An early test edit

Wednesday January 31, London

Two days editing with Holly, one of the two editors we'll work with later, and we've assembled a rough, seven and a half minute sequences from the St Mary Redcliffe rushes. It's very raw but it's not bad -- and it's an immensely useful lesson for the filming to come.
Father Simon's interview feels very strong (we'll be lucky if we find many contributors as good as him) and some of the shots look great. Also, the footage of worship in the church feels very welcome. But we don't use the jib shots as much as we thought we might -- trying to put the interview as the soundtrack to these feels somehow wrong -- and Holly is concerned about whether we have enough static shots of the interior. Note to everyone not to neglect these in the buildings to come.

Plus the assembly reveals that you really have to work carefully to establish on the screen the space, the layout, the basic configuration of a building. Not that we ever thought it was, but filming architecture is far from trivial. (John Wyver)

"The goodliest parish church in England"

Sunday January 27, Bristol, England

In fact what Queen Elizabeth I is supposed to have said, when she came on a visit in 1574, was that she thought St Mary Redcliffe "the fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England". We've chosen it as a representative of the glories of the English parish church. Glorious it certainly is, with the second (or third, depending on which architectural historian you believe) highest spire in the country and a soaring nave into which light streams from lofty windows. All over the church there are astonishing details: a porch built in an oriental style; a roof with more than a thousand stone bosses, each one individually designed; 15th century tombs; and connections through history with Handel, Hogarth and the boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide in London at the age of seventeen.

We have Saturday to film the church, and this is the first day that we put the camera on a jib arm. This really smart piece of equipment allows us to raise the camera up to about 12 feet above the ground and also to swing it (carefully!) in arcs and circles. At one point director of photography Ian Serfontein and I discover that we do a 360-degree shot about which we get boyishly excited. The downside of the jib is that it takes a long time to set up and is tricky to manipulate, but we have the luxury of two full filming days here, and it unquestionably helps bring out the "goodliest" qualities of the interior.

On Sunday we film, as unobtrusively as we can, the 9.30am Sung Eucharist. Afterwards we shoot exteriors and many more details of the architecture before spending the afternoon with Revd Dr Simon Taylor who takes us around the church and speaks (beautifully!) about his sense of worshipping in such an architectural masterpiece. We are also graced on Sunday with a clear blue sky, and our only frustration is that we can't talk our way into a building site across from the church to take some shots from the balcony of a new block of offices. "Sorry, mate, more than my job's worth…"

The highlight of the two days is a boat trip on the local ferry that takes tourists and commuters around the Bristol docks. We want some shots of St Mary from the water to bring out its historical connections with the docks and trade. As we walk down to the boat stop at Saturday lunchtime the disappointing grey sky of the morning begins to break up and blue patches to shine through. By the time we're shooting, and despite the bitter cold, the sky looks glorious and the spire of St Mary is magnificent. Inevitably, as everywhere, people want to know what we're filming. "A series about architecture and faith," we explain, "for Sky Arts." Sometimes the response is a disappointed, "Oh we don't have Sky" but an older couple on the boat promise to look out for the programme. "We really enjoyed your programmes on the National Trust," they say. So we should be able to count on two viewers. (John Wyver)

First thoughts from abroad

Monday January 21, New York and Philadelphia

The night before the series’ first shoot, at Central Synagogue in New York, apocalyptic blizzard warnings were being broadcast on the news, the radio and across the internet. The warnings informed us that travel was not recommended, ‘IF YOU MUST...KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT... FOOD... AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.’
So it was with trepidation that woke up on the morning of the shoot and with relief that I drew the curtain to see a snow-free, dismal and grey day outside. Day One of filming at Central Synagogue was glorious… a whole day of just myself and our cameraman Ross Keith at liberty in the Sanctuary. We were somewhat amazed - and grateful - to be allowed hours on end let loose inside this historic building with our camera.
On the second day we were joined by John, our soundman, for the shoot and the main purpose of the day was to interview the Senior Rabbi, Rabbi Rubinstein. Rabbi Rubinstein is a man whose name Major Giuliani made synonymous with ‘Hope’ after the Synagogue burned down in 1998 and was restored under his watchful eye, then rededicated just two days before the 9/11 atrocities. The Rabbi was excellent at telling us not only about the history of the Synagogue, but also about the decisions that he had had to take about keeping the restoration true to the old design, whilst also bringing it in line with worship in the twenty-first century, and simultaneously trying to future-proof it for centuries to come…
Days Three and Four of the US shoot were spent in Frank Lloyd Wright’s final architectural gem, the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, a suburb of Philadelphia. This incredible building was designed to look like a glowing Mount Sinai and we’d heard much about how its appearance changed in different light and weather conditions. A really early start found us in position at 06.50 and ready to film the sun rise over the Synagogue. We were both happy and surprised to be present for the arrival of a crisp but beautifully sunny day. The effects of the sunlight on the outside of the building just about outweighed the frosty cold of a Philadelphian winter morning.
Our next day and a half was spent filming the awesome building – arresting both in its exterior and interior - whilst also marvelling at some of the impractical design elements that Lloyd Wright has prescribed for the Synagogue. The entire Sanctuary, for example, (which seats over 1000 people, so isn’t small) is carpeted in light sand-coloured carpet, to represent the desert of Sinai. Conceptually great, but not so convenient for the Synagogue which has to clean it regularly and replace it every couple of years!

