CARDBOARD CUT-OUT Director Franny Armstrong and presenter George Monbiot with three ‘unavailable’ live interview subjects: PM Boris Johnson, Environment Agency chief executive Sir James Bevan and Noble Foods Group CEO Duncan Everett
poet Benjamin Zephaniah and former Undertones lead singer (and now river pollution campaigner) Feargal Sharkey. Featured is a specially composed song by Charlotte Church and Owen Sheers, titled The River Is Us, which Church sang live for the documentary with a six-person backing choir. Last year, raw sewage was released into English rivers over 400,000 times, for more than three million hours. Rivercide set out to show how the agencies charged with protecting our rivers have been under-funded and under-resourced, so are failing to adequately enforce action against polluters. The documentary also shone a light on the campaigners working to turn around the fate of our rivers. Created by Spanner Films and Empathy Media, Rivercide was produced by Nicola Cutcher – and the technical director was Peter Armstrong, director Franny Armstrong’s father. Both father and daughter
are experienced in broadcasting, with Peter having worked at the BBC for 20 years as a producer and head of department – and, latterly, across many areas of independent production. In 2004, he was awarded the Bafta Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in interactive multimedia. Normally – or certainly pre-Covid – a large-scale, multi-site live event like this would require several OB trucks, bandwidth from a satellite, and a crew of possibly 100 people. Instead, the production team comprised five live cameras (a mix of iPhone 11 and 12 Pros), a live drone operator, sound recordist, lighting cameraman for the Charlotte Church sequence, music producer, script supervisor, pre-recorded drone, pre-recorded camera, three production coordinators and an archive photo/ video team. But why did the producers decide to take on the massive challenge of going out live? “It’s a good question,” says Peter Armstrong. “It’s fairly intangible as to what advantage a live show brings. But we just felt it gave it an edge, the risk that we felt was picked up by the audience. They could see that somehow it wasn’t like a slick documentary, putting it on in order to persuade them of something – which is always the danger with environment- focused material. Rather, it was something we were
GOING WITH THE STREAM The production team set up a small portable control room, with main connectivity through the cloud via Amazon Web Services
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