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Time and motion

After they'd packed up the crew's kit was quite compact
(bottle for scale) - but this was still no iPhone job
Last week I had the fascinating experience of a film crew coming round to my house. I've done TV interviews in the past, but never had this level of direct exposure to the visual media at work.

I've had suggestions that I was engaged in an episode of Wife Swap or something similar. In fact it's both much less and much more at the same time. It's less because what I did will probably result in 10 seconds on screen, and it's more because this wasn't Channel 4 but a role with a Hollywood connection.

I'll reveal more when we get closer to the date, but the interview was for one of those bonus features you get on a movie DVD. It was about time travel and will accompany a science fiction movie that will be in the cinemas in September. What made it rather exciting was that I was sent a preview DVD of the film (with dire warnings about what would happen if it found its way into circulation, given it's not even in cinemas yet) - and I was then to be interviewed both on time travel in general and the movie in particular.

What I found particularly interesting is that old chestnut that everyone says, but it's hard to believe, about just how long it takes to get a relatively small amount of moving pictures captured. The crew were at my house for around three and a half hours. In that time, admittedly we did get over 40 minutes of interview, but I suspect that will end up as a few seconds on screen. So much of the time is just taken getting the lighting and the setup right - and this was just with a handful of people involved. Suddenly the fact that Hollywood movies cost millions of dollars to make doesn't seem so ridiculous.

It's funny, given we were discussing time, that this all a matter of time - time and motion.
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