The production - what can possibly go wrong?

Torrential rain during the shoot… the camera breaks down… your star fails to show… you “blow the budget” or “go way off schedule”. These are some of the problems, but also the myths of production.

For a start, how often does it rain every single minute of a day in the UK? Once only (for me). I was shooting at Lord’s cricket ground for a client. By adjusting the day’s “shot list”, we swapped exterior scenes for interior scenes while it rained, re-wrote some scenes so they could take place inside, and popped out to catch our essential exteriors when the weather let up a bit. We avoided shooting upwards to miss the black sky and to prevent spots of rain getting on the lens; we also used the wide angle end of the lens so rain was less visible. A bit of colour tweaking in the edit and you could hardly tell. Again, this kind of issue really goes back to pre-production planning – if a production needs to be shot entirely outside or depends substantially on it not raining, then a contingency day(s) should be put into the budget and schedule early on. If “commercials-perfect” weather is demanded, then there’s always weather insurance (or shooting somewhere like South Africa), but it costs a bomb.

But what happens when your star fails to show? Once I was filming with Gabby Logan in Liverpool for the Royal and SunAlliance the day a hurricane hit the UK and all flights were grounded. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t make it until Day 2 of the two day shoot. What to do? We changed the way we filmed her scenes that day so we could just about get away without her on camera and shot a little extra overtime the following day. No one could ever tell she hadn’t been there the whole time. In fact, it helped to create a really interesting look to the video and made what was supposed to be a straight presenter-to-camera show, something quirkier and more interesting.

What about equipment failure? Cameras and key equipment do occasionally break down. Often they are fixable temporarily on the spot. There are camera and sound hire companies all over the UK and in most large cities around the world where a replacement can be hurried in. If you’re going to be in a remote place, then it pays to bring a back-up camera or sound mixer with you.

“Blowing the budget” is really more the preserve of Hollywood prima donnas and cigar-chomping moguls. With a commissioned business programme, everything should be better controlled and more transparent (and usually less hysterical). The end cost might not be the same budget agreed at the beginning of the project, but the extra costs should have been flagged up, explained and agreed with the client along the way.

Similarly with “going off schedule”. The schedule is a co-operative affair between client and producer. Like the budget above, many a project has been delivered differently than first planned for, but in my experience this has always been mutually agreed in time with the client - maybe everyone realised the schedule was too ambitious to meet the original deadline so a shorter or more modest video was agreed instead or maybe the actual launch of the video put back; maybe a vital ingredient (a key interview or launch prototype) could not be made ready in time for inclusion in the video. Certainly, Player has never missed a deadline because the shoot overran or we were still editing the final programme while the curtain went up.