Producing in a period of economic downturn

In a period of economic downturn the efficiency of the production process is even more important than ever. When budgets shrink and there is a need of achieving more for less, it is important to revisit the processes we have been using and carefully consider changing the ones that represent an irrational waste of money, efforts and time. 

There are several basic reasons why we should start reengineering the production processes but the main one is our tendency to overproduce
We have been overproducing for a long time. According to dictionary.com, paradigm is "a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them." The process of producing TV commercials has been structured around a paradigm, a set of rituals, rules, archetypes and codes that very often acquire more importance that the objectives and the substance of the production. In many occasions the form is more important that the essence and ends up increasing the costs without giving any creative advantage. The TV commercial production process has been based on a set of written and unwritten rules that make it rigid and often ineffective from a cost perspective. Some of these roles are established by federal and local regulations or are dictated by union contracts and therefore there is little room to adjust them to the reality of the market, besides taking the option of going and shooting the project overseas if this option is allowed. But other roles, probably most of them, are based on by default procedures and comfort based practices. Many of those procedures are pre-established, unquestioned and not reevaluated on a per-project basis: that means that they are applied just because they always have been, no matter how related they are to the project, how cost effective they are and how much they add in terms of production value. Specific members of the team apply some particular procedures just because they are convenient for them personally, not because they are functional to the project: most of the departments tend to design the processes in a way that keeps them within a comfort zone. Most of the rules applied to define the processes generate a huge waste of money and resources and have a domino effect that makes the size of the production grow exponentially.

New rules for upgrading

American Airlines changed the rules for the upgrades. This is the last demonstration that flying with AA is just absurd: bad service, no food onbord (when most of the other international airlines like Mexicana or Lacsa can offer a decent meal), delays, and so forth. My loyalty to AA ends today. Next week I will start flying with another airline.

Homestead Speedway

Webisodes in Mexico

We shot in Mexico several webisodes for Vesyves, the video portal in Spanish we are going to launch in May. We used several ultralight planes to shoot in Valle de Bravo, Acapulco, San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato.

Production service

When hiring a production service company there is something you really want: efficiency and transparency.

You want the production to go smoothly and efficiently in a way that maximized the investment, the resources and the time. But you also want a transparent, honest and effective management of the finances. Production services have to handle your project in your behalf with one objective in mind: getting the bests results spending as little as possible. You cannot accept a production service to apply inflated rates, manipulate the information to confuse you and make the budget to grow to make a bigger mark up.

Puerto Madero

This week I spent three days in Buenos Aires: We had an office in Argentina since the year 2000 and we shoot there quite often because of the production costs and the quality of the production structures. This time I was there only for some meetings and I didn't have much time to go out but I could not miss having lunch at Puerto Madero and eat my favorite Argentine dish: Chinchulines.
Puerto Madero is a district of Buenos Aires, which occupies a segment of the Rio de la Plata riverbank: it is composed of restored brick docks and hosts some of the best restaurants in town.

Montezuma

We just finished shooting another spot in Costa Rica. This time it was in the region of Montezuma, in the southern part of the Nicoya peninsula.
We needed a combination of 3 different type of locations: a jungle, a waterfall where to shoot some stunt shots and a typical Central-American fishing village.
We picked that region because the 3 locations were just a few miles apart and the production schedule was achievable in the 2 available days.
The crew and the equipments traveled by road and ferryboat from San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, to Montezuma while the agency and the clients flew to the location on a small aircraft.
With the exclusion of the directors, DP and steadicam operator, all the crewmembers were local and, as usual, they demonstrate how professional they are and how used they are to the difficulties of shooting in the middle of the rainforest.

The Rincon de la Vieja Volcano

The Rincon de la Vieja Volcano is a massive cone situated in the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica, some 140 miles west of San Jose and approximately 40 miles from the Pacific coast. Liberia, the capital of the province has an international airport with direct connections to US and Latin American cities.
Rincon de la Vieja is a 6,200 ft high stratovolcano formed by several simultaneous volcanic eruptions that fused together and created a single mountain and is considered an active volcano even if the last eruption took place in 1997.

Even if the access to the mountain is difficult and the limitations imposed by the authorities to protect the environment are tough, the volcano offers incredible locations such as Las Pailas (gurgling mud pots and fumaroles), Blue Lake and the 100ft high La Cangrejo Waterfall.

Maps

Downtown Miami

In the last few days we have been scouting urban locations in Miami. Besides the typical Miami Beach locations such as Ocean Drive or Lincoln Road, the city offers a wide variety of streets: classic downtown look, residential, modern and so on.

A car on a beach

Shooting a car on a beach is in general a tough proposition both for practical reasons and for the permitting. On one hand wide, gorgeous beaches have often a difficult access that makes impossible to drive a car into them. In other cases the consistence of the sand doesn't allow the car to drive.  But there is also a serious difficulty in getting the permit to put a car on a beach for environmental reasons. Some beaches, like the ones in Key Biscayne, Florida, host turtle nests, and this fact makes them extremely protected.

In our experience the best place in Florida to shoot a car on a beach id Daytona, some 260 miles north of Miami and 55 miles east of Orlando. The surface is hard enough to support the weight of the car and the width of the beach make the shoot pretty easy to handle.

Cliff

We needed spectacular cliffs facing a stormy sea and mountains with majestic landscapes. The challenge was to find the land's end.
We put together a list of possible places where to go and produce the spot. The first list was quite wide: Cornwall or Southern England, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, Chile.
I shot many times in England and I have not seen anywhere else cliffs as beautiful as the ones in Sussex (Seven Sisters) or Dorset (Bat's Head). I would have loved to be able to shoot this project there but the UK option didn't look possible for two reasons: the lack of high peaks and mountains at a reasonable distance from the cliffs and the productions costs in England.
We immediately dropped some other options mainly because of creative concerns about the character of the locations but also for operative reasons as well.
At this point we narrowed down the list to 3 countries: Iceland, the North West of Spain and Southern Chile that offered not only the right combination of locations but also and fundamentally the right atmosphere for our spot. The textures of the rocks and the water, the colors of the trees and the sky, the density of the air, the general mood of those placed looked perfect for the spot.
Iceland, for instance, has fantastic locations and moreover the right atmosphere for the project: dark and cloudy skies, stormy sea, and big waves. We liked the cliffs of Dyrholaey, close to the village of Vik in the Myradlur region. There are not high mountains in the area but we could find locations of incredible beauty, capable of conveying the "land's end" feeling we were looking for. The texture of the lavic ground and the fogginess of the landscapes were absolutely perfect. Iceland looked as the front-runner location for a while also because of the technology available for the aerial shots. But unfortunately the shoot was moved from the middle of October to the middle of November. This made a great difference: on November 15th, for example, the sunrise in Reykjavik is at 9.58 am and the sunset at 4.27 pm meaning that we had only 6 hours and a half of daylight per day if we shot there. Iceland was not an option anymore.
We considered north-western Spain: specially the regions of Galicia and Asturias. I shot several times in both regions: the cliffs of Cabo Peña or Llanes are spectacular, offer the right climate and are situated at a distance of just a few miles from Los Picos de Europa, a chain of mountains with peaks with an elevation of over 8,500 feet. Los Picos de Europa displays a combination of deep valleys, high summits with drops of several thousand feet and some glaciers.
Asturias and Galicia are reasonably close to Madrid allowing the crew and the equipments to reach the locations in 5 hours drive or one hour flight. The ferry time of the helicopter would be a little over two hours.
We also considered Chile. The country has a huge number of incredible cliffs. We thought that the most spectacular were the ones on Rapanui (Easter Island) and on the Island of Chiloé. Chiloé offers far better conditions to shoot both logistically and in terms of opportunity of combining different locations in a reasonable production schedule.
Chiloé is located at the latitude of 42° South (approximately the same latitude as Portland, Oregon, but in the southern hemisphere). Being the shooting at the middle of November (mid spring in Chile) Chiloé should offer the right weather conditions with average temperature of 50 degrees and good possibilities of cloudy skies. The other great advantage of Chiloé is that on November 15th you can count on more than 14 hours of daylight (from 6:20 am to 8:50 pm). As I mentioned before, Chiloé is an island connected to the mainland by a ferry, which take 30 minutes to cross the narrow Channel of Chacao. Once in the mainland, it takes a drive of less than 100 miles to reach the Andes and the Chilean Lake District: a region of lakes, 9,000 ft high volcanoes, peaks, forests and waterfalls.
We were extremely ambitious about the texture of the rocks, the trees, the water, and the ground and also about the density of the atmosphere. But the beauty of the cliffs of Chiloé and the incredible variety of visual opportunities offered by the Lake District in a very short range really impressed us.

Florida: much more than beaches and Ocean Drive

Florida has a privileged weather throughout the entire winter:: temperatures rarely go below 20 C (70 F) and the blue skies are almost guaranteed . But Florida has an additional and less known advantage: it offers and incredible wide range of locations. It doesn't only have the typical tropical locations everybody knows but also many unexpected places such as small villages, hilly regions, forests, lakes, railroads, modern and colonial architecture, etc.

The World Monument Watch

Miami

In most of Europe it is already pretty cold: 4-15 C (40-59F) in Milan, 1-10 C (34-51F) in Paris, 2-10 C (37-50 F) in Amsterdam, 7-11 C (45-53 F) in London.
In Miami, for the contrary ,we still have excellent weather conditions: today the low temperature is 24 C (76 F) and the high will reach 31 C (89 F).  Shooting in Florida during the fall and winter is a very good choice:  sunny skies and warm temperatures. In addition to that in southern Florida you get more hours of daylight than in cities situated in northern regions.

