ACT THREE – 'I’m gonna be on the news!' We have around 10 hours of sunlight remaining. An eleven-page script to squeeze into 7 minutes (as per the rulebook) and 59 storyboard shots to capture with our rookie crew. The clock is ticking. Marwan, one of our lead actors, is making friends with his new co-star, a white Arabian horse, as I oversee final camera set-ups for Take 1. Even though he is an accomplished rider (so he swore to me under oath!) I’d asked him to go bond with h

ACT TWO – Where can we get some horses? Ah, yes. The horses. This is what had lead me to this spot, urgently reminding my camera operator to ‘format the SD card’ as we set up the first shot of the day, beneath the palm trees at the stable gates. (Incidently, when Brad Pitt’s production team for War Machine (release due May 2017 on Netflix ) were looking for stand in locations for Afghanistan, they used the exact same location two years later!) I’m guessing they didn’t have le

ACT ONE: Making an Emirati Western in 48 hours It’s 6:45 am. The sun is barely over the horizon and I have had nowhere near enough coffee yet. Oh, and I went to bed at 3.30 last night because I was still desperately trying to finish storyboarding for the script we’d started at 8pm yesterday evening. Insanely tired, a twenty hour day ahead of me and unable to really appreciate the exotic beauty of where I was standing – a horse farm in the shadow of the Musandam peninsula, bor