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Incredible India

This was my first time in India and it did not disappoint, Ive been all over the world filming and the sights, sounds and smells of india are going to stay with me for a long time.  Its probably the most colourful and sense assaulting place ive experienced, and ive got to say I loved it.  I got slightly overexcited about eating curry for a month as well, so much so that i made it every day at home the week before we left, (my poor family), I hadn't quite thought it through, i was to be eating curry 3 meals a day for the next month. Turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing !!!

My new favourite monkey, The Langur

I was here for a BBC landmark series currently called ‘One Planet’, and we wanted to film two sequences on Urban Monkeys across india, Macaques and Langurs, and experience Holi festival.  This filming took us from rooftops to ground level, suing long lens, MoVi and Cable Dolly, trying to follow our characters from Jaipur to Jodhpur. there is nothing like seeing your gear on a long rope suspended above a city to concentrate the mind.

Cable dolly

Holi came at the end of the shoot, which in many ways was lucky as having now experienced it, it definitely posed the greatest risk to the equipiment, I was falsely under the impression that Holi was all about paint powder, but it appears water has just as much of a part to play and its one of the main things that cameras and MoVI’s don’t like so myself and Louis Labroom came up with our slightly heath robinson Paint and waterproofing. Also we hadn't thought about the fact that the local children had also been planning for a long time their own plans for Holi, mainly focussing on water balloons filled with paint solution, fiendish !!! But we bobbed and weaved, duck and dived and took the occasional hit for the team and the kit survived, although has looked better.

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We were lucky that we had the chance to have 2 attempts at filming Holi in different locations and after the first run we quickly revised our paint proofing as within the first 10mins its inadequacies were shown up. So it was back to the drawing board, to prepare for the next onslaught which would be far less tame. Resulting in a full on street party, paint everywhere and was a complete blast !!!!! And is one of the few time I've been expected to dance while operating the MoVI :-)