Posada San Miguel

Webisodes in Costa Rica

Miami and the Caribbean

Miami is the perfect center for productions in the Caribbean: there are direct flights to most of the nations of the region and therefore shipping the equipments and the crew is easy and inexpensive. The crewmembers based in Miami are used to shoot in the islands: they know how to operate in those environments. Several production services based in Miami have multilingual teams capable of operating in the English, French and Spanish-speaking islands.

It is very efficient to organize from Miami a production in the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles (Virgin Islands, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, etc), the Leeward Islands (St Maarten, Dominica, Guadaloupe, etc) and the Windward Islands (Barbados, Tobago, Trinidad, etc).

The perfect location

The need for the perfect location goes much further than the quest for a specific type of geographic environment or an appropriate climate. It is a much more delicate, subliminal and creative approach.
We shouldn't look, for instance, for an "ancient European city" because thousand of places fit that description: Pompeii, Bath, Tour, Koblenz, Sigüenza, Budapest, Istanbul, Olympia, etc.  We should, on the contrary, concentrate our quest on finding that unique atmosphere, texture, tone of color, type of light or shape that can makes the commercial different, memorable, relevant.
In this same way the foggy humidity of Dover (England) or the black stones of Lanzarote can make the difference when the camera starts rolling. Or the golden light of the What Mahathat in Sukhothai (Thailand), the blue Lake Wakatipu (New Zealand), the yellow dunes of Torreon (Mexico) and many other places around the globe.
Putting the location exclusively in the creative side of the equation will indeed give a more consistent meaning to the international approach of a production.

Exchange rate

Since October 2006 the US$ lost almost 9% of its value against the Euro. It means that shooting in the Euro area  (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Finland) is more expensive today than a year ago for American production companies. But it is much cheaper for European production companies to shoot in the US. Something similar happens with the South African Rand and the Australian and the New Zealander currencies.
Shooting in Latin America, on the contrary, is a little less expensive both for the American and the European production companies than 12 months ago: especially in Argentina and Costa Rica.

The new global thinking

Global thinking consists of approaching every project with an open mind and being able to reinvent the process every single time. But this concept is evolving very fast. Production companies are becoming more and more multidisciplinary in the sense that they need to work with a wider spectrum of professionals and creators and produce, design, invent and conceptualize multiple forms of content and even develop new media. Global thinking is not anymore an exclusively geographical concept: it is not only a matter of knowing where you can shoot to maximize the production value and find the best resources anywhere in the world. It consists of being able to approach any kind of productions: from TV commercials to webisodes, movies, short films, interactive and multimedia projects.
Global thinking means also team up with a broader spectrum of creators.

Production companies cannot anymore think of themselves as TV commercial producers.
At Mia Films, for instance, we have recently incorporated programmers into our team because technology and media creation are becoming a big part of our business.  We are also locating graphic designers and illustrators in several countries in Latin America (such as Brazil and Argentina) to expand our capability in that territory.

Actable intelligence

It takes just a few minutes to find out the e-mail address of a production service in Dubai, Mumbai, Quito, Tahiti, Kiev or Casablanca. In 24 hours or less you can bid a project in almost anyone of the 192 countries members of the UN and in several other territories. But what kind of tools do you need to properly evaluate where to shoot a project? How can you be sure that you are going to the right place? That the relation between quality and costs is right? That you are going to be charged the right rates?
Most of the projects shot overseas are produced in 10 or 12 countries: Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Czech Republic, Hungry, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, perhaps in Thailand, India, Romania. Are there better place somewhere else?
Global production companies have a network of contacts that can give them the right info when they need it. Building up and managing a network of reliable informers is the most important task that has to be accomplished. Global production is based on intelligence.

Motion Control in Mexico

Today I am shooting in Mexico City a commercial using a General Lift Genuflex Mark II Motion Control Rig.
I have been shooting in Mexico with motion control for almost 10 years: Nissan, Whirlpool, GM, Wal-Mart and so forth. I always found that the MC operators are very professional and fast.

Central America

Our office in Costa Rica is working at the moment on several projects that imply shooting in different countries of the region.
In one case, we are planning a shoot that combines locations in Costa Rica (specifically jungle and waterfalls) and in Panama (downtown Panama City). For another we are planning a shoot that takes place in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (in the colonial city of Granada).
Central America offers a very wide range of locations and opportunities: rainforest, beaches, archeological sites, mountains, rivers, plantations and so forth. Costa Rica is, in my judgment, the perfect operational center  for any production in the region because of its infrastructure, the quality of the crewmembers and the resources available.

Webisodes

Tomorrow I am going to Costa Rica to shoot the first few webisodes of a series, which will be distributed, online.  Consumer-controlled media are attracting more and more investments and attention both from the advertisers and the creators.

We will be shooting in the jungle in a region north of San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. The two main locations will be the Toro waterfall and the Hule Lake.
Costs in Costa Rica are quite low and make the production value to grow immensely. In Costa Rica it is possible to achieve very spectacular visual and creative results within a budget that is compatible with the consumer-controlled media environment.

My offices overseas

We are prepping a shoot in Costa Rica: it's a production that is going to take place in the middle of the jungle in a region some 45 miles away from San Jose, the capital of the country. Las week I went to Costa Rica to put the production in motion and, once again, I realized how much I enjoy having offices in several countries. It is not only a matter of costs, even if logically having an offices in foreign countries, saves us and our clients the double mark up that we had to pay if you used an external production service company. It is basically and more importantly a matter of efficiency and quality standards. When I shoot in one of the country where we have offices, I positively know that the local producers understand the requirements of the project. They speak our same language in terms of quality. In addition to that, our teams very well together because the relationship has been cemented in many productions during many years. 

Lineal and holistic processing

When a producer works on a bid has to take into account all aspects of the production and balance them to put together the best production plan. It is clear that some solutions can save some money in one area but increase the costs in another.  Finding the right combination is an exercise of creative bidding skills and a demonstration of global production knowledge. It requires alternatively lineal and holistic processing because in some cases the producer has to cut down the all project into pieces, line them up, organize them in a logical order and finally draw conclusions while in some other circumstances he or she has to see the big picture first, not the little details.
Clients and agencies should ask the production companies to do a very extensive research before bidding and to put together a report explaining why the proposed production plan is the best to maximize the investment and give the creatives and the director what they need. And production companies have to leave their comfort zone and think globally as a normal way of proceeding for every project.

Branded entertainment

Branded content implies a variety formats that are generally much longer than 30 seconds: it could be a short film, a documentary, a TV show or a full-length movie. Their length and entertainment values make the global opportunities especially appealing for this type of productions. The World out there not only offers interesting financial advantages that are very handy when the duration of the content increases geometrically but also endless occasions of entertainment.

The Mediterranean

Greece

Left or right?

Pocosol

In the northern part of Costa Rica, just a few miles from the active Arenal Volcano and the lake with same name and about 20 km south of La Fortuna there is a place called Pocosol. The name, that means "Not-much-sun", is due to the fact that Pocosol is in a very deep valley surrounded by the rainforest.  The road that goes to the Pocosol Biological Station through an incredibly dense jungle, crosses over Penas Blancas River on a narrow suspension bridge that's the location where I shot in the past some spots.
It takes just three hours to reach the place from San Jose, the capital of the country and the city where the production industry is based. As I mentioned several times before, shooting in the rainforest is indeed a challenge. Mia Films has an office in Costa Rica since 1995 and our local producers, Marisol and Mauricio, have an incredible experience in managing this type of projects. They know how to handle the transportation and the communications and how to ensure that both the crew and the equipments work properly in those conditions.

Time and date.com

A different way

Visible Earth

Helicopters

Post-production costs

There are huge differences in costs from one country to  another when it comes to post-production. The editorial of a 30 seconds spot costs around $50,000 in the US but you don't spend more than 25,000 in Spain, France or Italy and certainly the expenses decrease even more in Argentina where you can accomplish the job for around $15,000.

In the field of graphics and special effects the differences are also very significant. The hourly rate of a Discreet Logic Flame reaches $1,200 in L.A. or New York but goes down to $650 in Miami or Mexico City, $600 in Milan, $370 in Istanbul and to less than $300 in Buenos Aires. It has to be said that the US is at the frontline in the field of visual effects but other countries have improved immensely their capabilities in the last few years. Paris or Madrid in Europe, Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo in Latin America, Bangkok and Singapore in Asia offer both the technology and the artists to accomplish most of the projects. Montreal, Milan, Barcelona, Seoul and Hong Kong offer excellent animation facilities, very talented animators and excellent rates.

Second Unit

I always thought that creating a second unit is a solution that gives great flexibility and adds a lot of efficiency to most productions. This, in my experience, is especially true in the case of spots with massive special effects or when shooting car commercials.
In the last three weeks we shot six spots and we used a second unit in all of them achieving much more spectacular results than if we used only one unit. For 4 car commercials we just finished, the second unit gave us the opportunity of shooting a wider range of running shots and take advantage of the best light conditions in the early morning and the evening.
Last week we shot complex running footage in a parking garage: the first unit shot in a floor while the second one used the next floor duplicating the amount of shot achieved by the end of the day.
To be effective, a second unit should be directed by an expert director and have the human and technical resources needed to accomplish its objectives. These have to be defined at the beginning of the process and are the base to establish which shots have to be done by the first unit and which one have to be assigned to the second team. The director and the second unit director have to coordinate themselves and synchronize their work. The equipments have to be proportional to the needs of both units but, if the shooting plan is professionally made, many resources can be shared and used by both teams maximizing the production value.

