Making Smoke.

I’ve known for more than a week that The Gunpowder Mills would be disrupted today; a film crew were due to move in. We took Merlin there for his constitutional to see just what was going on. The place was crawling with security men who all seemed to have been indoctrinated with the philosophy of Dale Carnegie, author of The Salesman’s Bible, a.k.a. “How to Make Friends and Influence People.” They were all very helpful and friendly but seemed to know very little about the project; I suppose they were happy just as long as their wages were paid promptly. There was a staff of around a hundred there, mostly idle apart from the guys running about with trays of coffee and food, it smelt as though the sandwich filling was mostly garlic.

It appears that they were filming a pilot for a TV series set in the eighteenth century - today’s plan being to take thirteen hours to film a four minute scene. I was looking for a vantage point to blip some of the action but inadvertently walked in front of a spotlight, the radiant heat from it made me check up on it’s power, it was eighteen kilo-Watts; it seems that they didn’t want the sun shining from the South.

The blip is of the man who was operating the smoke machine although the effect they were after was of mist rising off the river. Out of shot, on the far side of the bridge, is a man with a large fan, wafting the mist in the right direction; for all we could see, there may well have been dozens of men with large fans .....

I have just posted yesterday’s blip, “Sunshine Over Penicuik.”