Saharan Diary

This part of the film is titled ‘The Day We Got Lost and The Man Who Broke Down’. As the title suggests, there was plenty of drama. This is the sort of day where things just pop up and change the scheme of things in your mind. I believe that […]

After a journey through an evolving landscape, we end up setting up camp in a river bed near Ighrem. It is here that I find a giant bone that I decide to take back to England for the archaeology department at work. They are less impressed than I was at […]

It is Good Friday and we spend the day heading further across the Atlas. Paul has a spark plug problem and for a while we are held up on the road to Sidi Farr. It is frustrating, as I film the event to illustrate the dependency that we have upon […]

We make a fairly easy ascent into the Atlas mountains and I begin to get excited that the landscape is changing dramatically, which is exciting for my feature. I certainly wasn’t expecting snow in Africa! I start to witness much more begging than before, and it immediately feels difficult. I […]

I loved being in this city. The challenge here was to somehow capture its vibrancy, which was practically impossible. The problem is that the atmosphere is built by the smells, the sounds and the chaos that surrounds the medina. This is incredibly difficult to capture and my only solution was […]

As we go into Morocco I am presented with my first challenge – customs. It is notoriously hard at any African border and the perhaps the reputation precedes them among travellers. I remember being nervous just from hearing other stories. As a rule, filming anywhere near officialdom in any country […]

Once we are near Gibraltar I decide that I’ll talk a little to camera in a kind of diary style fashion. I really loathe this type of thing as it has become quite common on television, but my pieces to camera ended up being quite integral to the feature. In […]

We head from Bilbao towards Madrid and camp a bit further in St. Elena. I film loads of footage at this stage which ultimately makes up seconds in the title sequence. I film about three hours of footage before we enter Morocco and it ends up being five minutes of […]

There is not you can do with 24 hours on a boat. After my twentieth walk around the shop I go upstairs to spend the remaining 23 hours in the restaurant, cinema and deck. I’m thinking what to make of this film…