The Anti-Jet-Lag Diet

Costa Rica

Costa Rica has a very reliable industry. Movies like "Congo", "Jurasic Park", "Jungle Book" and "El Dorado" have been shot in this country. Arri III and 435 cameras are available as well as lighting and grip equipments: HMI up to 12 KW and cranes with remote heads. Crews are highly professional and hard worker. In general, they speak English and know how to work with European and American D.P.'s and directors.

Costa Rica doesn't have a lab: negative is usually sent to Miami or Mexico City for process.

We had an office in Costa Rica for the last 12 years and we shot there projects for clients such as Toyota, Visa, BK, Verizon, and so forth.

Sintra

Argentina

Argentina has one of the most sophisticated industries in South America.
Crews are used to high quality productions and understand European and North American standards of quality. Camera, lighting and grip equipments are up to date. In Buenos Aires there are several studios and excellent set constructors and art directors. Props and wardrobe meet European standards.
Argentina has labs able to process both 35 and 16 mm negative. Postproduction facilities are fully equipped: transfer, digital compositing, CGI, music, etc.
Since we opened an office there we have consistently produced in Buenos Aires commercials for all the other markets where we operate. Since we don't need a production service to produce there, we are able to work very efficiently taking advantage of the good rates and the production structure.

In Mexico again

Partnership with producers

The World offers unlimited opportunities for the creation of video content: especially content for the consumer-controlled media. These opportunities give the traditional TV commercial production companies the prospect of expanding their business and to reinvent themselves.
I think that multicultural operations have enormous possibilities of being very successful. In the US for example, there is a bright future for multilingual productions that involve both English and Spanish, taking into account the growing bilingual Hispanic population. Other amazing opportunities are in Latin America, China and Europe. I always believed in multinational production companies, capable of operating in several markets and producing everywhere in the World and I think that this tendency is going to increase in the next few years. New forms of collaboration have to be explored, particularly in the creation of on-demand, marketing related, entertaining content. Joining forces to produce compelling content and to create the platforms to distribute it is of paramount importance.

SoiWat

Partnership with creators

For many years we focused exclusively on one type of creators: TV commercial directors. All other professionals such as DP's, art directors, production designers and so forth were someway relegated to a second level tier. But now things are changing. Production companies are going to be involved in a different type of work: video content for the consumer-controlled media. It means that we will have to produce a wider array of projects ranging from webisodes, mobisodes or video-ringtones to branded movies and TV shows. For these kinds of projects, we need to establish relationships with a larger spectrum of creators that includes writers, directors, programmers, seeding specialists, animators and graphic designers. We will of course be able to help TV Commercial directors to evolve into new territories and explore new formats.

The World is an incredible source of talented people: we are starting to recruit them on a new basis. New forms of cooperation have to be established and new partnership procedures have to be explored. Joining forces with talented people all around the Globe will offer us immense opportunities of producing the content that the viewers want to watch and the brands want to be associated with.

Tagline

On January 1st 2007 at Mia Films we are changing the tag line we have been using for more than 3 years. The old slogan "What's the challenge?" will be replaced, starting today, with  "It's a big World out there!" Global production has always been at the core of our DNA : we have been shooting all around the globe for over 20 years and we have not only learned how to do it in a way that maximized the production values but we also have understood how to improve the creative essence of the projects by using the endless resources and the talented people available everywhere. But in 2007 being global doesn't only mean shooting overseas, it also implies looking at the entire World for partners in new and exciting initiatives, especially in the viewer-controlled media environment. This year, in addition to commercials, Mia Films will be producing a wider range of content like short films, webisodes and mobisodes. We will also create one videoblog and two online media. We will need to work with a broader spectrum creators and producers that goes far beyond the traditional TV commercial production industry.

Winter Solstice

Today is the Winter Solstice, which means that the daylight is the shortest of the year and the night is the longest. The sun has its lowest arc in the sky in the Northern hemisphere. In Reykjavik today they have only 4 hours and 10 minutes of daylight, in London, Amsterdam and Brussels a little under 8 hours, 7 hours in Copenhagen and Moscow.
Of course in the Southern hemisphere it is just the opposite: in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, Capetown, Oakland, Sidney it is the longest day of the year with approximately 14 hours of daylight.

Multinational production companies

Multinational production companies with offices in several countries can better serve the client and the agency because of their structure and their ability in operating worldwide. American agencies and clients can deal with a US based production company and still take advantage of the economic and creative opportunities offered elsewhere. I am sure that in the future we will see more and more production companies evolve into a multinational structure in order to deliver better quality with a much higher production value avoiding unnecessary waste of money and mismanagements. When, for instance, I bid a project in Mexico, Costa Rica or Argentina where my company has offices, I know that my bid will be extremely competitive: on one hand I am sure that the rates I get are the real ones (not the foreign-projects rates) and, on the other, I avoid charging double mark up. In addition to that, I am sure that I am getting the best crew and equipments available in those countries.

Places where I always wanted to shoot: Pamukkale

Equipment costs

Most of the camera, grip and lighting equipment is made in the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Italy. Therefore their costs affects equally all rental companies around the world but some costs other than the purchase ones, can vary sensibly: import dues, taxes, labor costs for maintenance, real estate costs, financial charges, and so forth. The cost of an Arri 435 camera body, for example, ranges approximately from $1,200 in L.A. to $900 in South Africa, $800 in Argentina, Australia, $730 in Istanbul, $700 in Dubai, $600 in Germany,  $500 in Hong Kong, Bangkok, or Costa Rica and $450 in India.
If you shoot your project in a place with low rental prices but with limited resources you can take advantage of the reduced rates only when the locally available equipment is proportionate to the project. But if you need some more sophisticated gears such as an Arricam ST, a 17-80 Angenieux Optimo, or Revolution and T-Rex Lenses, you will need to fly them in from some another country, paying higher rates for longer rental periods, the shipping and customs expenses, additional insurance charges and so forth. Shipping a few lenses from Miami or Mexico City to Costa Rica (a two hour flight) or from Berlin to Prague (a four hour drive) is not a big operation and doesn't cost much. But taking a 2 ton motion control rig from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires or from London to Malta could cause a bigger impact on the budget.

Argentina

We are at the moment bidding several projects for agencies based in the US and Mexico to be shot in Buenos Aires. There are several reasons for the success of Argentina as a location: cost weather conditions and locations.
Production costs in Argentina are at least 50% lower than in the United States while the production structure is consistently improving.
Right now it is the end of spring in the Southern hemisphere and therefore you can expect not only good weather but also green grass and flowers all around the country. Finally Argentina offers an incredibly wide range of locations: from European looking urban environment to mountains and glaciers.
Buenos Aires itself has a huge variety of different looks.
Mia Films has an office there that makes producing in Argentina a very easy task for us: we are getting always the best crew and, at the same time, the best rates.

Agency producers: more for less

The job of agency producers is expanding dramatically due to the evolution of the business. Multiplatform distribution and global production require a completely new approach and, at the same time, a different type of professional. On one hand agency production departments are increasingly multitasking and expanding their reach: games, reality games, short films, long forms, making of videos for a website, web based content and so forth. And, even more interestingly, developing entertainment property for the clients of the agency. The investments in these areas will certainly grow in the next years but right now the money allocated for this kind of operations is still limited and, in most of the cases, comes from the TV commercial production budget. Producers have to learn from scratch about technologies and how to deal with more departments within the agency such as media, planning and interactive divisions. But they also have to figure out how to produce more elements and materials with the same amount of money and within the schedule. How extra footage for a 3-minute short film can be shot without increasing the number of shooting days and the budget? How video images for an interactive program can be achieved?
On the other hand agency producers have to go over and over again to shoot their projects to Buenos Aires or Prague looking for affordable costs. They have to deal with unexplored territories in all senses. It is becoming a very risky and complex business. They need very experienced and global production companies to achieve their goals.

Construction costs

Taschen

Labor costs

The dolphin

Helicopters

Logistics

Mexico City

Tomorrow morning I am going to Mexico City where my production company, Mia Films, has an office. It is only a 2 hours and 40 minutes flight from Miami and there is one hour of difference between the two cities: therefore, leaving at 7 am, I will be in my office there before 10 am.

We shoot in Mexico quite a lot not only for Mexican agencies and clients but also for the US market and Europe. What I like the most of Mexico City is the incredible variety of architectural styles: from colonial building in Coyoacan or The Centro Historico to the most modern structures in Santa Fe. The textures and the colors used by Mexican architects are remarkable and very unique.

Two thousand years of history

Casale Monferrato begun as a the Gaulish settlement of Vardacate and became became later a Roman municipium called Bodincomagus. In the eighth century it came under Lombard rule. It was occupied by the Visconti in 1120, became again independent when Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, conquered Milan in 1153. In 1215 Casale was attacked and destroyed by the troops of Alessandria and Milan but rebuilt five years later. The city came under the power of the Alerami, the Paleologi, and, in 1464 became the capital of the Maquesat of Monferrato.
In 1536 it passed to the Gonzaga, who transformed Casale into a formidable fortress which successfully resisted several sieges from the Spanish between 1628 and 1652. In 1708 Casale came under the role of the Savoy and a century later actively participated in the independence war of Italy.
Because of its history, Casale, which is situated in Northern Italy, offers a wide range of architectural styles: from the romanesque of the Cathedral originally built in 742 and rebuilt in 1106 or the massive castle built in the 15th century to a wide array of palaces, buildings, theatres and churches edificated from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Since Casale is situated at a distance of approximately 50 miles from Milan, crew and equipments can be easily transported from there.

