It's always exciting to start a new project and after the success of Four Seasons on the Hampshire Avon we were keen to start our next production. After months of planning, we started shooting this summer 2010. With Magical Waters we are keen to throw our net a little wider, to capture some of the beautiful fishing we have in our country. We are therefore filming at different locations, rivers and stillwaters. One of the main features of Magical Waters is to show what happens below the water when a fish takes your bait; stalking fish is probably the most exciting element of fishing. We called upon one of the countrys expert stalkers, John Searl. John has an impressive list of big fish, most of them caught whilst stalking. At the moment I'm sworn to secrecy, but I can reveal we have captured some fantastic sequences of John catching some pretty impressive fish. John will be joined by various friends along the way.
Magical Waters is being filmed in HD, this will make our images even more stunning. As it's being filmed in HD we have had to make considerable investment in new hardware, I won't bore you with the details but we now have editing software the BBC use with terabytes of RAID storage.
25th February 2011
Now we are about 18 months into filming Magical Waters and, where we live at least, the snow has gone, catkins are dangling from the trees and snowdrops are popping up in cheery clumps all over the place. We have our fingers crossed that the terrible blizzards that blighted this winter will not return, but unfortunately there's still a long way to go before we can really know that we are past the worst.
It would be fair to say that winter is a cruel time for wildlife and although not to the same extent, pretty bad for wildlife filmakers too. Quite apart from the fact that it is so hard to get motivated when temperatures are plunging below zero and the option to light a roaring fire and stay indoors is so attractive, we also have to deal with day upon day of flat grey light. We rely so much on great light conditions that it's impossible to underestimate their value on film. The difference between a glorious sequence, with vibrant colour and a just another dull dreary drizzly english day in mid-winter...well...it's the difference between night and day.
Having said that, the beauty of the countryside is wherever we find it and there have been some wonderful sights, like the bittern that we filmed recently. One of our rarest birds, there are only a couple of thousand individuals left in the country because of the loss of their reedy habitat. Or the sequence we took of the ice-age fish, the grayling in bright sunshine, when the landscape was snow-coated, as though a white duvet had been layed all over England. That day felt very special, because blue skies had appeared, just for a few hours between snowfalls and there were no cars on the roads apart from ours, so the air was clean of scent and sound, apart from the crunching of our boots on the ice.
Looking back, though, we already have some very important news to report. For some years we have suspected that our friend and artist John Searl has been carrying a magic wand in his tackle bag. How else could he have conjoured so many specimen fish to take his bait, while we had been struggling so badly? The evidence for this unnatural ability is in the capture of a 25lb pike, a 2lb roach, a 14lb barbel and a 6lb chub, all in front of our cameras, in just one season. And lest we forget, he uses only the simplest tackle available, a minimum of bait and...most importantly, normally fishes one of the hardest waters in the United Kingdom, the Hampshire Avon. Crystal clear water, cormorant and otter predation, water abstraction and fish farming have made this lovely water an impossibly difficult river on which to be successful.
And just to make our point even clearer, we actually filmed a salmon underwater, watched closely by an eel, taking John's bait. As far as we know, nobody has ever filmed a sequence like this in the UK before now.
If John doesn't have a magic wand, then what on earth does he have? You will be fascinated to see how he does it.
Of course, Magical Waters is not just about specimen hunting, or the chalk streams of Wessex. We are looking foward to filming a SECRET LAKE this spring...oh yes, the ultimate dream of every angler in the country. It is an old lake that lies on private land somewhere on the Jurassic Coast and according to its owner, hasn't been fished for over twenty years. We have no idea what it contains, apart from the owner's accounts...of very big fish sighted, but never caught. We have to assume that those fish are of a size big enough to intrigue any angler, because the owner described them as: 'fat as pigs and longer than my arm'. Obviously, we are thinking that they must be very big carp and we will set out to catch them. But then, what else resides in that mysterious lake? We would like to imagine that there could be a huge perch, a rudd that would not fit into a landing net, or even a gudgeon of record-breaking proportions...but of course, that would be too much to expect.
And that's not even the tip of the iceburg, as far as we are concerned. We have plans to film on the River Wye...in one of the world's most ghostly and beautiful valleys.... and after that...well, hold on a second....
Taking a deep breath...yes we have a huge vision for Magical Waters and it will take some time to finish.
We will keep you posted about how we are getting on, but it is only a matter of fact to say that our story has completely outstripped our expectations, to such an extent that we have already extended our thinking beyond Magical Waters...into much deeper waters...
Watch this space....
Paul and Jason