Amazon Take Us Home: Leeds United
Play filmFilming the summer Leeds went up
Phil and the team did the drone filming for the makers of Take Us Home: Leeds United, The City Talking, for Amazon in the summer of 2020.
We flew the DJI Inspire 2 aircraft with the X7 Super 35mm camera and a full set of prime lenses, shooting in RAW to get maximum quality.
The shoot involved several days of drone filming, including the Wetherby training ground and the Elland Road football stadium.
The culmination of the shoot was to record the night when the team won promotion, at the end of the 2019/20 Championship-winning season.
Promotion night at an empty Elland Road
We were brought in to film the end of the season that took Leeds United back to the Premier League after sixteen years, played out during Covid in front of empty stands. It was surreal.
The 2019/20 season had stopped dead in March 2020 with Leeds top of the Championship. When football came back in June, it came back behind closed doors: no supporters, no noise, just the players’ voices echoing around empty grounds.
Elland Road holds more than 37,000 people and is famous for its atmosphere. Seeing it from the air with every seat empty, on the biggest nights the club had known in a generation, is something none of us will forget.
Promotion was confirmed on 17 July 2020, and Leeds were crowned champions the following day. The supporters could not go in, so they came to the stadium anyway, and thousands gathered outside Elland Road in the dark with flags, flares and scarves.
That is the picture below: the stadium lit up and silent inside, and the streets of Beeston packed with people outside it. From the air you could see both halves of that strange summer in a single frame.
Leeds lifted the Championship trophy at Elland Road a few days later, after the final game of the season, to bring Marcelo Bielsa’s team home to the Premier League.
Elland Road at sunset and after dark
Take Us Home, narrated by Russell Crowe
The Amazon Prime Video documentary that followed Leeds United and Marcelo Bielsa from heartbreak to the Premier League.
Take Us Home: Leeds United was made by The City Talking, the Leeds production company, and directed by Lee Hicken, with NEO Studios, for Amazon Prime Video. It is narrated by the Oscar-winning actor and lifelong Leeds fan Russell Crowe, who has said, “I’ve loved Leeds all my life.”
The first series, six episodes released in August 2019, followed Marcelo Bielsa’s extraordinary first season in charge: the football, “Spygate”, the goal he ordered his team to give back to Aston Villa, and the play-off semi-final defeat to Derby County that ended it.
The second series, two 45-minute episodes released in September 2020, is the one we filmed for. It covers the club’s centenary season, the shutdown, the return behind closed doors and, finally, promotion as champions.
It is a Yorkshire story told by Yorkshire film-makers, and we were proud to be the Yorkshire drone crew they called.
Elland Road and Thorp Arch from the air
Several days of drone filming across Leeds and Wetherby, at the stadium and at the club’s training ground.
Elland Road has been the home of Leeds United since the club was formed in 1919. It stands in Beeston, just south of the city centre, beside the M621, and from the air you can see how it sits in the city, with the Leeds skyline behind it and the Yorkshire hills beyond.
Thorp Arch, near Wetherby, is where the work is done. The training ground lies in open countryside north-east of Leeds, a world away from the noise of a match day, and it is where Marcelo Bielsa drilled the team that won the league.
Flying over a football stadium and a Premier League training ground takes careful planning and the full co-operation of the club. Every flight was agreed in advance with the production and with Leeds United, and flown with the right permissions in place.
We filmed on the Inspire 2 and X7 in RAW with prime lenses so that the aerials would stand alongside the cinema cameras used for the rest of the series, at sunset, at dusk and on into the night.
Leeds is our nearest big city. We are based in West Yorkshire and regularly fly for film, television, sport and commercial clients in Leeds and right across Yorkshire. If you are planning a sports documentary or a stadium shoot, we would love to hear from you.
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Call Phil directly07957 627 628 Send an emailphil@halovue.co.uk