Earth & Water is a nature documentary that tells the story of the special relationship found in the Cotswold Water Park
The Cotswold Water Park is an area of 40 square miles, with more than 150 lakes set across the countryside of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and West Oxfordshire. The lakes were created from various mining operations, excavating the glacial Jurassic limestone gravel, which had eroded from the Cotswold Hills. Due to the high water table, the vast open-pits left here became the beautiful lakes seen throughout the Cotswold Water Park.
Earth & Water was almost entirely self-shot over a total of 7 weeks spent in the Cotswold Water Park where I camped, cooked, washed and slept right in the midst of it all. I used my bike and trailer attachment to cycle all my (heavy!) gear to different filming locations around the park using roads, bridleways, footpaths, streams and anywhere else I could find a way through.
I chose to film at the CWP for a couple of main reasons: it's relative closeness to Bristol, and its abundance of animal life. Closeness was particularly important as I was without car and would have to rely on train, coach and/or bike to travel the 40 miles to my filming destination. After making the trip for the first few times, what I suspected was confirmed - train travel and bikes do not mix. Add a bike trailer full of heavy equipment into the equation and it definitely does not mix. Some rather disgruntled rail staff later, I arrived at Kemble, a quaint little village on the edge of the Water Park about a 10 mile cycle to my camping grounds.
Accomodation was a tricky one to nail down as my initial thoughts were camping in a camp site nearby. There were 2 or 3 in the general area, some much less central than others mind you. Some were only open during 'peak season' and since I was filming right in the middle of winter, this was not ideal. After several emails conversations to a few different camp sites, I had to settle for camping grounds which were a far cry from the west portion of the CWP (The 'main' bit and the area where most of the filming would take place). Eventually, after talking to one of my main contacts, Ben Welbourn of the Cotswold Water Park Trust, I was generously offered camping space in one of the park's closed sites. In the midst of an abandoned trailer park, I made this place home for the remainder of my stay. Luckily for me, electricity still ran to the trailer and on subsequent trips I was sure to pack an extension lead. This meant I could back up the days rushes in a tent before bed, rather than at a pub whilst darkness fell and still had to cycle home, although this did happen on several occasions.
Once in the park with camp set up, things became a lot more smooth. Camp was quite homely eventually. I'd clear an area for my tent, put up a washing line, collect a few slabs for a makeshift kitchen worktop, erect a tarpaulin for a kit store. In terms of a shower, I used the lakes - perilously cold but a great way to wake up. Luckily, I was given a toilet key for an unused one near to my camping grounds. I washed my clothes in fresh streams and allowed them to dry on the line. My longest stint at the park was around 12 days, with the shortest being around 4 days.
All sorts of footage had to be collected for the documentary: interviews, long-lens animal behaviour, environmental shots, quarry workings, timelapses, villages - so plenty to be getting on with. Plans for each day were quite loose and shooting was quite weather dependent. On lovely clear nights, timelapses were important as too much cloud cover (Although great when you want it!) or rain can really ruin a great night timelapse - and they come around less than you might think. On very wet days, animal activity is going to be lower, although it's important to get a diverse mix of weathers in any UK wildlife documentary, I think, especially one which charts through the seasons. Things can always crop up aswell.
My animal behaviour targets were to film Grey Herons fishing and Great Crested Grebe's exhibiting their famous courtship ritual. It was very interesting and quite wholesome researching animal behaviours and looking through studies and books to get a better idea of where I'll be able to find them, and when they'll be there. The Great Crested Grebe pair I was filming for a segment in the documentary made home on the lake right next to my camping grounds. The first initial weeks of the documentary were quite risky but really exciting! It's quite a thrill not knowing where you'll find the 'stars' of your documentary and the animal you'll spend hours watching and filming! After consulting with Ben Welbourn, he said GCG's have been seen on this particular lake the previous year and would be a good chance they'd be back. The lake conditions seemed right: lots of plant growth on the edges of the lake, low footfall from the public and good fish-stocks in the lake. GCG's are quite clumsy walkers on land due to the positioning of their feet on their body: great swimmers, poor walkers. As a side note, I only really realised the true extent of their underwater prowess when visiting the town of Strasbourg on a bicycle tour in 2018. We were in the petite-france district near the river and a GCG was fishing nearby. Due to our high position, the position of the sun and the quality of the water, the silhouette of the Grebe was easily visible when underwater. The speed at which it raced round in circles after a fish was astounding.
This brings me onto another feature of the CWP's landscape. It's very flat (hence why I had not yet seems the Grebe's underwater acrobatics until then). It's difficult to find vantage points without any hills of any considerable elevation, therefore wide landscape shots inevitably are obstructed by trees before you can see right 'down' the land. Something I had to note and why getting a drone operator was so important.
