Another week, another road trip with Phil Wilkinson.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve travelled across the UK with Phil and Neil Cuthbert on a wide range of PA Cooperative Ltd video projects.
We’ve been to Inverness and North Wales, Aberdeenshire and Northumberland, London and Morayshire, the Scottish Borders and Perthshire, up a cold snowy hill in Dumfries & Galloway - and today, a hospital in Fife.
We’ve filmed in lots of forests, on wind farm sites, and woodfuel yards, up hills and down dales … in sun, rain, wind, hail and snow.
Phil’s drone once got carried off by the wind (but came home) and he once lost his specs on a forest road, but they landed where the wheels of a fully-loaded timber wagon drove either side of them, not over them.
We watched some great live music in Inverness, then had a van karaoke singalong on the way back down the A9 - and we’ve stopped off at a fair few charity shops for Phil to search for bargains.
Oh, and we’ve made some great short films along the way - thanks to careful planning, clear briefing and working hard to always understand what a client wants. But above all else, the high quality of the films is down to Phil. He's a brilliant technician, but what really makes the films sing is his innate ability to spot the angles I'd never see, and capture those spontaneous human moments that bring a video to life.
This does sometimes involve him disappearing into the woods or up a hill for a while and leaves Neil & I wondering where he is! But inevitably, the shots he gets while AWOL turn out to be just what we need. You can't teach that. Neil and I call Phil 'The Magician' because he just has this special power to lift things way beyond the ordinary.
These trips have been a lot of fun, and we're off to the Highlands and Aberdeenshire again in the next few weeks, which definitely beats sitting at your desk for days on end.
What a privilege to work with people you like, to travel to beautiful places, to have a laugh along the way - and to produce work that you’re proud of.