How did the global trend start?

Some commercials have always been shot abroad, basically for climate or location reasons. The streets of Rome, the desert of Morocco, and the bridges in Paris were used when the storyboard required that. A few other projects used to be shot in Canada, especially in Toronto and Vancouver but also in Montreal, taking advantage of lower costs, favorable exchange rates and incentives from the Canadian government.
But in the year 2,000 the Sag strike made some clients and some agencies to explore the possibility of shooting abroad. One year later 9/11 was the beginning of a yearlong crisis in the production industry. Budgets became smaller, the number of productions shrunk and the production companies were desperate.
At the same time some countries went through complex economical turmoil and their currency was devaluated against the US dollar. Argentina, for instance, became overnight 70 % cheaper and something similar happened to Brazil. 1 US Dollar was equal to 1 Argentine Peso in January 2002 but one year later 1 US Dollar was equal to 3.37 Pesos. This means that a production that had a cost of $100,000 at the beginning of 2002 could have been realized for less than $30,000 only 12 months later.
The same situation had occurred previously in Mexico at the beginning of the 90's or in Spain in 1998 , but the situation in the US was not ready to attract the attention of agencies and clients to the global production. Part of the reason is that, by then, the technological gap between the production industries in the US and abroad (with the exclusion of some European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc) was huge, while in 2,001 the difference had substantially decreased. Argentina and Brazil, for instance, besides having cut the costs by two thirds because of the devaluation, had proved in the Advertising Festivals that the quality of their industries was exceptional. According to the Gunn Report Brazil and Argentina were the 4th and the 5th most awarded countries during 2001, way ahead of France (6th), Japan (7th), South Africa (9th) or Australia (11th).
A desperate need for reducing the budget combined with a drop in costs in other countries made the pressure to go and shoot abroad very strong. Suddenly some countries started to receive an unexpected number of productions and, even if their production structures were reasonably well developed, the size of their industries was not apt to absorb a so spectacular increase of work. In certain countries with a small production industry there were a few competent crewmembers but their number was not enough to serve 20 or 30 foreign productions at the same time. If you were lucky and you were the first in booking the crew, everything went very smoothly but if you were the 15th in line, you probably ended up with a pretty amateurish crew. Sometimes it happens in Los Angeles, the biggest production center in the entire World, that you cannot find a good location manager or a talented production designer available for your job. Imagine what the situation could be in an incomparably smaller industry environment. As a consequence of this some international experiences was very good while some others were less than satisfactory.

Now clients and agencies have learned. The global production tendency is here to stay.

Temperature changes

I am in Chicago at the moment where the temperature is in the mid 30's. When I left Miami two days ago we had 80 F there. Temperature changes are extremely hard to cope with. For me it is always easy to go to a warmer country than the opposite: I live in Miami and if in winter, when we have 75 degrees at home, I travel to a very cold place such as Stockholm or Reykjavik, I am almost sure that I will get a cold. For some other people it is exactly the opposite: if they go from a cold place to a hot and humid one, they feel weak and overwhelmed.  Very simple precautions can make the climate shock easier to manage. Pack the right clothes for the location where you are heading, eat the appropriate type and quantity of food and beverages and protect yourself from the cold or the sun rays by taking vitamin C or using profusely sun-block.

Readers

Portugal

Network of creative contacts

Making a few calls is usually helpful to a producer in order to detect the right approach for a project that has to be shot overseas, and to start putting the puzzle together. I personally have  quite a good list of people I can call in order to get some advice.

DP's, art directors, photographers, special effect supervisors, and many other professionals from all around the World shoot on a regular basis with different directors, in different countries, for different clients and agencies. They permanently explore their own countries and travel abroad thus gaining a broad expertise on a wide range of locations. They work with hundred of other professionals with knowledge in the most diverse disciplines. They are therefore incredible sources of information because they've built their judgment on their own creative experiences. When a DP, for instance, shoots in a location he immediately registers all of the visual qualities of the place: textures, colors, light, etc: He knows how a street in Rio de Janeiro looks at a specific hour of the day or how it can look if lit in a certain way. A production designer who worked inside the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech surely knows what the place can offer for a different project. A special effect supervisor who shot a spot in Barcelona could have met there an unbelievably good Spanish prosthetic specialists and recommend him to you. Their advise, suggestions, and contacts are based on personal experiences with people whose opinion you respect.

Bars in Buenos Aires

Recently we have been scouting bars and restaurants in Buenos Aires. The capital of Argentina offers a very wide range of options: it has traditional and European-looking places as well as modern-design venues. The city really gives very good options.

Global thinking

Challenges

A real network

Production services

As I mentioned in the past, many production service companies tend to give low bids at the beginning of the process in order to get the job and then they charge for everything claiming that it was not included in the original bid.
Some years ago, for example, I was shooting a spot in Brazil.  The day before the shooting the director asked for the book of the make up artist. The local producer told me "If you want to see a reel, it means that you want a top make up artist. In the bid we estimated a "regular one". Top make up artists are way more expensive". "Of course we want a top make up artist!" I said. And of course we had to pay more. In another occasion I was going to shoot in North Africa so we worked with a local service company to bid the job that required some set construction. We sent them blueprints of the sets, dimensions, etc. After the bid was approved, we sent them some additional specs including the color of the set. The Moroccan producer faxed back saying that they expected (and estimated) the set to be brown not blue as the new specs were saying, that blue paint was more expensive than brown and therefore the cost was going to be higher. These are indeed quite extreme situations: in 30 years of experience it only happened to me a few times.  But it is a trend that has to be properly and efficiently controlled.

Tepoztlan

Tepoztlan is a small town located 12 miles from Cuernavaca, at an approximately two hours drive from Mexico City. It is at an altitude of over 5,000 ft and in a very mountainous region.
We shot several times in Tepoztlan, including a commercial for Verizon that was aired in the US.

Analyzing a proposal from a production company

When an agency producer receives a bid and the treatments from the production company he or she should discern which one better answers questions such as:
1. Has the production company understood the main challenge of the project?  Production companies have to demonstrate that they are capable of achieving the maximum creative impact and pursuing at the same time the client's goals.
2. Is the director focused in the right direction? Is he or she making the idea growing?
3. Has the producer explored all the reasonable alternatives to get the most out of the bid? Has he or she found solutions that, by revolutionizing the original thinking, maximize the production value or offer unexpected advantages? Operating by default and within the comfort zone is not acceptable anymore.
4. Has the producer taken into account all the logistic challenges of the project such as the nature of the location, the type of equipment or technologies, the weather conditions and so forth? Is the planning solid enough to make good use of all the resources including the available time? Are all possible risks and alternative plans contemplated? When several hundred thousand dollars are going to be spent in a very short amount of time the logistics have to be incredibly well managed. One hour lost because of poor management means a lot of money wasted or fewer shots in the can at the end of the day.

Risks

As I mentioned before, in the last few years I shot in over 30 countries and I can tell that I never faced dangerous situations. But there are objective risks out there: Probably not more risks than at home but certainly different ones.
In London, for instance, where cars drive on the left side of the road, some tourists are hit by a car every year because, before crossing a street, they look in the wrong direction. Probably more tourists end up in a hospital for this reason in the UK than because of violence in Brazil.
The State Department publishes periodically safety advices for travelers. If you read them, you would probably never travel abroad. Kidnapping in Latin America, violence in Africa, terrorism in Spain and the UK, epidemics in Asia, the list is endless. But risks are extremely limited if minimal and logic precautions are taken and common sense is applied. Not going around alone in unknown neighborhoods and not taking local cabs but use instead the production or the hotel vehicles are normally sufficient means of self-protection against street violence.

Switching roles

One of the most important aspect of the cooperation among people based in different country is their capacity in switching roles and keep working efficiently. If our office in the US, for example, gets a job that has to be shot in Buenos Aires, our US based executive producer leads the project while the executive producer of our Argentine office assumes the role of line producer. Likewise, if the job originates in Argentina and has to be shot in LA, the two executive producers switch roles and keep working together. After doing that for quite a long time, our teams are so well coordinated that the projects shot abroad are handled with the same efficiency and smoothness than the projects shot at home. This capacity of interchanging roles and understanding somebody else's way of operating makes our teams very good in handling projects not only in the countries where we have offices but anywhere else. All our offices combined have an enormous volume of contacts spread almost everywhere in the World and this makes possible for our teams to find the right partners no matter where we have to shoot. If our office in the US has to shoot in Peru, for instance, can count on the experience of our producers in Costa Rica who shot in Lima several times.

Mexico City
During the weekend I have been shooting a car commercial in Mexico City. The Mexican industry is by far the most organized and powerful in Latin America. Many big American movies have been shot here in the last few years: Titanic, Zorro, Man on Fire, Troy, and so forth. Crewmembers are used to work with American and European directors and Dp and perform magnificently. Equipments are also comparable to the ones available in the major production centers worldwide. I have produced hundreds of spots in Mexico in the last 10 years: our production teams here is very expert and capable of managing very complex jobs.

