Blue Peter comes to Manchester - 26-Sep-2011
Local jobs for local people… Today saw the move of ...more
Filed under: General — Tags: 771 Sqadron, Add new tag, BBC, Blue Peter, media city, Royal Navy, Sea King Helicopter, Seaking Helicoper, smoke, special effects — Darren Wallis @ 3:45 pm
Are you feeling lucky? - 9-Sep-2011
10 Secrecy and confidentiality often surrounds our work, especially on soaps such as Coronati ...more
Filed under: Explosion SFX — Tags: Ant & Dec, explosives, ITV, Red or Black, special effects — Darren Wallis @ 7:56 am
Morrisons - 13-May-2010
I’m sure many of you have seen the latest Morrison’s commercial showing Top Gear’s Richard Hammond pushing his shopping trolley through various rural locations. We werent involved in every scene but the one scene we did work on is the part where he’s in the rain pulling his trolley across a cattle grid. That 10 seconds of footage took all day to film and for us, ...more
Filed under: General,Rain SFX,Random — Tags: morrisons, Rain, richard hammond, special effects — Wayne Bennett @ 9:28 am
A rainy day - 13-Aug-2009
As I suspect with most other eager youngsters my view of special effects involved lots of setting fire to things or blowing them up or both. However, in reality for every caravan you blow up there are days and days of making it rain – it isn’t glamerous and you don’t get much of a smile from the crew. In fact there is a lot of water on TV that isn’t all that it seems ...more
Filed under: Mechanical SFX,Rain SFX,Random — Tags: BBC, Cutting It, ITV, Rain, special effects — Darren Wallis @ 6:10 pm
Hollyoaks – Claires return - 21-May-2009
The big fire scene we worked on for Hollyoaks will be shown during the week commencing Monday 25th May 2009. Once it’s aired I’ll go into a little more detail as to how we achieved some of the effects.
Filed under: General — Tags: Hollyoaks, special effects — Wayne Bennett @ 2:07 pm
No Goldfish were harmed in the making of this production - 23-Apr-2009
It is a couple of years since we were involved in producing a comedy pilot for Granada TV with comedian Justin Edwards AKA Jeremy Lion, Children’s Entertainer, but the memories are as clear as if it were yesterday. Picture, if you can, a large (in fact very large) feathered pantomime goose, strapped to the roof of a Hillman Imp -if you are old enough to remember how implausibly small they ...more
Filed under: Fire & Smoke,Mechanical SFX,Random — Tags: Chocolate eggs, Granada TV, Jeremy Lion, special effects — Darren Wallis @ 9:52 am
Week ending 3/4/09 - 30-Mar-2009
The Bookies Fire episode for Corrie is being aired this week and we’re all looking forward to seeing the final cut. The scenes involving our effects were filmed over 4 days about a month ago. Some great pictures and footage were available on ITV.com prior to the episode being aired which was good. I was interviewed at one point so that might end up on ITV’s website. ...more
Filed under: Explosion SFX,Fire & Smoke,General,Random — Tags: Coronation Street, Corrie, Man United, special effects, Virgin Trains — Wayne Bennett @ 11:04 am
Ice Station Zebra - 10-Feb-2009
Writing the blog is now an excuse to avoid a trip to “Ice Station Zebra”, as our unit is lovingly known, due to our inability to use gas heaters where explosives are kept. However “I” do need to start prep work for two projects coming up in the next few weeks and a thousand litres of black goo needs making and testing – we have ...more
Filed under: General,Snow SFX — Tags: black goo, explosives, ice station zebra, snow, special effects — Darren Wallis @ 11:38 am