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Art Director looking for experience in location scouting and management.

8 years, 3 months ago - Emma Larsson-Revitt

I'm based in the South East/London with knowledge of and contacts in the Midlands and the North. I've also worked internationally in my previous role. I'm really keen to get as much experience as possible so will work for low pay/flat rate. Have wheels.

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8 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

My first tip for any location work coming from an Art Dept background - Unit bases! You cannot understate the importance of a decent unit base in connection with a location. A beautiful woodland location is useless if you have to walk 10 minutes through mud to get there with a full unit. Hard standing with access for facilities vehicles, parking, toilets, water, grey water drainage, waste management, dining space for everyone and power are all critical.

Response from 8 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin SHOW

8 years, 3 months ago - Emma Larsson-Revitt

Thank you Paddy! I have just managed a fashion campaign shoot location in the North Lincs coast which was perfection but toilets were indeed an issue! My Landy made a fab (albeit small) unit base though :)

Response from 8 years, 3 months ago - Emma Larsson-Revitt SHOW

8 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Ha! That is a dinky unit base, but when needs must ;-) Bear in kind all those facilities vehicles (costume, honey wagons, makeup, 3-ways, production office, dining bus, catering trucks, etc) can be quite chunky and need precision management to get everything into a space, and the space needs to be secure (you may need to get heras fencing for instance) if the production is any size at all. If you can get experience on an event site (eg a festival) in the SITE office, it'll be a useful experience - best location people I know know all about the requirements of site work, signage, etc :)

Response from 8 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin SHOW

8 years, 3 months ago - Emma Larsson-Revitt

Yes, it was v cozy. Thank you so much for the advice. Give me a shout if you have an opportunity for me to tag along with your location people at any point. Cheers! E

Response from 8 years, 3 months ago - Emma Larsson-Revitt SHOW

8 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Oh, just to expand slightly, in case it's helpful...

When you are at a location, it's not just about the set, but every bit as much about the mechanics of the shoot - the unit base is incredibly important - important enough that it may inform your location choices, even if somewhere looks amazing. For often people often want 'council flat in a block' as a location, thinking it's cheap - but it necessitates setting up a base nearby, and parking is always a premium at high-rise sites. That means the production must pay the council for use of parking spaces (and pay more than a drive-up punter by prebooking, and need many contiguous bays for parking long vehicles) and then pay a silence fee to anyone who lives in the block who can't park and decides to be a pain in the neck, then pay to secure the space with overnight watch and fencing...so what sounds like a 'cheap' location is actually a very expensive one when you cost beneath the line. It may be that 'council flat' can actually be 'generic front room', and that you can do a base deal with a nearby pub to use their car park, toilets, and catering.

When discussing with (in particular, inexperienced) directors, they can have ideas for loads of different locations, and not really consider the cost of unit moves. At the very least, each move is 2 hours lost on camera, which may help them focus again on reducing location count. I had a list of 54 locations from a script draft once - for a 22 day shoot! Pushed back to the director that that meant he'd lose 2-4 hours every day, unless he rationalised his locations - and we got it down to 17, and with a bit of huffing we reduced the base moves to 13 (and shoot in locations locally to those bases). You want the base moves to be overnight so the new site is waiting the next morning, and that is going to involve several drivers, probably including HGV drivers, and due to driver hour laws, they cannot hold other crew roles. As you can imagine, getting drivers for HGV's to do a full unit move overnight costs money, and needs management.

Just wanted to flag those small elements so you can avoid running up against them the hard way - I'm sure others have useful suggestions :)

Response from 8 years, 3 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin SHOW