The Wild Way of the Vikings film was by some stretch the most exciting, ambitious
and ultimately rewarding project I think I've ever been involved in.
So the whole film turned into something of an essay, not only about the wildlife of the North Atlantic,
but the wildlife of the North Atlantic in the Viking Age.
Without a doubt the most exciting thing to film during the
Vikings project for me was was the orca. I'd been based up in Shetland
for three months at that point and on my very second day in Shetland I'd seen orca
from somewhere ahead. And at that point you might be thinking, ah this is
great, you're gonna get all these opportunities to film the orca.
And during those 12 weeks I never saw the orca again until the very last week.
And Richard and myself, the other camera man who did the drone filming,
would get up at 6 o'clock every morning and have a phone call thinking about
where they'd last been seen, where we think they might be today.
When you're following the orca, even if you picked headlands to go to, they can swim past
you in just a few seconds and all you get is a glimpse of them as they pass you by.
So to actually spend enough time with them to film behavior was what was
going to prove to be a challenge.
On one particular day, I think was the 24th ofJuly,
and we watched as the pod came in and quickly identified there was a seal on the bottom.
And we were almost in disbelief as we watched them kind of circling
just over one spot knowing that somewhere down there there was a seal
desperately trying to escape for its life.
You just remember this huge splash,
and this is something that's maybe only been seen a few dozen times certainly
only may be filmed once or twice ever before.
I think one of my favorite bits in the film is the Vikings as they move amongst the gannet colony and when you
watch it, it's so dramatic and I think the actual shoot was
probably just as dramatic.
The most difficult job I've ever been given as a
drone operator was to fly amongst the gannets.
Naturally, I was slightly nervous, but on the positive side what we knew about gannets is that despite the
fact they're very territorial at their nesting sites, actually when they're in
the air they're quite passive, so the risk was minimized.
We also had spotters as well, but it wasn't to say it wasn't hairy, cause it was.
We had a drone which was like the ultimate game of Space Invaders, 3D Space Invaders.
There's a couple of times when some gannets flew really close to the lens and, yeah my
heart fluttered, definitely fluttered.
They were climbing up the cliffs and we
thought, 'you know they'd look so much better in barefoot,' so the two
re-enactors were slightly surprised when we said, 'could you take your shoes and
socks off and just scale this cliff for us, please?'
But they were pretty game and we checked in with all our health and safety crew and it looks amazing.
I think it's one of the really, really exciting shots in the film.
For these Icelandic sequences, it's in fact the the camera assistant, Steven McGhee Callendar, who
appears in those Viking scenes. We asked him to grow his hair long.
Steven had to walk through an arctic tern colony. Arctic Terns are very aggressive if
anything goes anywhere near their nests and they took a particular liking to
Steven's rather long hair and beard.
So it felt like they were dive-bombing him to try and pluck out some of that hair and beard possibly to
line their nests. Or maybe they just didn't like the look of him, I'm not sure.
So with the storm petrels, and to film that scene we were filming - you know
11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. as these birds only actually returned into the nest sites
under the short hours of darkness that you get in summertime.
That was a real challenge, working with low light and also obviously trying to minimize
the disturbance to the birds.
Because we were camping on Mousa, it's an uninhabited island,
we had to bring our own freshwater. We had no electricity, no heating.
So the conditions were probably not dissimilar to to something the Vikings would have experienced.
We heard over the radio that a storm was coming in,
and true to form one of the great storms came across the Atlantic.
We're talking winds of 60 miles an hour, pouring with rain,
so it proved to be a challenge to, not only film in those conditions,
but it was actually quite challenging for the animals themselves.
I brought two tents with me fortunately, but both of them were actually destroyed.
My tent was the best tent! All the other crews tents blew down.
The crew, we were stuck out in the bad weather, so I think the storm petrels, to be honest,
they had a better idea of how to hide away than the crew did.
I think the single most outstanding scene that we filmed was the the scene involving the Viking hunter,
and the reindeer herds.
Our Viking archer, who's called Dag Inge Bakke, turned up and executed this scene,
and it was just fabulous.
He had this amazing set of birchwood skis that were replicas of like a thousand-year-old Viking skis.
And these had been found at the foot of a melting glacier.
So to see this guy turn up with moose and beaver pelt boots,
with that amazing Viking clothing and then the set of Birchwood skis,
we instantly thought that this is combined with the reindeer would really create a spectacular sequence.
And just seeing that number of reindeer thundering around together...
Natural history's kind of filled everything but that felt new and fresh.
For a project like this it really draws on the passion and work of so many people.
When we started this film, I had no idea the level of stories that would unfold
as we started to dig into it.
Just the sheer resourcefulness of the Vikings
and the intimate knowledge of nature has been a real eye-opener.