Live and Wild: Filming with 5G

• Government funding: £1,224,834
• Total project value: £ 2,136,420
• Location: North East, Leeds

Live & Wild: Filming with 5G presents a series of real and challenging filming scenarios to test 5G’s capacity to support the needs of the documentary film industry in the UK. Filming will take place in a variety of extreme locations and weather conditions across the UK designed to test 5G’s performance to its limit including, caving in the Yorkshire Dales, sea cliff climbing in North Wales and ultra-running across Britain.

The project will monitor 5G’s resilience, adaptability, reliability and image quality as it livestreams high end video content. It will also monitor transfer time and performance of raw batch footage sent directly from remote film locations back to the post-production hub.

Patricia Doherty, Project Director at Candour TV said: “We are really looking forward to discovering the ways in which 5G can help us deliver fast-turnaround and live video content without compromising on high production values. This could be a game changer for the UK film industry.”

About Live + Wild

Led by multi award-winning Candour productions, Live + Wild aims to explore the use of 5G in extreme and challenging locations to help filmmakers deliver live and fast turnaround video content.

Working collaboratively with communications specialist aql and MTN Safety, the project will test the possibilities of streaming live content for broadcast and dispatching raw footage from remote and rural terrains directly back to editing facilities using 5G. It also has huge potential to improve communications for rescue teams including mountain and cave safety.

The project will challenge new ways of working and push the boundaries of filmmaking. It’ll be asking the question, “Is 5G the gateway to a new workflow to drive creativity and deliver more immersive, interactive and engaging content to audiences?”

Partner aql will deliver 5G services to support live broadcasting through a mobile base station. It has been purposely built to test the capabilities of 5G in extreme locations including challenging sites such as sea cliffs in North Wales, down caves in North Yorkshire, during a triathlon in the Lake District and following ultra-runners across Britain.

Safety partners, MTN Safety will make sure the project is conducted in the safest way possible. The MTN team is experienced in mountain and polar safety and will advise on logistics and feasibility of each of the filming locations and events. 

Five extreme, endurance and adventure sporting events have been chosen to test the capability of live streaming footage from each event and send video to the post-production hub in record time directly from the film location.

The footage shot on location will also be crafted into observational documentaries and ‘Making Of’ films of each event which will be available to view on a variety of online platforms and screen festivals towards the end of the trial period.