Sicily
Yesterday I spent a few hours trying to determine the right approach for a project we are bidding. The main challenge seamed to be the location: a European historic city. I wanted to stay away from the usual suspects such as Barcelona, Florence, Paris and so forth. Since the spot has to be shot in November I also wanted to focus on the southern part of the European continent where we could expect reasonably good weather: I started thinkingabout Seville (Spain), Arles (France), Lisbon (Portugal), Perugia (Italy). When I went home it was unexpectedly early so I took from the shelf one of the books that have been waiting to be read for a too long time: “L’Odore della notte” (The Smell of the Night) one of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano mystery series. The book is written in a mix of Italian and the Sicilian dialect, which makes the reading very funny, but at the same time a little challenging for somebody like me who was born in the North of Italy, less then 75 miles from the border with Switzerland and France and has not been much exposed to the Sicilian culture. “S'assittasse” instead of “si sedesse” (he would sit down), “ciriveddro” in place of “cervello” (brain), “Nesciri” standing for “uscire” (to get out) require some exercise of imagination to follow the story. But nevertheless the Sicilian atmosphere is so interesting and compelling that I questioned myself why that region rarely makes it into my radar screen when I explore possible locations. Sicily has a huge variety of locations and, in terms of cities, offers some architectural jewels such as Palermo, Catania, Taormina, Agrigento. This morning I will make some phone calls to Italy and I will explore the possibility of shooting in Sicily.

Production Networks

In the global era, agencies and clients have to evaluate carefully the structure of the production companies. International operations require adequate organizations: even if it is possible for every production company, no matter how small it is, to go and shoot everywhere, an internationally organized one will be able to find better options, get betters deals and manage the project more safely. As I already mentioned, an exclusive network of offices and contacts gives a production company incredible strategic and tactic advantages to better conceptualize the project, detect the main challenges, envision unexpected scenarios, pursue creative options and deliver the best results. To be fully functional, international structures have to be real, not simple marketing sophism, and must have been tested for a reasonable amount of time in multinational projects. Virtual teams must have worked together for a long while and have proved their ability to cooperate.

The proposal

A proposal from a Production Company is composed of a bid and a treatment. I cannot highlight more that the costs have to be justified by two visions: not only one from the director but also one from the producer. The bid should reflect the aesthetic and narrative vision of the director and the operational perspective of the producer. The money should be cleverly allocated to achieve the desired goals and the resources should be properly selected, substantiated and applied. Paying attention exclusively to the director's treatment is an irresponsible mistake. When an agency producer receives a bid and the treatments, he or she should analyze the matches between the documents and confirm that the estimate supports the creative vision and that the proposal justifies the costs. Two bids with almost identical bottom lines can correspond to two completely different visions, approaches and allocations of resources. An experienced Agency producer will be able to analyze all the received proposals and detect which one is better fitted to accomplish the goals, maximize the investment and reduce the risks. A recommendation to the client has never to be made based exclusively on the director’s treatment or the bottom line: it has to be supported by a combination of data that range from the director’s and the production company’s reels and accredited experiences to the creative and logistic visions of the specific project.

How many hours of daylight?

The light conditions that the commercial requires are a good starting point to analyze the location from the perspective of costs. Time in a production is the most expensive resource: a producer should try to avoid as much as possible the crew waiting around for the right light and weather conditions. If, for instance, the director and the DP want to shoot every single shot with early morning or sunset light, a place with a shorter day will be more cost effective than one with 15 hours of daylight. But, on the contrary, if you shoot in the jungle or in a dense forest, you need a very long day because you will probably not be able to use the first hour or two in the morning and an equal amount of time before sunset because the location will be too dark. Something similar happens when the shooting takes place underwater: there is a lost of intensity of the daylight when it hits the water’s surface with an angle of less than 30 degrees. That means that, in general, light conditions underwater are not favorable in the early morning and late afternoon. and the same thing happens while shooting in a dense forest. If for instance you are shoooting in a wooded area, a location with 14 hours of sunlight is recommendable to fully take advantage of the shooting day. If you only have 9 hours of daylight, you can end up shooting only 6 hours, which is a waste of money.

Global reading

More about the cultural shock

It is important to positively approach the culture of the country you are visiting and refusing stereotypes. This could be achieved by learning as much as possible about the country in which you will be shooting. Information will equip you much better to understand and appreciate the new environment: Before the trip, read about the country's history, art, music, religions, politics, and so on. And then, when you get there, observe and listen with humility instead of judging. Do not expect to find things to be and to happen as they would at home. Do not assess the entire country by the behavior of the first person you met and you have had some trouble with and always remember that you are a guest. But, of course, take into account the idiosyncrasy of the (the negotiation process in most Arab Nations, for instance): not doing so can generate very unpleasant surprises.

The smoke machine

A couple weeks ago I shot in Morocco a pretty complex project. Since the first time I shot in that country (it was 1987!) things have evolved positively there, especially since big movies such as The Jewel of the Nile, The Mummy, The Sheltering Sky, Gladiator, and Kingdom of Heaven were shot in that North African nation the industry has grown. You still have to be very careful and supervise every step of the process but you can manage complicated operations there. Things were very different years ago. At the beginning of the 90’s, for instance, we were shooting in the Merzouga dunes area, a few miles east of Ouarzazate. For a very important scene, we needed several smoke machines that we had shipped from Madrid. A few hours before the shooting the special effects guys tested the smoke machines and discovered that they were not working: none of them was starting. They investigated the causes of the failure and discovered that the production assistant we sent to buy the fuel for the smoke machines had bought just three quarters of the gasoline required and filled the tanks to the top with water. The guy put the entire shooting in jeopardy in order to make a few extra dirhams. Of course the PA was heading home 15 minutes later.

More about Jet lag

I came back two days ago from a 20 days long trip that took me to Spain, Morocco and Malta: I am of course dealing again with the jet lag. Jet lag is caused by the disruption of the body’s internal clock and its 24-hour rhythms when a traveler crosses multiple time zones flying east to west or west to east. Flying north to south, from New York to Lima (Peru) for instance, two cities in the same time zone, doesn’t produce the effect even if the flight is almost 8 hours long, as much as the trip from New York to Frankfurt. Most of the flights from the US to Peru are overnight and consequently poor sleeping conditions in the airplane, altitude and pressure changes while flying and the extremely dry air in the cabin can indeed upset body systems but there will not be any disruption of the internal clock. If the locations or the shooting conditions are similar, always pick a country in the same time zone than a place on the other side of the Globe. It is very difficult to work creatively if you are suffering from jet lag.

The shoot in Malta

As I mentioned before, there are 3 major water facilities in the World: in Mexico (Rosarito, Baja California), in the Bahamas (close to Nassau) and Malta (Kalkara, a few miles from Valletta). Even in the first two facilities are more modern and technologically advanced, I still prefer shooting in Malta because the crew knows very well how to manage the equipments and how to make things happen reasonably fast. The story of MFS in Malta started in 1964 when the British special effects specialist Jim Hole, opened the Malta Film Facilities, which created the surface tank near the sea to manage film projects with water related effects. In 1979 the gigantic 35 feet deep tank was built while the indoor and the insert tanks were added more recently. We shot in the MFS this week with models and life size sets using massive water and atmospheric effects to create a storm sequence: rain, waves, wind and smoke. I shot in this place several times and therefore I have a clear idea of how to use the available resources in the most efficient way: Consequently we have been able to plan the shoot according to the environment and to achieve over 20 shots per day, most of them with complex special effects. Resetting the machinery for every shot was possible thanks to the expertise of the Maltese technicians and to two tractors capable of moving in the 8 feet deep water of the “surface” tank and pull into place the equipments. We had to fly some of the crewmembers from Paris and the main characters from Budapest (Hungary) but the vast majority of the personnel and the talent (we casted 20 British sailors and 20 pirates) was local. The MFS are a very good choice for projects of this nature but I definitely think that to shoot a “water special effects project” it takes a producer and a director with solid experience in the field. From the conception of the shots to the actual shooting the experience of the team will prevent the production to spin out of control and to maximize the available resources.

Test day

Today we did a full test of the storm effects in the surface tank of the Mediterranean Films Studios in Malta. Tomorrow we will start shooting with the models of the pirate and the British vessels.

The Maltese Language

Because of the 160 years of British colonization people in Malta speak English. The original Maltese language, on the other hand, has strong Arabic roots, someway resembles the Maghrebi Arabic, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian, and it is also the only Semitic language, which is written in Roman alphabet. But the interesting thing is that in the Malti dictionary compiled by Joseph Aquilina, only 43 percent of the words have an Arabic origin, while a similar percentage has Italian roots, 6% come from English, and 3% come from Latin and the Romance languages.

Birgu (Vittoriosa), Malta

The location where "Munich" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" were shot.

Malta
I have just arrived in Malta where I will be prepping and shooting for the next two weeks. Malta, one of the most recent members of the European Union, is a small nation composed of two major islands between Sicily and North Africa (close enough to the coast of Tunisia and Libya). Being the base of the Knights of St John since 1530 the island has superb fortifications and an incredible variety of military architectural styles. Buildings, streets, balconies, facades, arched passageways combine medieval simplicity and baroque magnificence. Most of the constructions on the island are made of golden limestone, which gives to Malta its characteristic pinkish/salmon color. Cities such as La Valletta, Vittoriosa, Cospicua or Mdina are some of the most amazing locations I have ever seen. Malta has a very long tradition as a filming location: “Midnight Express”(Alan Parker) , “The Count of Monte Cristo” (Kevin Reynolds) and The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard), for instance, have been shot here. For his movie “Munich” Steven Spielberg reproduced in Malta many different locations: Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece, Italy, Palestine and Spain.

