From the Stage to the Scout Car

People sometimes ask how I ended up in location management. The honest answer is: by accident, and with some relief.

I spent ten years as a professional musician. After leaving school in 2002, a few of us moved to Glasgow with the fairly ambitious plan of making a go of it. The city had an extraordinary music scene at the time and it swallowed us whole, in the best possible way. My first band with a recording contract was called Make Model, and we signed to EMI during what felt like a genuine moment of momentum. Bidding wars, tastemaker press, small tours. Then we imploded mid-album, as bands do, and that was that.

After a stint doing session work, which I loved, honestly, for the sheer lack of responsibility, I was asked to join Frightened Rabbit, who were already one of my favourite Scottish bands and had built a real following, particularly in the US. We signed with Atlantic and Domino, toured extensively, recorded together. It was an incredible few years. But living and working in each other's pockets with four other people for that long takes its toll, and in 2014 I stepped away.

I needed a job. A friend worked in commercials production and got me on set as a runner. The on-set atmosphere struck me immediately, and not entirely favourably. Coming from the music industry, which for all its chaos is comparatively relaxed and unstuffy, and, strange as it sounds, far less ego-driven than life on a film set, the world of assistant directors and their clipboards felt unnecessarily tense. A lot of stress performed very loudly by people who seemed to enjoy performing it. I don't think I hid my feelings particularly well, because before long my friend pulled me aside and asked if I'd like to go and photograph a potential location instead.

I said yes before she'd finished asking.

What I didn't expect was how much my background in music would shape the way I work. Not in any literal sense – nobody needs a bassist on a recce – but in the way I think about creative collaboration.

Spending a decade working closely with directors, producers and other musicians taught me that the process matters as much as the result. That the best work tends to come when people feel understood, when there's enough trust in the room to say "actually, that's not quite it" and try again. You learn to read people. You learn when to push an idea and when to let it go.

That instinct transfers directly to location work. A big part of the job – the part that doesn't show up on any call sheet – is time spent with directors and production designers, getting inside their heads. Hours in the car between locations. Dinner at the end of a long recce day. Those conversations are where you find out what a project is really about, what the director is reaching for, what keeps the production designer up at night.

I remember sitting with a director over aperitifs in a hotel somewhere in the north-west, trying to pin down a location we'd been circling for weeks. We were drawing rough sketches on scraps of paper, pulling up maps on phones, scrolling through reference images, trying to articulate why this specific type of place seemed to exist everywhere except Scotland. It felt a bit like being back in a rehearsal room, working through something that wasn't quite there yet but that you knew existed somewhere.

A few weeks later, we found it. Watching the production designer's team then take what was already a remarkable place and amplify it into something that felt completely lived-in and real, and hearing the locals say they wished it could stay that way, was one of those moments that reminds you why the job is worth doing.

The practical side of location management is less romantic, and I'll cover that in another post. Permits, parking, portaloos. There's plenty of that. But the reason I've stayed in this industry, the reason I find it genuinely satisfying, is the creative collaboration at its heart. Understanding what a production is trying to say, and then finding the places that say it.

That, it turns out, isn't so different from trying to make a record.