Although I have a tendency to spend a lot of time running (well, ambling) up and down the River Thames in search of ships to film I have outdone myself while filming HMS Ocean.
The largest ship in the Royal Navy HMS Ocean was in town to act as the central point of the security exercise for the London 2012 Olympics. Greenwich is an ideal place for her to be berthed as it is probably no more than 30 seconds flight time to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford.
I found out about the imminent arrival of HMS Ocean through the immensely useful Ships and Boats in London blog which I recommend to anyone living in London who wants to keep up to date with interesting things happening on the River Thames.
Although the Thames is difficult to miss most people take it for granted. Fact is of course that if the Thames did not exist London would not exist. Simple as that. Well, it might exist somewhere else but then it wouldn’t be called London, would it?
London’s best filming location
The choice of where to film HMS Ocean coming in to berth at Greenwich was easy to make, Island Gardens is my favourite filming spot in the whole of London for the very simple reason that it has it’s own cafe. How cool is that? Oh and it is directly across from Greenwich too.
Once the film was edited and posted on my YouTube channel I spent several more days filming HMS Ocean at different times and also various events related to the security exercise on the River Thames, mainly Royal Marines zooming along in a wide variety of assault boats and landing craft. Although I got some good footage there was no real highlight event which made it worthwhile posting a second film.
All dressed up with nothing to film
A highlight promised to be a security exercise taking place between 5.30 am and 6.30 am one morning so I hauled myself out of bed at 3.30 then went and stood on London Bridge with two other hopeful colleagues for a couple of hours to film – nothing. No idea why the exercise didn’t happen but that’s just the way it is sometimes with news work.
What did happen was a large crane on a barge coming through Tower Bridge to fix the last piece of the new gangway for HMS Belfast into position. As the Marines were not providing me with any kinetic activity to film I shot this instead. The resulting footage is not the most exciting in the world but was of enough interest to post and the Imperial War Museum appreciated it. HMS Belfast is a unique floating museum and it was good to see that it was almost back open for business again.