BBC / HBO Gentleman Jack
Play filmOne of the highlights of our drone filming years
Drone filming on Sally Wainwright’s hit drama for HBO and the BBC was one of the highlights of our aerial filming business for several years.
We are very proud to have flown our DJI Inspire 2 drones on this high-quality TV drama, filmed right on our doorstep in Halifax, Calderdale, and across the towns, estates and moors of Yorkshire.
We first started drone filming in 2018 on series one, working through the summer heat and enjoying every moment of it. The Yorkshire sun was out every day we were booked for our drone filming service and we never lost a day of filming due to poor weather.
For a Yorkshire drone company, working on a Yorkshire story, written by a Yorkshire writer and filmed in the very house where it all happened, it does not get much better.
Shibden Hall, Halifax: the real home of Anne Lister
Most period dramas have to invent their big house. Gentleman Jack did not need to. Shibden Hall, on the edge of Halifax in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, is the real home of the real Anne Lister, and it plays itself.
Shibden Hall has looked out over the Shibden valley for more than 600 years. Its black-and-white timbered front is one of the best-known sights in Calderdale, and it was here that Anne Lister lived, ran her estate and wrote the diaries the whole series is built on.
Anne Lister left her mark on the place. The Gothic tower she added for her library, the terraced gardens and the lake in the park below the house are all part of the Shibden Hall that visitors walk around today, and all of it appears on screen.
Filming a drama in the house where the story actually happened gave Gentleman Jack a truth you cannot build on a studio floor. For us it meant drone filming over the same rooftops, parkland and wooded Yorkshire hillsides that Anne Lister walked nearly 200 years ago.
The hall is a treasured historic building, so every flight around it was planned with real care: precise, controlled flying close to the house, the cast and the crew, with the aircraft exactly where the shot needed it.
Shibden Hall and its park are looked after by Calderdale Council and open to the public, and since the series aired visitors have travelled to Halifax from all over the world to see Anne Lister’s home for themselves. We have plenty more aerial footage of Halifax and the valley on our Calderdale drone stock footage page.
Our drones at Shibden Hall and in the park
Sally Wainwright: Yorkshire’s own storyteller
Gentleman Jack was created, written and co-directed by Sally Wainwright, one of the most celebrated television writers in Britain, and a writer who has spent her career putting West Yorkshire on screen.
Sally Wainwright was born in Huddersfield and grew up in Sowerby Bridge in the Calder Valley, only a few miles from Shibden Hall. She studied at the University of York, famously drove a bus while she was getting started as a writer, and learned her trade on The Archers, Emmerdale and Coronation Street.
Her own dramas have rarely strayed far from home. At Home with the Braithwaites, Scott & Bailey, Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley made her name, with Happy Valley filmed around Hebden Bridge, Sowerby Bridge and the Upper Calder Valley, the same Calderdale hills we fly over every week.
She wrote and directed To Walk Invisible, her film about the Brontë sisters at Haworth, and her more recent series Riot Women is set in Hebden Bridge. Her work has won BAFTAs for Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley, she was awarded an OBE for services to writing and television, and she has been given the Freedom of the Borough of Calderdale.
Anne Lister was a story she had wanted to tell for many years. With the BBC and HBO behind it, she finally brought the diaries to the screen, filming in Anne Lister’s own home in Halifax and writing every episode herself.
On set she is a director who knows exactly what she wants from the air. Sally Wainwright uses drones to create seamless shots, working super close to the actors, so the aerial camera becomes part of the scene and not just a pretty view from above. That is the kind of drone filming we love.
With the cast, at the monitors and on the studio floor
Who was Gentleman Jack?
Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax: landowner, businesswoman, traveller, mountaineer and diarist, and one of the most remarkable women Yorkshire has ever produced.
Anne Lister was born in Halifax in 1791 and took over the running of the Shibden estate from her uncle. She managed the land, the tenants and the coal beneath it herself, at a time when women simply did not do that, and the people of Halifax gave her the nickname the series takes its title from: Gentleman Jack.
She wrote everything down. Her diaries run to around five million words, and the most private passages are written in a code of her own invention. They were hidden behind a panel at Shibden Hall, decoded long after her death, and are now recognised by UNESCO as a document of world importance. They are kept in Halifax by West Yorkshire Archive Service.
The drama picks up her story in 1832, when Anne Lister, played by Suranne Jones, comes home to Shibden Hall to restore the estate and reopen its coal pits, and falls in love with the wealthy heiress Ann Walker, played by Sophie Rundle.
At Easter 1834 the two women took communion together at Holy Trinity Church in Goodramgate, York, which they regarded as their marriage. Anne Lister died in 1840 and is buried at Halifax Minster.
The series was filmed in and around the places where it really happened: Halifax, Calderdale, York and the great houses and estates of Yorkshire.
Grand houses, market days and costumed crowds
Rebuilding the streets of 1830s Halifax
Stone setts, carriages, horses and market stalls: for Gentleman Jack whole Yorkshire streets were dressed back to the 1830s, with green screens hiding the twenty-first century.
Yorkshire is one of the few places where you can still point a camera down a street of blackened stone and believe you are in the 1830s. The art department did the rest, hiding road signs, laying down straw and bringing in carriages, carts and horses.
Drone filming on a period set is a discipline of its own. Every flight path has to avoid anything modern, the aircraft has to work safely around horses, cast and a very large crew, and the shot has to match what the visual effects team will add afterwards.
Where a modern town refused to disappear, big green screens were built across the end of the street so that 1830s Halifax could be painted in later. Our job was to give the production clean, steady aerial plates to build on.
These stills show the sets from our side of the camera: the drone on the setts waiting for its cue, the green screens, and the long quiet waits between takes that every film crew knows well.
Carriages, green screens and a drone on the setts
Up on the Yorkshire moors
Not every flying day was at a grand house. Gentleman Jack also took our drone crew up onto the open Pennine moorland above the Yorkshire valleys.
Anne Lister was a great walker and thought nothing of striding miles over the hills, so the landscape around Halifax is as much a character in the drama as the house. Wide aerial shots of a lone figure crossing the moor are exactly what a drone does best.
Moorland filming means carrying everything you need: aircraft, batteries, monitors, sun shades and a base station, all set up on rough ground a long way from the nearest road, with the wind doing whatever it likes.
It is the kind of location we know well. We are based in the Calderdale hills, the Pennine moors are our back garden, and we have been flying over them for film and television for years.
Our base station on the moor
Back to Shibden through lockdown
Then 2020 came along and all filming stopped for many months due to a government lockdown caused by a worldwide pandemic.
However, series two of Gentleman Jack was back in production, and over the next 18 months the cast and crew battled through this very difficult time.
New ways of working, testing, distancing and a stop-start schedule made everything harder, but the production kept going, and series two reached BBC One and HBO in the spring of 2022. We were proud to be back in the air over Yorkshire for it.
A drama made across the county
Gentleman Jack was filmed almost entirely in Yorkshire. Alongside Shibden Hall, the production used locations across Calderdale, West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and York, including:
If you are planning a drama, documentary or commercial in Yorkshire, we know these locations, the landowners and the airspace, and we would love to help.
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