Episode 1: Location Managers

Episode 2: Screen Composers

Antonia meets some of the people whose contribution to films and TV shows can have the most dramatic impact – the composers of the score. Some of its most famous practitioners – Bernard Hermann and Ennio Morricone fpr example – are spoken about in the same hushed tones as some of cinemas greatest directors. But how do they go about their work and how much of the job is down to single minded individual genius and how much down to a willingness to collaborate? In order to find out, Antonia hears from Mica Levi, whose work on ‘Jackie’ won her an Oscar nomination, as well as Francis Macdonald, drummer with the band Teenage Fanclub as he creates the soundtrack for a major BBC documentary about Raymond Briggs. Award winning musician Erland Cooper composes a piece overnight, especially for the show, to accompany a four-minute film shot on the Isle of Skye – and David Julyan tells Antonia all about his long term partnership, since their days at University film club, with director Christopher Nolan.

Episode 3: Animal Wranglers

Never work with children or animals, goes the famous advice for anyone working on film or TV production – and according to director, on the set of the forthcoming ITV drama ‘Deep Water’, children are by far the easier of the two. A good wrangler is indispensable on the set of any production involving animals, preventing hours being wasted while errant beasts are brought to heel.
In the third part of the series, Antonia Quirke meets expert wranglers including Bozena Bienkowska, who describes the impact of bringing her wolf onto set, as well as the lengths wranglers must go to in order to avoid being seen on screen; she describe hiding up chimneys, being buried in pits and lying in the boots of cars in order to stay close to her animals as they take their turn in the spotlight.
Antonia also visits ‘The Devil’s Horsemen’. a company specialising in providing horses in some of the biggest films and TV shows in the world, including Games of Thrones, Wonder Woman and the recent Mary Queen of Scots.
She also speaks with Brady Jandreau, a cowboy and horse trainer who went from being a screen wrangler to a leading actor in the film ‘The Rider’ following a horrific accident he suffered while competing in a rodeo.

Episode 4: Foley Artists 

If a foley artist does their job well, you’ll never notice them while you’re watching a movie. They are the people who add the sound of everything from footsteps and rattling jewellery to jail cells being slammed shut and guns being loaded once the filming’s over. And it’s not just viewers who don’t realise that such sounds are in fact created later on, as Antonia Quirke discovers in this final part of ‘Cast and Crew’ – sometimes even actors don’t know that the footsteps they hear in the final movie aren’t their own. She visits ace foley artist Ruth Sullivan in a dedicated foley studio and watches on as Ruth records the sounds of a football match using a boxing glove and some mint leaves. We hear from one of the masters of foley – Walter Murch – about his work on The Godfather, and Antonia meets Barnaby Smyth, who recently donned his ballet shoes to create the sounds for the forthcoming biopic about Rudolf Nureyev, ‘The White Crow’.