London & West Coast Scotland

Who would want to make a film about in a flood in a drought!
 
The summer of 2022 was a hot one, perhaps the hottest on record with some days touching 40o
 
We started on location in London, one of the major sets was a London Street with post flood detritus across the whole road across gardens and up the fronts of houses. We had started by scouting for disused residential streets, perhaps ready for demolition or redevelopment. We checked with many city film offices and commissions. I had seen streets like this in Hull previously, whole terraces boarded up ready for demolition but this was in 2013, I checked with the Hull film office but all had since been demolished. We decided to find a willing street in London which we could set dress.
 
It started with finding an empty house which the owners had just bought but had not started renovations in Hackney. We needed it for about two months to make it look like an everyday home for the early scenes in the film then set dress it to look like a flood had swept through it. We found a suitable house and owner and then started to scout locally for a dead end street with similar architecture. By having a dead end it would be easier to close and block with our flood detritus, the designer wanted overturned cars so we needed a very complicit community for such an undertaking. Surprisingly we quickly found a street nearby and with willing residents.
 
Each house was contacted and let’s say 50% where up for it. Cars from both sides of the street cleared and for two days we dumped water damaged furniture, waste and upturned cars! During this process some of the house owners dumped their own bulky waste into our street set dressing (as we promised to remove everything for official disposal), water pipes where threaded through make it look like water was still running through and drains blocked to create pools of water.
 
Throughout the whole shoot the weather peeked at 40o and we constantly carried with us 20’000lts of fresh water as each scene needed rain or wet downs. As it was deemed a drought the water supply company had to get a licence to source and use water like this. This did situation did cause a few complaints from residents as their gardens where dying and we were watering our sets! This was soon remedied with a hose down of parched gardens around the locations from our water bowser.