OK, so this was a strange one.

A couple of weeks ago Scott Bass contacted me to tell us about some potential work in the near future, but he refused to say what the job was other than it involved costumes…Obviously I assumed it was to do with the coming Halloween and it would be something related to that, but no, a few weeks later he phoned me up and told me the facts.

From the success of a recent video of his “Professor Longhair, Big Chief,” Friends Of The Earth had contacted him asking for help on their MOOvement project. The project is based around passing the bill for planet friendly farming and more info can be found at www.jointhemoovement.com

The plan that was devised was a short viral video featuring cows freerunning across London and ending up at the Houses of Parliament. Scott roped in the incredible, Phil Doyle, Kie Willis and Alex Potts for the action and kindly gave Visive a call when he realised he would need more than one cameraman.

So last Thursday we travelled up to London to meet some cows and took it from there. Thursday was the action day as we wanted to get the more risky stuff out of the way incase the cows ended up getting arrested. The reason for this being that everything was done without permission, this was essentially a protest not a carefully planned out music video. We started at the obvious Imax and hit it off with the cows chucking out some huge moovement before heading to Waterloo station to get the tricky glidecam shots of the cows running through the station. We managed three full runs before security stopped us and even then we blagged our way past him. Jamie on the other hand who was on static tripod shot duty was collared pretty early on and asked to leave, but with a tripod the size of ours its hard not to stick out in a crowd.

From Waterloo we worked our way along the river trying to capture as much decent footage before we were kicked off each area. In one case I climbed up a closed off bridge to get a shot with the help of Phil passing the tripod up to me, once the shot was complete I was stranded because everyone forgot about me! After another little chat from security we were off on our way again.

The real trouble came when filming the cows running across Parliament Bridge, when I say running I really mean jogging along the handrail high above the water. Within seconds a police van had skidded to a halt and the cows were getting a pretty serious talking to.

That night we were put up in a hotel where burgers were eaten and beer was drank before a good nights sleep in preparation for the second day which would mainly consist of narrative scenes so that the viral actually had a story.

We started out early at Hackney City Farm where much fun was had with pigs, cows and many other farm animals. The farm was probably the least stressful shooting of the day as from there we jumped in a taxi to Parliament Gardens where on arrival we were confronted by police talking of potential terrorists dressed as cows. After this more action was captured around some notorious spots on the north of the Thames before a couple of “illegal” sprints through Trafalgar Square, during one of which Phil managed to put his arm through my camera strap mid flip which was pretty scary for both of us.

Anyway once again I have rambled horribly, heres the final video, edited by Scott Bass:

Thanks to Lauren Such for providing the hotel entertainment with her drunken adventures throughout the hotel corridors.