We also filmed an interesting early morning Torah reading, with a surprisingly full congregation for 7.20am and a very diverse congregation. This service was overseen by the Senior Rabbi Glanzberg-Krainin who also gave us a fascinating tour of the Sanctuary and an insight into how it works on a day-to-day basis as a place of worship.
By the end of our stay in Philly we’d not only had a thoroughly enjoyable time at Beth Sholom, but we’d also had two tremendous and memorable breakfasts at a roadside diner we discovered. Who could resist our irrepressibly smiley waitress, Frahanna (which she told us means ‘Happy’ in Arabic), when she insisted we tried the Southern speciality of ‘grits’? Grits is a cornmeal dish, a bit like slushy white polenta and surprisingly, we found ourselves enjoying it. In Philly the snow also caught up with us, but luckily just as we were getting our final shots and about to drive off into the speckley distance and back to New York. (Nonie Creagh-Brown)

So just how worried are we?

Thursday January 10, Islington, north London

As well as recces, there is a pile of other preparations to make: visas and hotels, pinning down access to places and finding contributors, arranging insurance and equipment, pulling in other members of the production team. At present we are planning to film in the UK, USA, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, Syria, Iran, India and Singapore, all before Easter.

We negotiated access to most of our sacred sites before Christmas, but there are one or two late choices still to pin down and inevitably problems come up with one or two of those that we thought were fine. St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow begins to look flakey because, our local fixer explains, of the forthcoming elections in Russia. And then we run into difficulties for filming at the Chapel of our Lady of Rosary in Vence.

We hoped to finish the Christianity film at the exquisite chapel designed and decorated by Henri Matisse for a house of Dominican sisters near Nice. The convent itself is welcoming and the Matisse estate give permission but it proves impossible to work out an appropriate and affordable arrangement for rights and permissions with DACS, the copyright society that collects reproduction fees for artists.

To date, losing the Matisse chapel is our only disappointment in the planned schedule. Even so, the logistics at this stage feel a touch overwhelming. To better prepare ourselves, we watch together some films that have touched on this territory before. There can be something quite consoling about a collective viewing of someone else's documentary about the subject you're working on, especially if it was made a few years ago. Apart from anything else, you can make a note of the spectacular shots which work and promise yourself and your colleagues that you can do better than the rest of what's on the screen.

We look at parts of the series "Heaven on Earth", six half-hour programmes made with the presenter Christy Kenneally by Tile Films in 2003 and at Wag TV's "Divine Designs" series with Cambridge academic Paul Binski. Both series visit two or three of our sites, although they treat them far more as places of architectural interest than as contexts for religious belief today.

Another reference point is the recent David Dimbleby series "How We Built Britain". Among the things we take from this is that a seemingly limitless budget for helicopter shots in a wondrous thing and that buildings look a hundred times better in sunlight framed against a blue sky dotted with white clouds. We of course are filming not at the height of summer in most of countries but in the winter months with a light that will be pale, grey and even. One more thing to worry about. (John Wyver)

Tomorrow the world, but today… Woking

Friday January 4, Woking, England

If you are setting out to make three ambitious documentaries about art, architecture and faith, with HD filming in sixteen countries, where else to begin but Woking? At least that's where Nonie Creagh-Brown and I go a couple of days after New Year to Britain's first purpose-built mosque.

Surrounded by an indisutrial estate on the edge of Woking is the Shah Jahan Mosque which was built as part of Wilhelm Leitner's Oriental Institute in 1889. As the mosque's website explains, "The purpose of the Institute was to enable visiting dignitaries from India to stay and study in culturally sympathetic surroundings. It also enabled Europeans being posted to India to learn the language and culture." It's an entirely surprising and beautiful building in the strangest of surroundings, but importantly it remains today an active centre for Islamic worship and study.

The Shah Jahan Mosque is one of 27 buildings that we have chosen to feature in a series of three films about the art and architecture of the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We're setting out to explore the cultural riches of these traditions but also to attempt to understand aspects of these faiths in the world today. So we want to see the sacred buildings not only as architectural wonders but also as places of lived faith. At each site we hope to find a contributor to the films who can tell us about the history and art but also about what the church or mosque or synagogue means to them in their life.

Our recce on a dismal, rainy Friday afternoon goes well, and we agree to return early in March to film. We will not have the luxury of visiting in advance the locations where we're filming abroad, so in early January we use trips to Bristol, to Brick Lane and the City of London, and to Cheadle in Staffordshire to think through not only the specific possibilities (and challenges) of these places but also how we are going to approach shooting in general. (John Wyver)