Dam Busters Film Nearly Done

It’s been a pretty full-on couple of weeks – filming finished and then into the edit, which takes way longer than you might imagine.  I’ve been up at Maya Vision’s offices for the past fortnight on-and-off, and we’ve had a number of very late nights, although no-one has worked harder than our brilliant director, Aaron Young, who on Wednesday night did not even go to bed, but worked through.  I reckon he got no more than about three hours’ sleep in two days and nights.

Still, the end result is looking a hundred times better than it did ten days ago and now, as I write this, the picture is locked.  This means all the interviews, all the filming we did, all the archive and so in is set in stone and unchangeable.  All that’s left to do is honing of the script, then the voiceover on Tuesday and final compress on Wednesday and then we’re done.

A big relief for me is that Rob Owen, the Official Historian of 617 Squadron, has seen the rough cut and has given it his approval – at least, he could find no obvious howlers, just the odd Halifax bomber when it should have been a Lancaster.

It’s 59 minutes, but we have forty-one hours’ worth of recorded footage, plus all the archive and so.  And we’ve been at since last September when I went to see Les Munro – in other words, it’s a long old process, but hopefully people will think it worthwhile.

It’s out on Tuesday, 8th November on BBC 2 at 9pm.