Ouarzazate
Today we are shooting in the desert in Ouarzazate (Morocco) at a few hundred yards from where Ridley Scott shot "Kingdom of Heaven". The huge sets of the movie are still here in the middle of the desert.

Our set:

                                    The sets of "Kingdom of Heaven"

Jet lag


This afternoon I am taking a flight to Europe on my way to Morocco where I am going to shoot next week. Jet lag, time differences, and related inconvenience are something I will have to deal with in the next days as it always happens when I shoot in a different time zone.
The first time I shot in New Zealand it was exactly at the antipodes of Madrid, where I was living then: the time difference was therefore 12 hours. When in New Zealand it was 7.00 am, time to get up in the morning, for my body it was 7.00 pm, time for dinner Doctors say that it takes one day per hour of difference to adjust to the new time zone. In my experience it is absolutely true. The first 10 or so days in New Zealand were really hard. I couldn’t sleep at night, I was incapable of waking up in the morning and I spent most of the day with a very strong tiredness feeling. I tried everything to fight the jetlag: as 95% of long distance travellers I discovered that there is not a quick and easy solution to eliminate the symptoms of jet lag but something could be done to alleviate them. Before departure I try to rest as much as possible, eat light and eliminate the consumption of coffee before and during the flight. When I arrive at destination, I try to spend some time outside or by an open window during daylight hours because sunlight automatically helps the internal clock to adjust. I adopt the local bedtime and I try to sleep in every 24 hours period as many hours as I usually do at home in blocks of at least 4 or 5 hours. Taking a naps during the day works very well for me but unfortunately it is a rare luxury.

Panel 

A few months ago, I acted as the moderator of a panel at an event in New York. Among the panelists there were some producers from production company based in several countries : It was a privilege sharing the stage with them because they are clever, honest and knowledgeable professionals. They know their countries and the industries they can count on. But another of the panelists, an agency producer, much less impressed me. I asked him: “Agencies logically are very focused on selecting the directors! But to operate in a Global environment, you need a very well organized production company: With the right producers, the right contacts around the World, and perhaps an international structure. Do you think that in the global arena, the production companies are more relevant than when you have to shoot in downtown LA?“ He answered “No”. Really? Some agency producers are incapable of seeing the real challenge of putting together a complex and international production. The pre-pro-book is their major concern. When they land in an exotic country, they are taken to the Marriott, driven around in an air conditioned Mercedes and invited to have dinner in the fanciest restaurant in town. Their perception is that everything is quite easy.
Luckily enough many others know what they are talking about.

More about teaching and learning

I have been shooting in more than 30 countries all around the world and I've learned a lot. In New Zealand, for instance, I learned how to improve the safety of a crew shooting on a road; in Grand Cayman how to coordinate efficiently a team shooting underwater; in Morocco how to operate in the sand of the dunes; in Malta how to build a 12 foot miniature of an oilrig that looks 300 feet high; in Costa Rica how to move crew and equipments in the jungle and in Italy how to put photography, wardrobe and art direction in sync. I've also learned many precious tricks. But certainly in these many years I've also taught many things. Some trivial ones like how to make a proper pre-pro-book or how to set up a video village for the agency and the client. Some more critical such as how to define clearly the responsibilities of the team members, test properly the special effects, coordinate a helicopter shoot or put together an achievable production schedule.

Advantages of being based in certain regions.

A production company in a European country, for instance, can easily work and operate in most of the continent taking advantage of the labor and custom legislation. In fact any national of a member state of the EU is entitled to move freely and work on the territory of another member state. This has gigantic consequences for the production industry. If you have to shoot, for example, in Chamonix, a sky resort in the French Alps but just on the border with Italy, you can bring the equipments and the crew from Milan, a 100 miles drive, instead than from Paris, 400 miles away. Or, if you are shooting in Prague and you need a Milo motion control rig, you can ship it from Vienna, a 4 hours drive, without having to deal with customs. For this reason several production companies have strategically established a network of reliable contacts in Europe that can help them to expand their production capability in that region without losing the control of the operation. We did that with companies in Spain, the UK, France and Italy.

Teaching and learning: the exciting process of producing internationally.

It was an extremely hot night in November of 1977. I was trying to sleep in the noisy non-air conditioned room of what was supposed to be the best hotel in Surin, some 300 miles East of Bangkok, Thailand. The phone rang: It was Weepa, my Thai Production Coordinator. "The elephants owners wants more money or they are not going to show up tomorrow morning!" she said. The next day was our first shooting day and we needed 20 elephants for the first set-up. I told her: "Wait for me downstairs, I already made a deal with them: I want to talk with these guys!". Since I didn't fully trust my local crew, I had personally made the deal about the elephants already. I got dressed and I joined Weepa in the lobby of the hotel. We drove a few miles to the place were the elephants and their owner were staying. When we arrived, 25 to 30 men were sitting around a few big fires in the middle of a wide field surrounded by topical vegetation. I asked the leader of the elephant keepers why we were again negotiating when we had already reached an agreement a couple of days before. Weepa cut me off and said: "Let me do this!". She started talking in Thai and she went on for a while. I was watching her face and the expressions of those men while I was killing some of the hundreds of mosquitoes that were trying to bite me. I could understand some of the words they were saying, especially numbers. "Song roi" the leader of the elephant owners kept saying. "Paeng bai. Nueng roi." Weepa kept answering Minutes later Weepa told me "We have a deal if we offer them 100 Bahts more per elephant". "That's fine", I said, (after all, back then, it was approximately 5 dollars) "but how do we know that we are not going to negotiate again in one hour or in the middle of a shot?" "I am making a deal" Weepa answered, "I know they will keep their word". And they did. We shot all day with the elephants, which they turned out to be extremely well trained and surprisingly well behaved. It was the first time I was shooting in an exotic location and I immediately realized something: when you shoot in a country other than yours, you have a lot to learn. And, if you are lucky, perhaps you have something to teach.

Power plugs (how many do they use out there?)

In a couple of weeks I will start a global production that will take me to 5 different countries in Europe and Africa. I did some research and I discovered that every one of them has a different type of power plug. If you are going to use electrical devices or you just need to recharge your laptop or cellular phone in another country, you need to know what type of electrical voltage and the type of plugs and outlets are used there. Information about this topic can be found on: http://www.kropla.com/electric.htm

Shooting a car commercial abroad
Shooting a car commercial abroad is a more complicated operation than shooting most other type of spots. Cars are big and heavy and their transportation is generally expensive. But on the other hand some ideas require travel abroad and shooting in remote locations. You cannot find anywhere else closer jungle locations as in Costa Rica or the glaciers in Greenland, the streets of Prague or the countryside in Tuscany. Going there makes a lot of difference and makes the spots more memorable. Shooting abroad is not an easy task, it requires a lot of planning and a deep knowledge of the country where the production is going to happen:
1. Climate. Not only temperatures and precipitations but also number of hours of daylight at the date of the shoot.
2. Regulations. Labor regulations, special permits, traffic laws, etc.
3. Crews. Which crewmembers are locally available and which have to be flown from some other places.
4. Equipment. What equipment are available and which have to be shipped from somewhere else. In this case from where and what customs requirements have to be met.
5. Communications. How equipment and crew can be transported in and out of the country, and how a specific location can be reached.
6. Safety information.

In the last few years, we have been shooting in more than 30 countries and we have learned how to achieve our goals using as much as possible local resources and adapting our procedures to the local conditions. We cannot operate in Thailand or in Chile as we would in Los Angeles, but we have to achieve the same quality and the same efficiency wherever we produce.

Bidding overseas

In the last few days one of our production teams has been working on bidding a package of 6 spots that are supposed to be set in countries as Romania, Malta, Egypt, India, Thailand and China. The first major challenge of bidding a project like this, is indeed, properly briefing the production service companies based in so many countries. In an early stage of the process some elements are still elusive and others cannot be properly defined until the locations have been selected and some additional key players, such as DP’s and production Designers, come aboard. We have shot in some of these countries in the past one or several times and therefore we already know rates, procedures and methods. In others we never shot or we shot a few years ago and things can have substantially changed over time. We of course explored at least two alternatives in the countries we don’t know as deeply as others. We bid with two different production services in one of these countries and we got two bids: one was 5 times higher than the other. They both bid with the same brief and list of requirements but the bids had an amazing difference: not a few thousand dollars but several hundred thousand dollars. One of the bids was of course too low (some chapters were clearly underestimates, the crew was too small, the previsions for the art department were insufficient) while the other was clearly overestimated (ridiculously high crew rates which don’t correspond to the normal ones applied in that country, equipment costs that are more than double of the cost of similar equipment in LA, abusive overestimation of the construction costs and so forth). One of the bids was in line with the costs that production companies charge to local agencies for local projects, and reflected a low production value. The other was overcharging as many production services do when they work for American companies. How do you actually solve the puzzle and find the perfect balance between costs and quality? Do you select the least expensive service and you just coach them in order to apply to the project the needed resources or you decide to go with the more expensive proposal and assume that you will be outrageously overcharged? My instinct, based on shooting in exotic countries for over 25 years is to follow the first path. Pick a serious, honest production service, arrive in the country with time enough to supervise the entire process and make things happen according to your needs and quality standards without being robbed and treated as idiots.

