The Only Way Is Essex?

August 9, 2011
By John Mountford | No Comments

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The weather men said fine – but what do they know?  This was Frinton, it was 6am and a dozen crew stood hunched against the rain lancing past the location-catering truck. Somebody struggled to put up a windbreak.  The jokes were thin, even amongst battle-hardened veterans hugging their insulated coffee-mugs for comfort.

‘Last week’, said one, ‘I worked on this Rum commercial in Fiji’.  Another countered, flashing a nut-brown tan from beneath his parka, “I was doin’ a motor ad in Morocco”.  We too were preparing to make a commercial, about harvesting the warmth of the sun’s rays. Only this was Frinton, and it was 6am.

Frinton. Where our written authority stipulating the exact parking spot for the location caterer was over-ruled on the day of the shoot by someone more local.  The truck, and our lunch, ended up half a mile away on a hastily-begged pub car park. Frinton, where a resident, pre-warned about the day’s events, chose nevertheless, volubly and energetically, to take issue with our generator-truck being parked on the street.  Not HIS street, and not in anyone’s way.  But this was Frinton, and the day was young.

And cold.  My Lord the cold.  Only a week previously, the design team, in shorts and flip-flops, prepped the location garden (in between slurping ice-cream) with an eye-wateringly colourful array of summer plants and shrubs.  Inside the property their interior design colleagues also performed magic, with windows wide-flung, gasping for air in the sub-tropical shimmer. Today those windows were shut tight and the once-stately flowers sagged onto the soggy lawn.

But cheer up, this was day one of the shoot … things could only improve.  And it was now 7am.  Bacon butties downed, tea slurped, the shouting could begin. ‘Des, can I have 5m of track laid across the lawn?’ ‘Alex, those cables will need moving’ ‘Bruno we’re on the 6mm prime lens please’ ‘Who’s got a claw hammer?  Anybody?’ The usual cheerful pandemonium.

But not for long.  With the chauffeur en route to collect the performer, the Ad Agency primping the props, and just an hour to go before shot number one, the Director took a final, grimacing squint at the leaden sky and called for silence. ‘OK everybody, no exteriors today.  We’re bringing all the interior shots forward from tomorrow. So can we set and light interiors, please?’

Sounds easy? If only. It’s a frantic, shot by shot re-build of the entire schedule.  And it’s not even ‘problem solved’. Because we still have to pray the rain doesn’t fall too heavily or we’ll be able to see it through the supposedly ‘sunny’ window.  And to simulate the sun inside will require a whole lot of extra lights outside. If you’ve not met a bronzed spark just back from Morocco who’s been ordered to spend the morning in a rain-lashed garden, believe me, you’re lucky.

Now picture the living room of a standard modern semi-detached.  It measures from over there to, well, over here. One small sofa, one small chair and you’re hard pushed to find space for a rug and a coffee table.

Now imagine it with a large camera, camera tracks, a camera operator, focus puller, grip, lighting gaffer, sound recordist, props guy, producer, director, agency, and a runner.  All additional personnel simply have to work in the kitchen (after all we must leave space for the performer!). That’s digital people, the 3D designer, an electrician … oh yes and the householder and her son!!

No wonder the performer, needing to press her clothing, can only find space round at the neighbours’ house!

Slowly we inch through the day, pausing because a neighbour’s car is too visible, or the wind is blowing the distant trees, or somebody’s accidentally switched-on a haze machine so the whole scene takes on the look of a period drama.

Amazingly, we wrap on time and collapse into our hotel.

Day 2 dawns. Warm.  Clear blue skies. Over breakfast there’s real delight about the decision to hold-over exteriors to today.  Frinton has come up trumps!  Did we ever doubt it?

Around the lawn the plants stand bright and colourful. In fact so bright the director momentarily considers erecting screens to reduce the amount of sun!

But no, it’s fine, and with the first shot set, the whole of this neat Close of houses falls silent. ‘Standby’. ‘Mark it’ ‘Shot 38a take 1’. Only, no-one shouts ‘action’. Because all ears have swivelled in horror towards an emerging hubbub which is slowly but inexorably swelling into the placid summer air.  The entire crew simply stands stock still, listening to the snorting, shrieking, laugh and tumble of the school playground – in the next street.

The sound recordist didn’t need to say ‘I’m sorry we can’t record over that racket’. But he said it anyway (recordists are like that). So we took the first tea break of the day.  There were to be quite a few more.

Like when the planes flew over – and later the rescue helicopter.  When the bin lorry reversed its stately way along the Close right up to our lights; when a cheeky old bloke cycled through the middle of shot – and even gave the camera a cheery wave; and when the kids were finally released for the day. Where did they all make for? Yep. Oh well, we needed another tea break.

But as ever, the angst of getting the raw material disappears when at last you see the rushes in the edit suite. Breathe easy – we have a commercial.  We have thirty seconds of pure gold. And there’s just a sneaking feeling that somewhere, hopefully in the Ukraine, a spark might be hunched against the icy wind saying ‘Just think, last week I was basking in the warmth of Frinton’.

- John Mountford