1. BEHIND THE SCENES EDEN
42 | Broadcast TECH | September/October 2016 broadcastnow.co.uk/broadcasttech
C
hannel 4’s latest fixed-rig show,
Eden, is billed as a social experiment
in which a group of 23 strangers try
to build a society in the Scottish Highlands.
The show is filmed partly using remotely
controlled cameras and partly by embedded
camera crew, and the site covers a significant
part of a remote, 600-acre region of Scot-
land’s rugged west coast.
With such a vast expanse to cover, plus the
need for the rig to be in place for a year, the
Keo Films production made unique demands
on the facilities firms hired to capture and
craft footage of the cast’s activities.
One of those companies is NEP UK,
the outside broadcast services provider that
also supplies robotic camera systems, semi-
permanent studio installations and kit and
expertise for fixed-rig shows. Its credits
include the C4 series Educating… and reality
formats Love Island (ITV) and Big Brother
(C5), but NEP UK commercial director Mick
Bass describes Eden as “without doubt the
most ambitious fixed-rig project NEP UK
has ever undertaken”.
Preparation began in September, with
recces by Bass and NEP UK technical
manager Trevor Bell. “Based on some of the
stuff we’d done with [executive producer]
Liz Foley in the past, she called me, so I
went up first and walked the course and was
gobsmacked by the scale of what they were
undertaking,” he says.
The core of Eden is the “hands-off experi-
ence”, says Foley: “This cast is unproduced.
How they choose to spend their days, weeks,
months and, ultimately, year is entirely up to
them, including where they live.”
That required NEP to build what Bass
describes as a “durable yet unobtrusive fixed
rig” with video, audio and control technology
in a number of locations across the forest.
How we rigged the
Scottish Highlands
A year-long production on a 600-acre site in the wilds of Scotland was
one of the most ambitious projects ever for the facilities companies
working on C4’s latest fixed-rig series. Phil Rhodes reports
Eden: cast and embedded
camera crew are spending a
year in the Scottish Highlands

2. BEHIND THE SCENES EDEN
September/October 2016 | Broadcast TECH | 43broadcastnow.co.uk/broadcasttech
IN-DEPTH
And because of the requirement for a
“hands-off” approach, minimal intrusion
into the area once cameras started rolling
was essential. “System reliability and minimal
maintenance were key,” says Bass.
NEP worked with the production team to
anticipate where best to place the cameras,
and ensure there was enough power avail-
able to run them. Installation began with
power in February this year. Bass credits the
director of Initiative-Electrical for extending
the national grid about a kilometre and a
half. “They took that to the [control room]
compound, then pulled three-phase power
right into the centre of the forest another
1.5km away,” he says.
NEP UK provided the set-up for the
production gallery, 3km from the main site,
which housed the master control room, the
monitor gallery, sound control, ingest,
administration and welfare facilities.
It also built five hubs that would serve as
the nexus for the 45 newly purchased (to
reduce the chance of failure), remotely con-
trolled Panasonic AW-HE40S cameras, pro-
viding power and routing facilities via which
pictures would be routed to the control room.
Each hub also dealt with connections from
the Sennheiser 416 effects microphones and
radio receivers for the cast’s body-worn mics.
Bass is, understandably, reluctant to reveal
specifics of the hub hardware itself. “The
value is in what we did before we got there,”
he says, referring to the plans made during
bi-weekly technical meetings.
Connection of cameras to hubs and then
to the control facility was via optical fibre.
“In situ, we have about 22km of 24-core
fibre,” notes Bass. “It’s about 800km of fibre
if you count all the strands.”
The team chose to house each hub in a
garden shed to allow technicians to perform
equipment set-up and the delicate work of
fibre termination in comparative comfort.
The conditions would, regardless, affect the
tools used to terminate optical fibres.
“We had a deadline to meet and suddenly
we were down a fibre splicer,” recalls Bass.
After replacing the equipment, around 1,000
fibre terminations were successfully made.
Even camera mounts in the Highlands
were a challenge. “The trees fall over,”
says technical manager Jason Spencer, who
built much of the equipment as it was deliv-
ered to site. “There are four iron tent pegs
and we had to drive poles five feet into the
ground because it’s sand.”
