Snow! Sun! Copper! Coal! Cameras! Action!

On location with a film crew, Hugh Leggatt kept a diary as he toured Rio Tinto operations in the US.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, it was dark and a cold rain was falling. A woman from Washington DC in the shuttle bus from the airport was told the good weather had ended just that afternoon. She exclaimed, "Damn, I'm always a day late and a dollar short".

It got worse. The dazzle expected of Utah at the end of March, of the shimmering salt lake and the blue mountains, turned next day to a white wonderland of snow. "And a merry Christmas to you too," a companion greeted a caller on his phone as cars ploughed along the freeway.

Conditions were not ideal for making movies. However, the schedule was set, the appointments made, and the operators and managers of Kennecott Utah Copper ready to go before the cameras to show what they do and how they do it. This was for Rio Tinto's quarterly video magazine Shared vision, a roundup of news and insights from Group operations. It is distributed on DVD in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese to thousands of managers, employees and others in 20 countries.

A London production company makes two or more forays a year "on location" to different parts of the Group. Last year it was Argentina and China, this time the American west, later northern and western Australia. The footage is fashioned into a number of features for Shared vision as well as for additional corporate productions.

This visit to the US took in Kennecott Utah Copper (KUC) in Salt Lake City, the Resolution Copper project and Kennecott Exploration in Arizona, and the open cast coal mines of Kennecott Energy in northern Wyoming.