 

28 June

Today I ring one of the Ranger veterans on my list called Ray Tollefson. I know almost immediately that he is just the person we are after for eyewitness testimony. As one of the Rangers who trained for the assault on the cliff top position Pointe du Hoc but who was diverted to come in on Omaha beach itself, he is at the very heart of our story. As part of 2nd Rangers ‘A’ company, he also ended up coming in at the very worst sector of Omaha beach – Dog Green, near the Vierville draw – where casualties were particularly high. Ray tells me he lost many of his close friends in the assault and he himself was badly wounded, hit twice through the arm by machine gun fire. But what really gets me about Ray on the phone is his candour and genuineness. He tells me about cliff training in England and how much he hated it because he was scared of heights. He is the very opposite of gung ho – he is frank and very human, which makes me really emphathise with him and thus feel his story that much more powerfully – an important factor for a TV contributor. Ray says he has never really talked about what happened to him on D-Day not even to his wife – but when I ask whether he would be willing to be interviewed on camera, to my delight, he accepts.

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