Bass says that while rain spots were inevit-
able, despite having imported weatherproof
camera housings from the US, long-term
‘I went up first and
walked the course and
was gobsmacked by
the scale of what they
were undertaking’
Mick Bass, NEP UK
Panasonic AW-HE4OS:
durable, yet unobtrusive

3. BEHIND THE SCENES EDEN
September/October 2016 | Broadcast TECH | 45broadcastnow.co.uk/broadcasttech
IN-DEPTH
staining could be a more serious problem,
given the reticence of the production to send in
maintenance crew. “On the first day it started
raining, we thought: ‘Oh, here’s the acid test, if
this dries all spotty it’s going to look terrible.”
Wireless packs worn by the cast include
radio mics, GPS tracking for safety and audio
recording to SD cards during periods of no
radio coverage. “All these stories sink or swim
on the audio. We’ve given them a 24-hour
radio pack in a waterproof case,” says Bass. “I
wouldn’t say [it’s] indestructible, but it’s been
pretty robust.” Built by Wireless Works, these
are left in a drop box every night.
Also, says Bass: “There are embedded
ENG crews. We’ve given them Canon
XF305s, and we’ve got GoPros. There’s quite
a lot of card management to go with that.”
By month four, only one XF305 had been
damaged. “They had screwed one in the first
day and a half by getting it very wet and
sandy,” says Bass.
Having beaten the weather and terrain,
the production used satellite links to get
the footage to Evolutions in Soho for post-
production. Only then could they begin the
edit and grading process to match at least
four types of camera.
The post-production workflow was designed
by Evolutions head of technical operations
Ricky Martin, with an eye on the logistics of
shooting “in the middle of nowhere” and a
desire to begin editing a couple of days later.
These factors drove the choice of both the
Canon cameras – for familiarity, portability and
replaceability – and the lightweight XDCAM
codec used by the embedded camera crew.
Sixteen channels of audio are also
recorded, with up to 64 channels at any one
time. Using Evolutions’ own Luther ingest
system, 48 hours of video material might be
generated each day, with another four or five
from the embedded crew and a few minutes’
worth of GoPro footage.
“The actual workflow is quite a compli-
cated beast, mainly because of distance and
remoteness,” says Martin. Each day, H.264
proxies are generated by Luther and sent to
London via a satellite provided by Internet
Anywhere. Up to five of Keo’s own loggers
begin work a copy of the full-res media is
sent by post.
“The duration of the journey changes
depending on the weather and whether the
postman’s working that day,” says Martin.
As well as the rigged cameras, embedded
crew and GoPros, the production shot a lot
of drone footage and material with an Arri
Alexa for GVs and pack shots.
On location, Evolutions uses Storage
DNA. “The reason we’ve gone with that
is so that when series one is complete, we
can do a retrieval straight from the LTO
using an Avid Log Exchange from the Avid
on their request,” says Martin.
Eden’s first 4 x 60-minute series,
covering the first four months of the year,
ended in August. As Broadcast TECH went
to press, Evolutions had just finished the
next four-part run. Before the cast and crew
return home, Eden is likely to continue
testing its cast and crew in ways that can’t be
entirely foreseen.
Eden is graded on Baselight under Evolutions
colourist Tim O’Brien, who was involved almost
from the start of production. “We’d had discus-
sions about how it was going to look... I had a
rough idea of what to expect but it was only
really once I got the finished sequences that I
could see what we had,” he says.
The brief was to avoid “anything too
stylised that would take away from the reality”.
O’Brien explains: “The viewer’s got to get that
these people are in this real environment.
The main thing is to get across the beauty of
the location. One shot can look like Canada,
the next the Seychelles. You get these incredi-
ble forests then these beach scenes with
turquoise water.”
O’Brien describes the task as “led by
the conditions, so when it’s cold and wet, it
should feel cold and wet”. He adds: “There
were times when I kept it fairly cool to allow
the mood to develop that things weren’t
necessarily going so well.”
He also matched the notoriously difficult
green hues of the foliage. “[Mismatches] can
suggest that things have been filmed at differ-
ent times or even different times of year,” he
explains. The grade was finished over “one very
long day and a few hours the following day”.
“The cut doesn’t finish until the night before
the morning I get it,” he says.
Making the grade
‘The embedded crew had
screwed one XF305 [below]
in the first day and a half.
Got it very wet and sandy’
Mick Bass, NEP UK