The right production company

The selection of the production company for a specific job or as a long-term partner is a very important task. A good production company is capable of delivering always a good product no matter who the director is and what the conditions of the project are. It is the administrator of the money of the client as well as the caretaker of the brand and of its values. In these days agencies and clients need to partner with production companies with robust international capabilities, talented directors, creative production teams and a global way of thinking. They need production partners capable of operating everywhere around the World and producing any type of formats in the most efficient way. Global producing is a state of mind, not a label: it implies the attitude of seeing every project from an international and multiplatform perspective and the determination to approach every production in the most creative and cost effective manner. Selecting the right production company it is not a minor task: it is as important as the selection of the director, perhaps even more important.

Shooting in Costa Rica

I spent all last week shooting in Costa Rica. I specially like shooting in that country: fantastic and uncontaminated locations, a reasonably good production structure, competent crewmembers and especially a great attitude. Moreover, being a virtually violence–free country with an almost inexistent government corruption, shooting in Costa Rica is easy and safe.

Scouting in Costa Rica

We spent the weekend scouting the region between the town of Liberia and the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. We were looking for canyons and rivers for a commercial for a SUV. The area is a wide plain surrounded by volcanoes and mountains on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. Even if it is the rein season the weather is reasonably dry with just a few thunderstorms in the afternoon.

In the global arena boundaries are not crucial anymore.

We can go and shoot in Ukraine if it is appropriate for the project, we can hire a Thai director for a hair commercial or a Spanish one to make an action spot. We can work with a Brazilian DP, a puppeteer from the UK, a wardrobe designer from Japan. Does this imply that American agencies and clients can work directly with production companies based in Sao Paulo, Bangkok or Kiev? In theory, yes. But some considerations have to be made. There are many differences between the procedures followed overseas and the ones we apply here at home. In some countries, for instance, the director and the production company retain the rights of the commercial they have produced and charge royalties for the usage of the spot past on year or in other markets. In other places production companies are not too efficient in appropriately signing contracts with the talent and this can carry serious complications later. There are also some concerns, when working directly with companies based oversees, about the legal protection. If something goes wrong, the production runs into unsolvable problems, the negative goes accidentally destroyed, the production company doesn’t comply with the production specs or the agreements taken during the pre-production meeting, the agency or the client can face the situation of having to go to court in New Delhi, Moscow or Quito. And the contract signed with the local production company might not be valid and enforceable over there. But the most important thing to take into account is that American production companies know the standard procedures and are used to working according to them. They are acquainted with the roles that make a project successful, from the merely procedural ones such as the pre-pro books to the most essential and crucial ones like the monitoring and implementation of the agreements made during the pre-production phase. In my experience in many countries both the agencies and the production company are as creative and innovative as undisciplined: Experimentation and improvisation are the standard way of working. This is sometimes a very interesting approach for certain kind of projects because it can generate a lot of fresh ideas but, at the same time, it is a system that has to be properly supervised and controlled. Having a production company with a solid experience in the American market at the helm is a guarantee that the spark and the creativity of the directors and the other members of the team is enhanced and supported but also directed and rationalized. In the last twenty years I have worked very successfully with directors of many nationalities and in many occasions my main role was making compatible their vision with the requirements of the client and the agency. American companies, moreover, can ensure that the shooting is made according to the technical requirements of a production that has to be post-produced and aired in the US. In Europe, in most of Asia and in all countries that use the PAL television system, for instance, they shoot at 25 frames per seconds while in the US we shoot at 30 fps (and sometimes at 24). This little discrepancy could be a major problem if not managed. Dealing with an American production company minimizes the risks: it knows how to deal with foreign production service companies, keep full control of the operations, make sure the contracts with the talent are properly filled and the negative stays safe.

Costa Rica

I am in Costa Rica prepping a car commercial. We spent the all day yesterday scouting for a location in the jungle. The good thing about Costa Rica is that most of the interesting tropical locations such as rainforest, waterfalls, rivers and canyons are in the range of a few miles from the capital San Jose but even so you need a lot of time to explore places that are difficult to reach. Shooting in the jungle is a science: you need to plan very carefully transportation, logistics, and equipments and coordinate every move very efficiently. I have been shooting in Costa Rica since 1995 when Mia Films first opened an office in this country. WE managed to produce here big projects for Repsol (the Spanish oil company), Toyota, Delta, Verizon, MTV, BK and so forth

Agencies

The global opportunities widen the spectrum of what could be done but at the same time make the process more intricate. Agencies have to get out of the comfort zone and take the risk of exploring new territories more creatively. That affects not only the way the production of a commercial or any form of content is organized but also the process that starts with the conception of the ideas and goes on with the selection of the director and the production company throughout the shooting and the post-production. Dozens of interesting countries where to go and shoot or post-produce, thousands of talented directors and other creator from all around the globe, a proliferation of astonishing technologies, ground-breaking media formats and a new attitude of the consumers. Agencies have to adapt themselves to the current times and to what it is coming.

Producers

Complains about Production Services

These are the most common comments about Production Services: The production services don't have any emotional link with the project: they are like a rental company. They tend to give low initial bids to get the job with the understanding that overages can be presented later on the base of the most bizarre reasons. The production services tend to charge much higher rates than the real ones, especially when they bid for US companies.
Bidding with at least two companies in a remote country is always a good idea, unless you had previous experiences with one specific production service and you trust their managing of your budget. References from other production companies that shot in the same place before are also a must: getting the e-mail address of a production service on Google is not a very wise solution.

More about the Director's Attitude: England Vs. Morocco

The combination of teaching and learning is the right one: the crew members will be happy to learn something new and to change their procedures when it makes sense and when the director accepts some of their ideas and leans something from them. In the past I have seen directors managing very successfully these relationships and others failing miserably. Many years ago I used to work with a British director that thought that nobody in the all World knew how to shoot with the exception of British, American and Australian crews. When I shot with him in the UK everything went smoothly and perfectly but when the production took place in some other country like Malta, Spain and Morocco he was incapable of creating a good atmosphere on the set. I finally, despite his talent, decided not to work with him anymore when the production had to take place outside the UK.

The producers and the challenges

The main task of a producer is to define the real challenges of a project and look around to find where and how those challenges can be met. Detecting the opportunities and the risks is a key task that will determine the results of a production. In the Global arena, opportunities have to be taken and risks avoided: this means that the producer has to be able to understand what a foreign country can or cannot offer and how local resources can be properly used.

Oil rig


All major water tanks for the shooting of aquatic specials effects are based abroad: Malta, Mexico and The Bahamas: before chosing the right facility for a project a comparison of costs, availability, constructions capabilities and dimensions should be done. The surface tank of The Mediterranean Films Studios in Malta has a dimension of 300 by 400 feet and is 4 to 6 feet deep. The studios also have a deep-water tank, which has a 350 feet diameter tapering downwards to 162 feet of depth. Both tanks have an efficient seawater filter system which guarantees water clarity, especially important for underwater filming. Many movies such as “Christopher Columbus”, “U-571” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” were shot in these studios.

Tank n.1 of Fox Studios Baja in Rosarito (Mexico) has an irregular shape with approximate dimensions of 600 by 600 feet and a capacity of 16 million gallons of water. It can be filled or drained in les than 40 hours. “Titanic”, “Deep Blue Sea”, “Pearl Harbor” as well as “Master and Commander” was shot here. The water tank of the Bahamas Film Studio is the largest in the world, and offers new technologies such as a cable-operated gimbal capable of moving ships and giving actual at-sea simulation. The tank was opened in 2005 and hosted the shooting of Pirates
When we shot a commercial for Repsol, we chose Malta because we were able to built there a model of an oil rig within the available budget and, because of the limited depth of the surface tank, we could easily generate the type of waves we were looking for. Having a 14 ft high oil rig miniature in the middle of a 120,000 square feet tank let us create spectacular shots. We were able to generate 4 feet high waves that, at a 1/10th scale, looked as impressive and menacing 40 feet walls of water.

Bidding

The global approach makes the bidding a more complicated process: if you plan to shoot in LA, the estimate could be done in a few hours making just a few phone calls. But if you are exploring global possibilities, you should start comparing costs and opportunities in several countries and this process is more time consuming and more expensive. Therefore, the single bidding system from the beginning or from just after the submission of the director’s treatments is probably a good idea. It allows the production company, the agency and the client to work together in maximizing the production value by dedicating the proper amount of time to the research and the exploration of several production strategies and scenarios.

A network of contacts
In the past we have established an interesting network of contacts with talented DP’s from all around the World and we work with them when their style and their passion can make a difference. Similarly art directors and production designers from other countries can offer a different and more interesting vision for a specific project. The modern Mexican architecture has a unique personality: the use of certain colors like yellow, purple, pink and blue, the definition of spaces, the combination of interior and exterior areas. Milan is one of the most relevant centers for design: Italian architects and industrial designers are in the frontline of innovation. Tokyo has some of the most revolutionary bars and restaurants: synthetic materials, washi (hand made paper), fiber optic lighting, and so forth. Certainly Mexican, Italian or Japanese production designer can give an interesting input for certain jobs.

Irrational conflicts

Unfortunately I have seen irrational conflicts happen without a valid reason: American producers screaming at local production teams complaining about something that looks wrong just because it is done differently. Distrust is offensive for everybody: if a producer accuses a local production manager or an art director of wrongdoing when they are just working hard to make things happen, the relationship is compromised and things start to go wrong.

