Life is all about packing cases

by Jasper Montana, Technical Coordinator

Metal pins are slowly spreading across the map of the world in our office – each one representing a trip, a recce, a shoot, and another sequence of Human Planet recorded onto what have now become many kilometres of magnetic video tape.   For each of us on the Human Planet team, each pin represents a different moment of time.  

For those who went on location, it may be a life changing adventure, a harrowing experience, or a drop in the ocean.   For those left in Bristol or Cardiff, it might be a sigh of relief as the crew depart, a moment of pause in a quiet office, or a stressful planning process which lingers long after the crew depart, when phone calls from the Jungle require a mortally wounded shoot to be remotely stitched back together.

So far I've been to Mongolia and Yap and I'm about to go to Australia!

 On many occasions the pin represents for me long days of getting a plethora of filming equipment squeezed into the smallest possible cases for transport to location.   So I was going to write a post about how the human desire to make order out of chaos can be summed up in the line ‘life is all about packing cases’ but I thought I’d just make a time-lapse video instead.

 Enjoy.

 Packing cases for a shoot to Algeria - timelapse video coming soon

 Only a handful of pins are left in the jar – who knows what each has in store.