China Stories

My Mini Atlas of the World.

28th Apr 2008 13:00, Maria

I brought my 'Mini Atlas of the World' into work today and it proved very handy during a phone call to our fixer.

He was suggesting people and places that might fit our story briefs. Even with our new found fluency in Mandarin (!) I had to ask him to spell nearly all the place names before I found them on a map.

When you are planning a shoot it's really important to be realistic about how long it will take you to travel from one place to another and how much time you'll need to spend at each location in order to film all the material you need. Once you know this you can start to decide where you'll be on a particular day and who and what you'll be filming.

George told us about a really amazing temple where we could film, but now we have to work out whether we can fit it into our filming schedule.

Travelling around China, the fourth largest country in the world behind Russia, Canada and USA (thank you mini atlas), will be a challenge with the limited time we have. We'll probably have to fly to and from most places. Although this usually saves lots of time, it can work out quite expensive and we have to decide if our budget can stretch to it.

Did you know...

China has the largest population in the world (1.3 billion), the highest mountain (Mount Everest), it has borders with 14 different countries and should span five time zones but it actually operates on a single time.

You have to wait and see if I put some of these into my scripts...

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