The Director Wants to See More Options

A quick note on tempo before I begin. Drama moves at one speed and commercials move at another, and the gap between them is roughly the gap between a long walk and being fired out of a cannon. I'd spent a few weeks trading tidbits with a local producer about a fashion brand commercial that might or might not happen, and then at the start of last week it was confirmed and we were off. Here's the brief. Here's the treatment. Off you go.

The treatment tells the story the advert wants to tell. In this case, two characters, each on their own journey, eventually converging. Which sounds simple until you count the locations: somewhere in the region of twelve or thirteen, and because there are two separate journeys, it's essentially two of everything. Two houses. Two pubs. Two of most things. Everything doubled, which means everything doubled in the finding, the scouting, the planning, the parking, the facilities, the logistics, and all of the invisible work that has to happen before a camera can point at anything: clearing the line of sight, moving parked cars off a street, getting permission to put the camera where it needs to go, arranging road control with the council. Twice.

The houses are always the hardest. In Scotland there isn't really a centralised database of private homes willing to be filmed in, or at least nothing substantial or comprehensive. There are pockets, as I'll come to, but nothing you can rely on to furnish a whole job. So most of the time, finding one means door-knocking, letter-dropping, wearing down the shoe leather. It takes time you're rarely given. And then the options you've spent days assembling get reviewed at a fair clip, as they have to be, because everyone is working to the same impossible clock. Yes. No. No. Yes. No. It's nobody's fault, it's just the nature of a process where the finding takes a hundred times longer than the deciding. You learn not to take it personally. You mostly succeed.

That was last week: the scouting week. And all things considered, I think I did a decent job of it, gathering a respectable spread of options in the time available.

This week we started the director's recce, which is where the real fun begins. It began well. The London contingent flew up, we set off, and the first couple of places landed nicely. A lovely house with a lovely owner that fitted one of the story beats. Then an amazing location in the Pentland Hills with brilliant rural countryside, a great logistical position, and an owner who was genuinely keen to have us. Off to a strong start. Everything slotting together.

Then just as we started looking at the houses, the brief began to move.

The properties I'd been able to scout in the time available were, for the most part, upmarket rental homes. Stylish, a bit quirky, not stuffy, the kind of thing that fitted the brief as I'd understood it. And I'd gone for them deliberately, because they had photography readily available online, which is the only realistic way to scout thirteen locations in a week when there's no library to pull from and no time to door-knock enough private residences to put enough examples on the table as will be required. The plan was that art department would work their magic and dress them to feel properly lived-in.

But a brief is a living thing, and on a commercial it tends to evolve in real time. What became clear on the recce was that a dressed rental wasn't going to land, because at the far end of the chain sit the client and the agency, and when the scout photos reach them, they're being asked to picture a finished result from an undressed room. That's a hard ask of anyone who isn't on set every day, and the understandable instinct is to reach for something that already looks real. So the brief shifted towards genuine, lived-in homes. Fair enough. But it did mean the ground had quietly moved under a week's worth of work.

Then it picked up pace.

On day two, word came down the chain that one of the characters’ houses should now be something different. Less rural, more urban. A modern apartment, perhaps, in the city. Though the reference images that followed were of townhouses, old buildings with high ceilings and big Georgian windows, just with more contemporary furniture, so the target was still coming into focus even as we chased it. We scrambled. This is where one of those pockets I mentioned would have been a godsend: Film Edinburgh, the council's film office, does keep a database of houses. Perfect, in theory. Except their representative was on holiday that week, so the one bit of proper infrastructure available to me sat just out of reach. We found a few anyway by phoning round other location managers and calling in favours, which is how a great deal of this job quietly works. We pass locations to each other. The local producer, mindful of a tight budget, agreed to pay a colleague for a handful of his archive locations.

And then, at the end of that same day, another call with the client and the agency, and another refinement: the house should really be mid-century modern. Scandinavian, minimalist, clean lines. Different again.

So off we went to conjure yet another batch of options, with everyone understandably keen to see what else there might be. At one point the director joked that she'd half expected a letter drop to have landed already, which, given the brief had changed that same afternoon, we both knew was a joke about the timeline rather than about me. That's the thing about these weeks. The impossible compression becomes a running gag, because the alternative is to let it get to you.

