Okay, where are we? The filming was constantly hampered not only by questions over security and safety but mainly due to the deluge of rain that shut off the very road that I needed to access in order to get the site I had selected. As such, when an opportunity came to film I had to grab it. This included racing out so quickly in the mist at sunrise one morning, that I omitted to take any gloves and my fingers nearly broke off in the freezing cold standing for hours on top of a hill fort with my camera. At another point I had to haul my teenage son out of bed who was helping me and double the financial incentive in order to get to the Plain just before the morning sun broke through. But bit by bit I had the footage. At other points I had to trawl through decades of early Porton Down field trials kept on film at the Imperial War Museum covering early experiments and training exercises with soldiers that were anything but pleasant to go through.
At one point though I discovered film footage of the most surreal exercise clearly carried out on Salisbury Plain. I knew I had to incorporate it in the film and tried every avenue I could to get license to use it. Obviously many artists make videos using a montage of clips without gaining license from the copyright holder to do so but as I was working with the Imperial War Museum and the DSTL media department at Porton Down, which has a large section whose sole duty is to chase up the illegal use of their material, I wasn’t taking any chances. In the end I had no choice but to re-enact the experiment myself which actually brought a totally new dimension to the entire work.
During this time Prudence Maltby, who was the instigator of the project, was constantly working to build connections, follow-up areas of interest, hold meetings with potential collaborators etc. On the advice of the Council we went for further funding to support a particular set of workshops to be held with an organisation which supports the homeless, a connection I have built up over recent years. We literally worked our socks off and still are, for me, having to dash out for instance, one evening to catch a particular council meeting and personally argue our case for funding when it came up right at the end of a three hour meeting of local issues.
One of the highlights of our research has been a personal tour of the Defence Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear centre in Winterbourne Gunner where soldiers, journalists and anyone working in the path of chemical warfare are trained to survive. Being shown round at the end of the day, when the building was almost empty, we had the opportunity to look through their collection of equipment and protective masks and clothing from World War I to the current day. We talked for some time with the member of staff, who was incredibly generous with his time, and I discovered when we chatted, that he had been nearby when a dear friend was murdered on the streets of Belfast in the last days of the troubles. It’s a small world indeed, and a sad world at times.
For a couple of months during this time I lived and breathed this work, constantly editing and re-editing it in my head, rearranging the footage and the narrative again and again, going to sleep at night and running the work in my mind from start to finish to find a pattern that felt right. In the end, which often happens with video, the various scenes and recordings etc fell naturally into place with very little manoeuvring on my part. In a sense, although it still involved endless painful fine tuning in the editing, the film felt like it dictated its own rhythm.
