TELEVISION / Production notes

Leo Dickinson, adventure film- maker, on the making of 'Ballooning over Everest' and 'Dead Men's Tales' for Adventures (Saturday C4):

'Always my quest is to get different shots to everyone else's. For the Everest film I bought a piece of plywood in Kathmandu for pounds 4 and tied it to the outside of the basket to stand on. I did feel terribly vulnerable but had a parachute in case I came off. I don't deliberately court danger, that would be stupid. In fact, my mistake was not parachuting out of the balloon before landing, as the pilot came down too fast and I broke two ribs.

'When filming, I try to imagine what they must have felt like and put that into action. On 'Dead Men's Tales' we wanted a point-of-view shot of this Irishman who survived hitting the ground when his parachute didn't open. We put a hole for a fish-eye lens in the bottom of the basket and filmed as the ballon took off, climbing at 2,000 feet a minute. Reversing the film, it looked pretty effective.

'I do get disappointed with a lot of adventure filming. British wildlife filming is brilliant but adventure films are too often a sort of video diary - production values are generally a lot lower.'

(Photograph omitted)