Here is the thing nobody outside the job quite sees. All of this happens while I am physically in the back of a moving recce van.

I'm in the back, elbows knocking against the sides as we take the B roads, trying to draft traffic management plans, make appointments, and field new images as they come in from homeowners we've reached out to, holding my phone up to show the production designer between bumps. Is this one worth a visit? Yes or no. My reception cuts out every thirty seconds. I'm apologising to a location owner for the last-minute call, all while the people the apology is really for sit a few feet away, through no fault of their own.

And then the appointments, which are where I earn my money and lose my hair in equal measure.

You book someone for two o'clock. They rearrange their whole day around it, because being visited by a film crew is a novelty and people are generous like that. And then the day does what recce days do: it runs long, or a casting call comes in that genuinely can't wait, or the edit on another job needs an hour and a decent wifi signal. Side mission: I'm the one at the counter of some small rural café, asking very nicely whether we might borrow the back corner and most of the bandwidth for an hour. The owner, slightly baffled, says yes, because people mostly do.

Meanwhile the two o'clock is quietly slipping. I'll flag, as gently as I can, that it's the only window that particular owner has, and that it was one of the places singled out as a favourite in the review. Sometimes it holds. Sometimes the day simply has other ideas, the appointment moves, and the owner graciously shuffles things again. It's rarely anyone's decision exactly, it's just the creative process breathing in and out on a schedule that was always too tight. But I'm the one on the phone to a kind stranger for the third time, and I hate letting people down, so those are the moments that stay with me longer than they should.

There's a related hazard in following your nose, which is that a good location can appear anywhere, including down a stranger's driveway, in a farmer's field, or on the far side of a main road. The creative eye spots it instantly. The logistical brain then has to work out, often on the spot, whether the thing is remotely serviceable and whose land it even is. Find five or ten of those in a day and you've got five or ten little detective missions waiting for you that evening. It's genuinely part of the fun, most of the time. It's just also a lot.

Somewhere in all this my Garmin gave up on me entirely. HRV in freefall, sleep hours plummeting, the watch issuing increasingly disappointed notifications about my recovery. It wasn't wrong.

I don't want to make it sound like unrelenting misery, because it isn't, and the moments of oxygen are genuinely why I keep doing it.

Today we saw a townhouse in Edinburgh that must be worth several million. The kind of opulence I will never in my life get near, owned by a lovely couple, one a corporate high-flyer, the other now given over to philanthropy. Warm, generous people, an extraordinary house, and a small glimpse behind a curtain most people never get to look behind. The week before, East Lothian in the spring sunshine was glorious, and on the rare occasions I got to slow down and walk a bit of it, I can report there are few finer things in life than a genuinely scenic piss in the Scottish countryside. I've seen some beautiful houses. I've met a lot of new people, nearly all of them kind. Those are the bits that keep the tank from running dry.

Right now I'm driving back from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and the sun is going down behind the Kilpatrick Hills in about four layers of silhouette with a band of low flat cloud sitting on top of it, and it's stopped me thinking about locations for the first time all day.

The engine that drives all of this is the creative vision, and the job of everyone around it, mine included, is to serve that vision while keeping the practical realities in view, because those realities have an enormous bearing on the budget. That's where a good producer is worth their weight in gold: giving the director room to reach for the best possible version of each shot, then quietly steering the whole thing back towards something that can actually be made on time and on budget. The best ones make it look effortless. When it works, you barely notice it happening, which is rather the point.

Anyway. I've been in the Holiday Inn this week, while the London team enjoyed somewhere considerably grander, which feels about right for the pecking order and honestly suits me fine. I'm heading home now to eat something, have a shower, do a couple of chores, try to stop my brain from ticking, sleep, and get up in the morning to make sense of it all over again.

I'm a week and a half into this, already thoroughly knackered, and the phone keeps ringing about the next one. Another commercial, or a film, or a different film, higher grade but smaller budget, which may or may not work out to the same thing in the end. Somewhere in the back of my mind a quiet voice is asking how long I want to keep doing this for.

A funny old spicy mix, this job. But I wouldn't have answered the phone if I didn't love it.