Back to the Grebes. Some morning you'd venture out with a plan in mind and on your RECCE you'd find 2 so-far-unpaired Grebe swimming close together. This usually meant dropping your plans and filming these very important stages of their relationship. This was the preliminary stages of the courtship rituals the Grebe engage in where they size each other up and decide whether they make suitable candidates of each other. On several occasions, I found pairs of Grebes on lakes surrounding the one they finally chose the build their nests on, sometimes, 3 of them together. Whether in these pairs, 'my' pair were there, I don't know, Grebes are fairly hard to distinguish unless they have obvious markings. GCG's are not sexually-dimorphic so telling who's who takes some work, especially when - like a lot of bird species - share roosting responsibilities evenly. During my observations, one adult would go out and fish, relax and clean themselves, whilst another roosted, then the non-roosting adult would relieve the other of his/her duties.
Although animals in the CWP have fairly regular contact with humans, they've still retained their caution and birds are VERY nervy compared to their suburban brothers and sisters. I think the SAS should practice stealth training by sneaking up on Herons 'cus those things flush when a twig snaps! You could probably sit down for tea with the one in my local park in Bristol, it doesn't care! This meant a hide was needed. Whilst I wasn't a rich filmmaker, I was a resourceful one. 'Proper' hides were too expensive so the next best thing was a £20 camping toilet tent I bought off eBay with a flap cut into it to stick a lens through. I would set this up at the side of a lake or river and wait for something to happen. I remember one day fondly where I must have waited about 8 hours for a Heron that never came. The lovely little lake I waited at was a spot I had flushed a Heron several times on my passing but no such luck on that day, although I did see a Little Egret there on a few occasions.
Equipment-wise, I had a bit of everything really. Filmed mostly on an FS5 @ HD 10-Bit 4.2.2 with hispeed footage at 240fps 8-Bit 4.2.0. Timelapses were shot on a 5DII. My long lens was a Sigma 150-600 with a Tokina TC (Not sure whether it was 1.4x or 2x) which made the image quite soft in places, especially at the end of the focal range. Unfortunately the Canon TC's didn't fit the Sigma lens due to the opening on the back of the lens to be too narrow to accommodate the protruding glass on the Canon TC. Sigma and Tokina's TCs are flat and fit no problem. The tripod was a bit of a dodgy Manfrotto full plate head that didn't pan well but on the upside, it didn't move when I didn't want it to. Several other lens were used on Earth & Water, including a set of Cine Primes, a lovely Canon 70-200 II, a Samyang 14mm and a few odd primes here and there. For sound, I used a Zoom H5 with Sennheiser boom mic for ambient sound and in-camera recording. A Kessler CineSlider was used for recording the intro slider sections. This is a particularly heavy and awkward thing to carry through mud trails and the back-lanes of the CWP - I don't miss this. A typical days carry comprises of a FS5 with case, lenses with case, audio recorder with boom mic, and tripod plus any other little pieces of equipment. My trailer was a great help throughout the filming for the documentary. If you were in the CWP during the winter and summer of 2017, you'd probably had seen me on my bike and trailer on the Spine road going from lake to lake.
There were hard times: punctures, racing the darkness home, tipped bikes and trailer (They go together), running out of mobile battery and stuck in the middle of nowhere, running out of fuel for my stove and eating cold food, creeping over to one side of the lake only to flush every bird in a 250m radius, missing trains home, running out of money and having to stretch out food supplies, riding down busy roads in pitch black with no lights (Not recommended!), -5C nights in a tent and freezing mornings and everything BUT that is all made completely justified by the documentary I produced and the experience of it all. It's those moments, the good and the bad that make it the briliant experience it was. It was a real slog and I did it the hard way without a car or enough money really and came out with a documentary I'm proud of.
It's the making of this documentary that reconfirmed to me that I want to be a wildlife filmmaker.
Special thanks: Cotswold Water Park Trust & Ben Welbourn
Hills Group & Peter Andrew Gane Trust
Thanks to: Danny Houghton (Hills Group) Alan Down, Cleeve Nursery Ben Welbourn (Cotswold Water Park Trust) Christchurch Studios Jill Bewley & Bob Bewley Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust Wiltshire Wildlife Trust CWP Sightings - Bob Philpot Gloster Birder Library of Congress - Archive Photographs
Colin Chadwick
Credits: Creator - Paul D. Scott Composer - John Partridge Graphics Designer - David Czobel (onehnc.com) Narrator - Phil James Script Supervisor - David Cann Sound Mixer - Barnaby Malins Sound Designer - Barnaby Malins Camera Operator - Paul D. Scott Sound Recordist - Paul D. Scott Matt Pidala - Colourist Bart Chomiszczak - Editor Drone Operator - Matt Pidala