Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat (Nor Ash)
There is an inscription on the front of the James Farley post office in New York City that says, “Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”. It resonated with us recently when the exploding Icelandic volcano meant that we had a three-man crew stranded in Cannes for over a week. Not because we’re comparable to the US postal service or because we suffered any particular hardship while “trapped” in a five star hotel on the ridiculously sunny French Riviera, but because the travel chaos didn’t stop us getting the job done on deadline or cause any particular disruption to everyday company business. And this got me thinking about how modern communication tools allow us to pretty much carry on regardless.
We went to Cannes to shoot at the fabulously glamorous Intercontinental Carlton Hotel. You’d recognise it from virtually every Cannes Film Festival photo call (film stars from Bardot to Brando to Bernard Bresslaw have been seen draped across its 7th floor balcony) and we were there to shoot a promo for the luxury travel market with TV star Julia Bradbury. The plan was simple, arrive Tuesday, shoot Wednesday, skeedaddle Thursday, then edit Friday and Saturday ready for use on the web on Monday. A relatively tight turnaround but perfectly achievable. And then we woke up on Thursday to the news of the volcano.
Rather than shrug and go for a croque monsieur (google it, it’s not rude) we had a quick brainstorm and, after commandeering the entire IT capability of our hotel, started uploading footage to our FTP server. The clips were downloaded in the edit suite and the edit actually started earlier than planned. The only downside was that the clips weren’t as hi-res as we’d have liked but the client received the finished edits on deadline and was both very grateful and pretty amazed at our ingenuity. NB: We re-edited in HD once we got home and replaced the online films.
As this happened, and for the subsequent six days we were marooned in Cannes, we stayed in constant contact with the office, our clients and the rest of the world. Two mobile phones and one wi-fi connection enabled us to arrange meetings and shoots, liase about ongoing projects and post pics and pointless trivia to Twitter. Inevitably, after a few hours on a sun lounger, we reasoned that there really was little point returning home at all, however one look at our escalating credit card bills soon disabused us of this notion – croque monsieurs don’t come cheap.
Perhaps the most significant example of how modern communication assisted us came the following Tuesday, while we were still stranded. One of our most high profile recent projects is a short film of Philip Larkin’s poem “Here” which we made to promote the Larkin25 events in East Yorkshire this year. We’d worked on the film for over a year – prepping, shooting, recording, scoring and mastering – and that Tuesday was the day the film was being launched. Twice. In the morning was a press launch at the Vue Cinema in Hull and in the evening was the public premiere at the Hull International Short Film Festival at the Reel Cinema in the city. Both events took a lot of organising and were to be attended by several media agencies – TV, radio, newspapers etc. During the planning it was decided that I, as director, would be the public face of the film; so I would be available for media interviews and photographs and lead a Q&A session at the premiere. Once our exploding Icelandic chum got to work I thought that all of our plans would be out of the window, but again technology came to the rescue.
From just one mobile phone we managed to amend and approve artwork, powerpoints and press releases, pre-record interviews and provide photographs to accompany them as well as taking part in live radio interviews on the big day. All of this was reported on Twitter as we went and both events passed off perfectly without any real need for panic or our personal presence. The next day we saw the resulting TV reports and the reviews from the attending press (excellent, by the way) on the same mobile phone.
If Moore’s law (google it, its not rude) is correct and all our communication devices continue to get ever more powerful and if broadband speeds continue to get faster then the time is surely arriving when we could complete entire jobs without anyone ever meeting each other. The producer lines it up, the director plans the shoot, the cameraman shoots it, the editor edits it and then puts it online for the client to approve. But no-one ever actually meets. No-one even knows what anyone else looks like. We’d all be invisible, ghosts in our own machines, like the robbers in the original Thomas Crown Affair, like Keyser Sozes.
It probably won’t happen but if it does I can’t decide if it would be a bit of a shame or really, really cool.
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