In reply to Fraser:
Thanks for all the comments everyone - great to hear you enjoyed it. It really sounds like watching it live was what made it more exciting, so I'm glad we put in all the effort to do it that way. I was blown away by the level of effort put in by all the production team. I can tell you it was no day at the office for any of us. 50 or 60 people sweated blood for months or some cases a couple of years to make it happen.
> I was very disappointed that you couldn't actually see the crux move on pitch 2. Why didn't they have a camera in position, or adjust the boom-cam so that the viewers could see how crap the holds were or how hard the move was? Could they not have had something prepared earlier in the week demonstrating, in a clear and interesting way, just what was being asked of the climbers?
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Fraser I think your comment underestimates the difficulties involved in filming on the cliff and the live nature of the broadcast. It took 600 feet of rope and about 3 racks of aid gear for me to rig a rope across the roofs on the line we climbed. The filming lines for the pitch 2 cameras went through completely blank roofs. I back-aided the roof to clean it using bird beaks and rurps. It's one thing for me to be sketching about on A4 territory on beaks. If I strip a piece and go for a giant tarzan swing during preparation, I've just lost a day and had a frightener. But It's not safe to have cameramen with heavy kit sitting on marginal aid gear. So the positions are slightly dictated by the nearest good gear. On vertical cliffs it's no problem to get to any position you like, but on roofs it's not.
The plan was that I would iron out the correct shots for the crux section during the week before with the director as I was the only one who knew what that section would be like, but the day I arrived I was hit by a rock and spent the week lying down with my bandaged ankle above my head. To be honest, with my ankle in the state it was, It was really lucky I managed to do the crux at all. The director I'm sure would have been preparing the shots to catch a fall rather than success as that's what I'd said was the most likely outcome. So you can blame me!