Sweeping down the River Mersey, the iconic Royal Liver Building comes into frame. The sun is rising behind it, bringing an end to a night of frantic activity across the city. Paramedics have been racing to people in need, but their work isn’t done, and the emergencies keep coming. It’s just another 24-hours for the North West Ambulance Service. We were there in the sky above to follow the drama for the seventh series of the BBC’s factual series, Ambulance.
The new series shows the immense challenges faced by the North West Ambulance Service during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Taking the viewer to heart of the NHS are the courageous frontline paramedics, as they respond to emergencies across the North West.
Series seven will concentrate in and around the cities of Liverpool and Blackpool. Covering an area of more than 5,400 square miles, they respond to an average 4,000 emergency calls every day. It shows in detail the harsh reality of the shifts of the call-handlers and ambulance dispatchers as they make decisions in the highly pressurised environment of the control room.
While the crews are accompanied by the production team on the ground, we provide a sense of scale from above. Capturing wide aerial shots of the city and iconic landmarks to close tracking shots of the emergency vehicles as they hurtle through the city.
Equipment
For this project we flew one of our AS355NP’s rigged with our GSS C516 gyroscopic camera system. For shooting during the day, we used our RED Epic Dragon camera with the Canon 30-300mm telephoto lens. At night, we switched to the Sony P1.
Produced by Dragonfly Television and the BBC, it was first broadcast on BBC One in 2016. Since then it has proved to be very successful, winning a BAFTA for ‘Best Factual Series’ in 2018 and receiving several National Television Award nominations.
