Help! Legalities of staging a viking funeral

[Your Media Hero]

Hi guys,

Just found the forum via Google search, I'm hoping you can help me out here.

I want to film a viking funeral scene. Set in the present day, one guy pushes another out to sea on a burning sailboat.

Now what is the protocol here? I don't know where to begin as relates to permits, health and safety, and so on. Will any UK councils even allow such a thing on one of their beaches?

This is something I'll likely be shooting on a DVX100, and hardly any money. A crew of about five. I'm not sure whether to shoot at night - where the fire will ostensibly look better, but lighting a beach would be a massive financial and practical burden. Essentially, I don't know if this kind of scene is possible to shoot on this scale.

I don't know if anyone here has had any experience shooting anything similar, but I'd guess someone will have shot stuff around water or stuff involving fire so I'm hoping someone will have some kind of insight as to where I should start looking.

Thanks,

PC

[miker]

Will any UK councils even allow such a thing on one of their beaches?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">How will you know unless you ask them?

Ridley Scott got permission to burn down half of Farnham in order to make certain sequences in Gladiator.

Have you thought about using a miniature on a pond? It used to work in all those old WWII movies ..... !

[Your Media Hero]

A miniature on a pond? Hmmm... I hadn't even considered it, but is it easy to get decent results that way? I would imagine a fair bit of trickery with shots and editing would be involved to get it looking like it was in the sea. And even then, the shots of the guy setting it alight and pushing it out to sea would need to be done at a real beach.

Do you think I should just ask different seaside councils then?

[Tard]

I'd suggest to ASK, out there to them. Not to us here in networld.
Local laws vary quite a bit location-to-location.

[Chance1234]

Try the film commisions http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/

I took over a chunk of coastline in norfolk a few years back via them

lighting, i can see shooting at the magic hour and abit of post trickery coming into play

as for burning the boat at sea , this is where you may have problems with the enviroment agency, but the film commision will get you on the right track.