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The making of The Patient Fisherman

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At BIAFF 2015 Jill Lampert won  5 stars and the AKM music award for The Patient Fisherman .

Still from 'The Patient Fisherman'.

Film making is my passion. When I'm not making films or learning about making films, I like to be out and about watching wildlife.

Still from 'Payient Fisherman'.

The goings on of creatures around us feel to me like secret parallel worlds and I love to peep into them. Making wildlife films is the perfect way to combine my favourite pastimes.

For my next wildlife film I wanted a creature whose daily habits are not very well known. It needed to be something I could realistically get enough access to in order to make an interesting film. Just before Christmas 2012 the Grey Heron sprung to mind.

First Steps

I was given a little book about herons for Christmas. I studied it, researched on the internet and made a list of the behaviours that I would like to capture on film. I also told everyone I met that I was looking for herons. People were incredibly helpful and gave me all sorts of suggestions about where I could find herons. I heard about the feeding of herons at Muncaster Castle in the Lake District, heronries within reach of Birmingham (where I live), a heronry which was visible from the roadside in Pwllheli, Wales and much, much more. I started filming in January 2013.

Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.
Bad Decision?

Grey herons are incredibly shy. This meant that it was very, very difficult to get close to them. I would go to my local park, and if I was lucky, find a heron. I would set up my tripod as stealthily as I could, compose a shot, and maybe even get it into focus. But many, many times the heron had flown away before I could press 'record'. It was SO frustrating!

Guerilla filming

Then someone told me about a park where the herons are so used to people that you can get as close to them as you can to ducks and geese. I made a special trip to this park, which was in another city several hours journey away. If I had sought permission to film in the park, as far as I recall it would have cost me something like £250 for half a day. So I decided not to get permission. I feared that if I used a tripod I would very likely be challenged by a park keeper, so I handheld my Panasonic SD900, hoping I'd look like a tourist, and imagining that they couldn't possibly stop every tourist from taking a few shots of video. To stabilise the camcorder I used a home made bean bag concealed in a plastic supermarket carrier bag.

Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.
Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.

The herons were wonderful. I managed to get some super close-ups. It was a terrific day.

Far far away

Herons build their nests in heronries which are usually only visible from a distance. For example they are often in tall trees on an island in the middle of a lake. Even if it was physically possible to get close, it would certainly be very much discouraged because there would be a huge risk of frightening the parent birds who might then abandon their nests and any nestlings. I did try to get special permission to get close to one, but it was refused for that reason. So filming had to be done from quite far away. It was impossible to get close-ups of nests with my Panasonic SD900. Its 20x Zoom was not enough. So I used a Canon XL2 with a 300mm lens. This is a Standard Definition camcorder. Its great advantage is that with this lens it has huge magnification. It has a 1/3" chip with a crop factor of 7.2. This means that using the 300mm lens it has a whopping 43.2x magnification!

Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.
Pwllheli heronry from the roadside with the Panasonic SD900 on extreme wide angle. The red circle encloses the herons seen right.

Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.
Herons at Pwllheli, showing the detail which is circled in red in the picture to left. This is the Panasonic SD900 on maximum Intelligent Zoom.

Soft shots

However, I found it extremely difficult to focus accurately at that distance. I could hardly see the chicks or even their parents in the tiny LCD screen. There was no focus assist to tell me whether I was in focus or not. My skills were simply not up to getting a sharp picture every time. So the finished film includes some shots which are below the standard I would normally feel was acceptable. I made the decision to leave them in because I feel that their content contributes significantly to the overall strength of the film.

Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.

Patient Jill

I would get up early in the morning if the weather forecast was good, and drive to some spot where I hoped to see herons. I might stand there with camera(s) set up for two or three hours and absolutely nothing would happen. Sometimes I would travel long distances. Twice I travelled to Pwllheli in Wales. It is so far away from Birmingham that each time I stayed overnight in a hotel. On those occasions I would spend around five or six hours a day watching the nests, with cameras ready. I might come away with a few seconds of interesting film. In all, over a six month period,I went to something between fifteen and twenty locations in search of herons. Some of them many times.

Still from 'Patient Fisherman'.
Me as an on screen presenter?

My original plan was to have myself as a presenter in this film. I mentioned this to a friend who is a successful prime time TV documentary maker, and asked for his help. He got interested in it and thought it would be good if I played the role of a bird watcher taking the viewer with me on my own journey of discovery. So he came to stay at my house and filmed me a bit in the house, and then early the next morning we went out and he filmed me travelling in the car and then talking about herons and "looking at herons" (tight angles so you wouldn't realise it was the wrong place!). It was fun. Then I tried to edit that together. I'm afraid I didn't like it. I couldn't really bear seeing so much of myself on screen. I regret that I wasted my friend's time. Luckily he's kind and he has forgiven me.

Sneaking in facts

However I did like the idea of taking the viewers along my journey, and so I stuck with that. It helped me to sneak in facts which would hardly feel like 'learning'. I also tried to give it wider audience appeal by including some myths and historical facts and not just a load of natural history facts. At a fairly early stage I wrote down an outline of how I would structure the documentary. This was revised many times. I would do a bit of editing as I went along, and then things I discovered or shots I took affected my view of how to order things.

Narration

When the filming was finished (around June 2013) I edited it more or less into the shape I wanted it and then worked on the narration. I wrote the narration many times. I would record it and try it out with the visuals. That would often lead to changes in both the editing of the visuals and the wording of the voiceover.

Soundtrack

I toyed with the idea of having some music, and I tried out several different songs/pieces. Nothing felt right. So I abandoned that and built up a 'nature' soundtrack. Mostly the live sounds of herons were marred by traffic noise. Very little of it could be used. Instead I used sound from other sources: this included foley sounds, bits of sound borrowed from some of my other films, and heron sound effects from sound effect libraries.

Test Audience

When it was 'nearly finished' I showed it to relatives and friends and put it on YouTube unlisted so that distant film making friends could comment on it. This was quite scary. But incredibly useful. People were kind enough to be frank about the disastrous bits, and many very constructive suggestions were made. I didn't take up every suggestion, but I do think that the film is very, very much better as a result of revisions made in response to audience comments.

Jill Lampert
March 2015


Watch the film online

Click here: THE PATIENT FISHERMAN


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Page updated on 25 April 2015
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