Location, location, location

LOCATION manager Andrew Bainbridge is always on the lookout. While others wander round our region’s beautiful countryside getting lost in the moment, he is always on the alert, observing both buildings and landscape with a filmic eye.

He carries with him his camera and his phone, filing away images for future use. After all, you never know when a lake, a disused pithead or a redundant cement quarry will come in useful.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the scenery or relax when I’m out," says the 53-year-old father of two from Piercebridge. "It just means that I am constantly looking, because you never know.”

Everything gets stored up in Andrew’s head or on his computer to be called up when he is trying to match a location to a film script or TV programme. “I will often trawl my archives just looking at old photographs, which sometimes trigger memories and other ideas,” he says.

Take the current Sunday evening TV adaptation of Beowulf. Andrew was looking for a beautiful stretch of river with some fast water that could be used for filming. “I hadn’t visited the Meeting of the Waters, near Egglestone Abbey, in Teesdale, since I was a young boy, but remembered it vividly from then and thought it might be right. I went to have a look and it was perfect.”

Andrew’s company, North By North East, operates as a location management and "fixing" company for film, TV and commercials projects wishing to film in the region. But he’s recently added another string to his bow – as a photographer – and is about to hold his first exhibition, jointly with local photographer Tracy Kidd, at The Station, in Richmond.

“I have been taking photographs since I was a young boy,” he says. “I was hugely inspired and influenced by a teacher at school who took superb photographs. He taught me all I know about light, framing and composition and I used to spend much of my spare time alone in the dark room, creating what I considered to be magic.”

His mentor always photographed in black and white and that stayed with Andrew. “I have always felt it is somehow more real than colour, stripping away the niceties and leaving the moment,” he says. “For me, that is what photography is all about: the moment. It’s there for an instant, then suddenly gone because the light dips or a head turns. My photos are all about that instant. It’s instinctive. I don’t go looking for the shot. I don’t sit for hours waiting for it. It’s there, I see it and I capture it.”

While using a camera the majority of the time for work, Andrew likes to photograph for himself on his phone, embracing the app culture and new technology. His debut exhibition features prints shot only on his phone of places in the region such as Bamburgh and Craster, and further afield.

Andrew’s roots are in the North-East – he was born in Darlington, and returned from a stint in London to set up his company in 1993. He has attracted companies to the region to shoot large scale commercials for clients such as Aston Martin, Tennent’s, Argos and Carling.

More recently he has worked as location manager on the television dramas Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, Vera, Harriet’s Army and Inspector George Gently, all filmed in the North-East.

For Beowulf, the main set was constructed in an old disused cement quarry in the fells above Eastgate, just to the west of Stanhope. “I have always loved the journey from Middleton in Teesdale up to Stanhope when you travel right over the top and there is literally nothing there - it is wild and bleak, but fantastic in its scale,” he says. “I felt this area would work really well for Beowulf as many parts are almost devoid of modernity, something that is obviously important when you are making a show set in the Dark Ages.”

Other quarries in the area were also brought into play. “We filmed a lot at Skears Plantation, just north of Middleton in Teesdale, which afforded lots of different forest and river scenes all in one place - a great find and relatively unknown,” says Andrew.

A location fee is always paid to the land or property owner, the fee depending on what the film company wants to do and how long they will be there. “Some people are just very flattered to be asked and love the kudos,” says Andrew. “Where things sometimes get tricky (and expensive) is when you are on land that is owned by one party, has a tenant looking after it, a fishing club leasing the lake or fishing rights and another landowner over whose land we need access.”

There is a lot of red tape to negotiate, particularly when well-known building are used. “Nobody – including the film crew – has any idea what we do,” says Andrew. “Obviously, we find the locations and manage them, but there is often an enormous amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. Councils, police, traffic management, etcetera, have to be happy with our plans. It is like organising a large wedding every day, and no two days are ever the same. We have to plan the get-in, the dressing, the shooting and the clear-up. Every location has to be left as it was found after the unit has moved on to the next location.”

One decision that proved very controversial was the filming of a shoot-out in Durham Cathedral for Inspector George Gently. “That took a lot groundwork, coupled with a very film-friendly team at the site,” says Andrew, who was called in to meet the Dean and to discuss the issue. “We talked about how the Cathedral has been both a place of sanctuary and brutality over its long history. TS Elliot's famous drama Murder in the Cathedral was mentioned – a play with a bloody ending which has been performed in many Cathedrals. The Dean was open-minded, recognising that if violence is used within a narrative to make a clear moral point, it is not gratuitous. He had seen the script and saw the episode as a kind of morality play with good and evil clearly identified.”

The Dean mentioned that the show was his wife's favourite programme; Bacchus was her favourite character. “He did ask whether Bacchus died and I was able to reassure him (in confidence) that his wife had no cause for concern. The cathedral door was opened.”

At one stage, Andrew himself had visions of being an actor, and stayed in London after university. “That soon fell by the wayside. I had enjoyed the production side of my drama course as much as the acting side and was lucky enough to get a job in a small TV commercials production company in Soho. After I moved back home, I worked hard to attract companies up North and slowly that began to happen.”

Now, after travelling around 30,000 miles a year searching for locations, Andrew knows the region like the back of his hand. “That said, there are still areas waiting to be discovered,” he says.

And to be photographed, of course.

Website: bainophoto.com; Tel: 07785-343023

The Tracy Kidd and Andrew Bainbridge joint photography exhibition will be at The Station, Richmond, from March 12-23. W: richmondstation.com