Thursday 29 May
“So of course we arrived at the airfield on Thursday morning to heavy grey skies and light drizzle. I think we did one jump as soon as we got there just to get one in.
We had two professional parachuting camera operators wearing helmet cams who were doing the main following shot. Without them we had nothing. And I think that on the first jump those cameras didn't work. If we jumped out of the aircraft and we had no shots, that was a ‘moment'.
I don't think we did another jump until late afternoon. We just hung around waiting for the weather to clear. No one wanted to ask what the forecast was. We felt that around teatime it was probably 50/50 at best. We went into the truck and practiced our contingencies.
But by whoever's good graces we had a little weather window arrived at six or seven o'clock and the clouds started to go away. I am told that if you looked at a satellite shot of Spain it was thick cloud with a very small hole which was basically us.
We did a jump at around 6pm. It wasn't perfect. We got up there and we were ready to jump but the guys said they needed another minute and a half. It was at that crucial point where we knew we wouldn't complete the jump if it had been live.
It was a good practice so we went into our weather back-up mode - cutting to the cloud shot and put over the caption [saying we couldn't continue] as if it was live. We tried to make all the rehearsals fell as real as possible, which is part of the key to this. The idea was every jump on Thursday was live rehearsals.
We didn't know what to think at this point. We might get half way there and fail because of the weather. Or we might get out the aircraft and it not look quite as great as we'd seen it before.
The way to make any live event is, there are so many things which are luck. There are a million individual entities that could make it less good or take it off air. So all you can do is manufacturer a bit of luck for yourself.
So 45 minutes before we were due to go on air the cloud is looking good, the jump looks likely we gathered everyone together.
There was 18 jumpers, the flying crew, the camera teams, the audio crew, the uplink crew, the guy with the generator, everybody from North One and 4Creative and I asked everybody to not think it was going to be alright. But to take this hour to check every battery and every cable and go through what their job was going to be for the three minutes.
It's getting people nervous so that they check everything but not so despondent that they can't believe it's going to happen. I think my words were: “If this goes wrong let it be because it's cloudy or because something that nobody could have any control over happened but please don't let it be because you forgot to change a battery or you didn't check that cable.” Hopefully that made a lot of our luck for us.”
The attitude of the professional aviators was so good. It was completely understanding that it's only television. That it wasn't worth doing anything we hadn't rehearsed already or taking any chances. They said, if we can do it, we will do it.”
The Honda “Difficult is worth doing” commercial is a North One production in association with 4 Creative.
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