Here’s the first promotional material for Iolo’s Beacons that I worked on last year. The actual title of the series is Iolo’s Brecon Beacons. Some people might not understand that the shortened version is about a National Park in Wales.
The first programme airs on January 11th at 7.30 p.m.
Filming the Series – Iolo’s Beacons
I will go through some of the more interesting filming assignments in future posts. The first will be about the clips on the BBC website. Wildlife filming for the series was varied and often challenging. We were not very successful in our attempts to film close shots of cuckoos calling. There are easier places to film cuckoos. On the other hand we had fantastic encounters with dotterel and foxes. Stalking red deer in the snow was very challenging. Again, we went in pursuit of great grey shrike.
The series is not just about wildlife. The Brecon Beacons is a fascinating National Park, and Iolo’s take on it is typically engaging. Apart from the landscape, which is evident wherever you drive in the Beacons, there are the people. It must be difficult for the contributors sometimes. There was one instance where we sat on a hillside for many hours. The information we had was that a ring ousel would feed on a pasture at some point during the day. Everyone knows that we might fail completely. The contributor had to leave before the ring ousel appeared. Just as we were about to give up the bird did appear, ate a couple of worms and flew off…and that was it. Such is wildlife filming most of the time, but we did film it! I can remember the sequence of events in great detail. Frustratingly I could hear the bird well before I saw it, which often means you will not see it, but we did.
More of this later.
