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24 September

Bloody Omaha is finally finished after a six week edit. Richard is brought in to voice over the commentary and then the programme is dubbed and graded ready for broadcast. The programme didn’t quite end up where we expected. The newly found battery at Maisy did not take the central role we thought it might. In the end the programme turned into an examination of the recent and ongoing research about Omaha and why so many died there.

But in documentary making, stories often don’t quite turn out the way you think they will – and I think that’s exactly what makes our job so exciting. Above all, I am proud of our re-telling of the incredible story of the Rangers on D-Day. What touched me most was hearing firsthand the very moving testimony of the veterans like Ray Tollefson – they are an inspiration to us all.

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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.

29 August

We have a final filming day in England – with a MG42 German machine gun down at an ex WW2 training bunker on the Dorset coast. For this, we have employed a specialist Armourer because it is a real gun and we will be using live blank fire.

We cordon off a wide area around the filming and everyone on set has to don ear defenders. The gun fires an impressive 1,200 rounds per minute and the noise it makes is incredible. We have a very limited amount of ammunition because it is so expensive, so we film in very short three seconds bursts before changing the shot size or set up. It takes most of the day to film what will probably amount to about 15 seconds of television but it’s worth it because the CGI boys will be able to use some of these shots as foreground for their landing scenes.

For the people down on the beach enjoying ice creams, it must be very surreal to hear this gunfire echoing out across the bay.

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Explore Bloody Omaha with the Timewatch team

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.

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.

Find out more

Explore Bloody Omaha with the Timewatch team

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