Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Sun, glorious sun

Day 7

After the great day we had yesterday I expected today to start on a high. It was overcast when we drove to set only to find nobody else there. It felt like we would never get going. When Omar eventually got to set at 9am, two hours after call time I was pacing up and down like a caged tiger.
The catch 22 of being here is this: I might as well keep a calm head and breathe because shouting achieves less here than anywhere else in the world and what is, is more so than anywhere else. But as I sit there keeping calm and watching the hours slip by I wonder if anything will happen at all and at the end of the day I am responsible to deliver the commercials.
So I alternate, periods of calm punctuated by little explosions. At least the explosions are a deliberate, conscious strategy and not some automatic behavior.

Funny enough, the day turns out to be most perfect to date, with blue, blue skies and great sunlight and we manage to shoot today and tomorrow’s shots in one afternoon. When the sun eventually set, Merlin, my cameraman, and I turned to each other with a bewildered look in our eyes not quite sure if we had in fact managed to pull off the impossible. Of course, it could have ended up the way we’d planned it, with shitty weather and nothing in the can after two days.

I realized that evening how fantastic it is to have people you can trust working with you. Manuela, the art director, Merlin and I have really worked well and had fun so far. Fun seems to be the essential ingredient.

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