The Baby Has Landed
Date: 2023-10-26 Category: Portfolio Location: Unknown
Project
The Baby Has Landed follows six families over their first laughter, love and chaos-filled weeks of parenthood. Makers of 24 Hours in A&E, The Garden Productions followed each family across six weeks, with a combination of fly-on-the-wall fixed rigs and single-camera shooting. The heart-warming documentary series sheds light on one of the most intimate times of parenthood.
The Garden are renowned for authentic story-telling, so it was a joy to be approached by them and work on this delightful series.
Mission
Wishing to be completely fly-on-the-wall, The Garden asked Limitless to develop six neat and tidy residential (12-16 camera) fixed-rigs to be fitted quickly and efficiently in busy family homes; whilst the baby was being delivered in hospital. The rigs had to be discreet, robust (little children climbing!) and quiet. We were delighted to offer a great solution tailored to residential and family-life.
If the success of a fly-on-the-wall documentary hinges on two factors - just how access-all-areas the filming really is, and how interesting the subjects actually are - then this show gets it right.
The Evening Standard, The Baby Had Landed, BBC2Challenge
The on-site production had to be streamlined, and the crew kept to a minimum. Limitless trained The Garden's production team to run self-sufficiently whilst offered a 24/7 technical support line.
Babies do not run to production schedules - Limitless were very flexible, with rigs and teams on standby ready to go at short notice, working to a moving target and deadline.
The rigs ran 24/7 so the installation had to be robust and it wasn't possible to quickly interrupt for maintenance. Cameras were equipped with infrared night vision for operation in complete darkness, with some of the most important scenes being picked up when least expected.
Impact
In total, Limitless provided a combination of fixed-rigs and mini-rigs for six main family homes and multiple secondary locations. All production equipment for the homes and galleries was installed and fully supported across many months of shooting.
