A while back I wrote a post about Colin creating a new piece of work for the Cupar Arts Festival based on the pioneering balloon flight by the 18th century Italian balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi. I also wrote about our first experience of hot air ballooning here. Well the past few months have been very hectic and traumatic and tiring and stressful but also amazing.
I feel really lucky to have been involved in this whole process and I’m sure I’ve helped Colin to remain sane as well as help him concentrate on his work by taking on most of the dog walking and cooking and sleeping [he’s not been doing much of that lately].
The process is kind of finally over as the Cupar Arts Festival started yesterday, but due to some technical hiccups Colin’s venue only opened this morning rather than last night. The film being shown is a work in progress rather than the finished piece. Due to weather restrictions the balloon and microlight flights we needed to do kept on being postponed and this left Colin very little time to actually create the film he wanted to create for the show.
I’ve been wanting to write about this for ages [since September], but have just been too busy with work, my computer being attacked by a virus [!!!] as well as being Colin’s assistant and sorting all manor of things out for him and the show. In September we did two hot air balloon flights – one over Edinburgh and one in Fife – and Colin also did a microlight flight too. There was a lot to organise as we needed a lot of ground crew, filming the take off and flight from lots of different locations and on the weekend of the 12th/13th/14th September it all just came together very nicely. It seems like a very long time ago now.
After our hectic and exciting afternoon/evening in Carnwath on the 12th, we got up insanely early on the 13th and packed the car full of camera’s and drove to George Heriot School in Edinburgh. This is where the first balloon flight would be taking off from as this was the location used by Lunardi in 1785 for his balloon flight from Edinburgh to Cupar. Friends started arriving at around 7am and Colin briefed everyone as to what to expect and also what he wanted each of them to film and from where.
I managed to get a few shots of the balloon getting inflated and also of a few people doing the filming from the ground.
The weather was almost perfect – we were worried it was going to be too windy, when in fact it turned out that there wasn’t enough wind. So we waited until about 8am and the balloon crew let a helium balloon drift up to the sky to test the direction of the wind and then it was up, up and away for the two of us and two pilots. Colin had attached two camera’s to the basket to film the flight automatically and he was also filming with a hand held camera. I was recording sound and we had people dotted around Edinburgh to film the take off and flight. Here’s a lovely picture of us drifting away into the distance…
It all happened so quickly and all of a sudden we were hovering above Edinburgh, barely moving due to the lack of wind. I wish I had taken some photographs from the air at this point, but firstly it didn’t really occur to me to do so as I was just so overwhelmed by the whole experience and secondly it was a bit difficult as I had a gun microphone in one hand hanging over the side of the basket and a recording device in the other. We flew over the meadows and saw Matt filming us from below. We saw George Heriot School get smaller and smaller and everyone there shrink into tiny dots and disappear. All the church beels started chiming at 9am which was a suprise and something amazing to hear from above – especially with my supersonic hearing.
We drifted up and down and were in the air for over an hour and a half. We tried to land a few times, but each time we descended the wind direction changed and this took us back up and away.
We drifted quite low over Liberton and lots of people came out of their houses in their pyjamas and waved at us – it was great to see people’s reactions and to hear dogs barking out of excitement or confusion or fear. We eventually drifted towards the golf course and landed very gently on the 13th Fairway much to the dismay of some golfers about to tee off. They were slightly alarmed by us appearing as if from nowhere and landing so suddenly, but they helped up move the balloon over to the side and out of their way. We then waited for them to tee off and move away before deflating the balloon and packing it all away.
We got a taxi back to George Heriot and I got a chance to have a bit of a nosey around. The building is amazing and these snaps don’t do it justice.
…and there’s more…
In the afternoon we headed over to Cupar, or to a farmer’s field outside of Cupar to be exact. Here there’s a plaque commemorating Lunardi’s flight as the field we were taking off from was the field in which Lunardi landed in 1785. This time round it was a lot windier and the take off conditions were far from desirable. Again we had people dotted all over the place to film the take off and flight and here a few pre-flight shots.
The take off was quite frightening as the wind dragged us across the field, but I think it was more frightening for the onlookers as we were more focused on recording and getting ourselves set up to notice. We thought this was going to be quite a short flight, but we ended up being in the air for longer than we expected because of the wind conditions. We travelled quite fast this time around and got swept away towards to the Lomond Hills. This time around we were mostly flying above farmland and so sound was pretty minimal, but it was amazing to hear the sound of horses galloping and cows running across fields as well as buzzards flying nearby.
We made a few unsuccessful attempts to land but each time we did the wind picked up and we got swept away again.
We flew over little villages and I think, Ladybank, where we came a bit too close to a church spire for my liking.
We kept flying over forests and there seemed to be nowhere we could land, then we saw a field ahead and headed towards that and were told to hold on as it was going to be a bumpy landing. Bumpy landing indeed – we ended up touching down and then lifting and touching down and lifting and getting dragged along a field and it was a bit of a comedy crash landing in the end.
All I remember is holding onto the two handles inside the basket and bending my knees which were bashed against the side of the basket [ow!] with each touch down. Colin survived unscathed which is amazing as he wasn’t clinging to the balloon for dear life like I was and instead was concentrating mostly on not stamping/landing on the video camera. The pilot on the other hand was busy standing on my left ankle whilst trying to control the balloon as we got dragged and bounced along a field and battered against the basket several times. It was pretty hilarious, which enabled me to laugh rather than cry with pain.
There a was long skid mark all along the field from where we first touched down and finally keeled over but I couldn’t quite capture this in all it’s glory in my photo above. The next day I couldn’t walk and for the next week my knees turned from red to yellow to black and blue. It took us ages to get the balloon and basket packed up and out of the field but were eventually on our way back to the launch site and back to our friends and then onto home and sleep at last.
Colin was up again the next morning bright and early as he had a microlight flight booked…more on this later as I’ve got to go and walk the dog.