More about the Director's Attitude: Absorbing different cultures

With the growth of the number of commercials shot abroad, directors have to evolve and become more culturally international as well: they should speak languages, understand foreign forms of art, listen to music from all around the globe, watch movies and short films from all latitudes, follow the tendencies of fashion in emerging countries and stay opened to new information. I believe that absorbing expressions of other cultures makes the directors more flexible and therefore more capable of using the global resources to enhance their creativity.

Finding a little town with the right flavor

A few months ago we got the board and the specs of the project. It was clear from the first moment that the location was the main challenge: we needed a beautiful, picturesque, historic, little Spanish town with perfectly preserved architecture and sunny, warm weather. Of course many towns, both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America, meet these requirements: A few places came immediately to my mind such as Chinchón in Spain, Evora in Portugal, Antigua in Guatemala, Cartagena in Colombia and San Miguel de Allende or Oaxaca in Mexico, but I decided to extend the research a little further. I called a few of my usual sources in Madrid, Barcelona, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires and I told them the story. "You should think of Sigüenza", a Spaniard told me. "Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay is the right place, believe me!" affirmed an Argentine. I decided to concentrate our efforts on 5 towns that, despite their architectural peculiarities, fit the original requirements of the project: a picturesque, historical little town with a Hispanic flavor.
San Miguel de Allende was founded by a monk in 1542 and has been designated historical landmark since 1930. The town has preserved its colonial look by banning new construction and therefore most of its buildings keep their original style.
Antigua Guatemala, the first colonial capital of Central America, was established one year after San Miguel, in 1543. UNESCO declared Antigua "Heritage of Humanity" because of its colonial houses, churches, convents, squares and fountains structured according to the traditional Spanish grid design.
Sigüenza, situated in Spanish "meseta", conserves its medieval structure with narrow and winding streets, stone buildings and historic monuments. The Plaza Mayor is a fantastic example of Renaissance architecture while the Cathedral has interesting gothic rosette windows dating from the 12th to the 15th centuries.
Evora, the capital of the Portuguese region of Alentejo, has over two thousand years of history. It combines roman ruins, medieval walls, gothic building and churches from the 16th century. Most of the houses of Evora have balconies covered with carnations and many of its streets and squares like Praça do Giraldo are flanked by an ancient arcade.
In Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, is a perfectly well preserved colonial town just across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. Founded as Nova Colonia do Sacramento in 1680 by the Portuguese, it still preserves the colorful houses and cobblestone windy streets, reminiscent of certain sections of the old Lisbon. While our producers in Latin America and Europe were working on gathering pictures of the different options we activated the estimating process. We detected that Antigua was the least expensive place to shoot, followed by Colonia (5% more), Evora (20%) and San Miguel or Sigüenza (approximately 30% more expensive). We got the locations pictures within 24 hours and we shared them with the director who decided that we should narrow down the list to three towns: Evora, Antigua and Colonia. We analyzed the average weather conditions of all 3 places in the middle of February when we were supposed to shoot. We found out that in that period Colonia has approximately 13 hours and 30 minutes of sunlight a day, Antigua 11 hours and Evora a little more than 10 hours of sunlight. Furthermore Colonia, on average, receives 4.1" of precipitations with temperatures of 73ºF, Antigua only 0.2" of rain with 63ºF and Evora approximately 3" with an average temperature of 50ºF. Colonia and Antigua offered warmer and longer days, an important factor in this project. Even if we deeply regretted loosing the opportunity of eating a delicious Borrego Assado (Rosted lamb) at Fialho, the most traditional restaurant in Evora, the Portuguese town was dropped from the list. If we shot in Antigua, we could cast in Mexico City, Bogota or Miami, cities less then three hours away by airplane. In the case of Colonia, the talent would be selected in Buenos Aires and transported to the location using the hydrofoil ferry that takes one hour to cross the estuary of the river from the Argentina to Uruguay. We showed several casting tapes from previous jobs to the director in order to give him the feeling of what type of talent he could find in all those cities. He determined that Miami and Buenos Aires would give him the models he needed. Colonia and Antigua were at this point on the same level in many aspects: the textures, the colors, the density and the atmosphere of both places looked perfect for the spot. The costs were pretty similar and the appropriate talent could have been found at a short distance. We could have indeed shot in both places. The Uruguayan town nevertheless had a few advantages in some areas: slightly warmer weather, one extra hour of sunlight a day and a faster connection to a major production center such as Buenos Aires which would make the production more efficient. Finally Colonia was the winner. We proposed it to the client and the agency, they all fell in love with the atmosphere of that little South American town, and a few days later we got the job awarded.

Talented people
When we shoot in another country we try to explore the possibility of working with a local DP’s or art directors. They know the local lighting, textures, resources and crew better. If you go and shoot in Italy you probably want an Italian look after all: Italian DP’s or art directors can better serve your purposes and capture the essence of the location. They know what equipment is available and how to use them. They know the gaffers, the electricians, the grips, the carpenters, the painters, their strengths and their weaknesses. There are very talented DP’s and art directors in many places around the globe. If you regularly watch foreign movies you can tell: Argentina, Brazil, Eastern Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and so forth.

The cultural shock

From time to time, unexpectedly, a cultural shock happens and prevents some of the team members to fully operate in a foreign country. This is not certainly the case if the shoot takes place in Canada, the UK or Australia: people speak the same language and have a similar lifestyle, there are not security concerns and behaviors codes are identical. The entire team can interact easily with locals at every level and in every place: in the hotel, on the set, in a pharmacy or a restaurant. But some places around the World are more difficult to manage because they are completely different. Imagine for a moment that you take off from the Los Angeles International Airport and, a few hours later, you land in Fez (Morocco). The streets are overcrowded, hundreds or thousands of people try to catch your attention to sell you something, to offer themselves as guides, to beg for money. Cars are stopped in unbelievable jams; unusual odors and noises surround you, sometimes very aggressively; signs of poverty are evident and widespread.
Some people can manage the shock and even treasure the experience. Some others cannot and get uncomfortable, scared, worried. The cultural shock provokes sadness, preoccupation with health and hygiene, anger and resentment. People start idealizing their own country, developing stereotypes about the new place, fearing of being cheated or robbed and, soon enough, judging everything that is different as inferior. The results are often feelings of hostility on both sides.
Production companies, agencies and clients have to select very carefully who they send to shoot abroad. Especially when the production takes place in certain countries.

The creative goals

The creative goals are based on a crucial analysis that starts all operation: defining the main real challenges of a project and detecting what is the essence of the idea. Establishing a hierarchy of creative needs is an incredibly important task that affects the entire production. Not being able to do that prevents the achievement of the best results and makes that the money is wrongly and inefficiently spent. The global approach doesn’t change the scrutiny; it just makes the process broader, more complex but, at the same time, way more rewarding and exciting.

Forecasting problems


A production company with a wide experience in managing projects shot in studio is not necessarily able to control complex productions in the middle of a desert. Producing is the science of forecasting problems and making sure that either they are prevented or that there is a plan b in place in case they occur. Obviously, the more you shoot the more you learn. In the global era, I suggest that clients and agencies require extensive international credentials from a production company. It should have shot in many countries, operated in numerous environments and dealt with different cultures. If a production company has shot commercials in Canada, England or France as well as in Morocco, Thailand, Honduras and India, it is surely capable of operating everywhere else in the Globe. If a company has experience only in countries with a very developed production industry like Australia or New Zealand, it is probably not ready to go and shoot in less organized places. If they don’t have experience in dealing with completely different cultures, with people speaking other languages and with precarious production structures they will probably have a hard time if they had to produce in a remote country.

The body language

The body language varies greatly from one country to another. Italian or French, for instance, have very distinctive body languages: you can detect a national of those two countries by only watching how they express themselves and observing the gestures of their hands (in the case of the Italians) or their mouths (for the French). Using a performer from Rome to create a typical Italian character is obviously an easy task, but in most of the cases you can also make an Italian actor to look American: you just have to control and suppress certain gestures that belong exclusively to the Italian culture. I successfully worked with Argentine or Brazilian actors for commercials to be aired in the US, British, New Zealander, Australian and South African actors for commercials for Italy, Spain and Mexico, Spanish talent for spots to be broadcasted in the UK or France and so forth. The nature of the project will tell if the goal is achievable or not.

Glow-worm in Costa Rica

We were shooting with an A-Star helicopter and a Wescam in the region of Quepos, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica: the aerial shots involved a group of little islands situated a few hundred yards from the coast. I wanted to get some shots after the sunset so we kept flying around until it was pretty dark which is something you don’t do very often when using a chopper. As soon as I got the shot I wanted the pilot directed the ship to the north toward the base camp in Jaco. I probably never enjoyed so much a flight as that night. The silhouette of the coastline was beautiful: the foam of the waves looked like phosphorescent and some fires on the beaches gave a touch of reddish to the mainly blue landscape. When we arrived in Jaco it was completely dark. Our production team put some cars with their light on at the four corners of the field where we were supposed to land in a way that the chopper could easily touch down. The pilot turned the turbine of the helicopter off, I stepped down and I looked around: the field was approximately two hundred feet wide and all around it I could perceive the mass of the vegetation of the jungle. It was very silent I could hear only the wind and the engine of one of the cars. And it was very dark. Suddenly something happened: from within the grass a million glow-worms started to fly around. I had not seen any since I was a kid in Northern Italy. I realized how lucky we really are to do this job.

More about the director's attitude: The museum or Starbucks

I produced commercials with directors who enjoyed every moment of the experience of shooting in a country other than their own. They discovered new textures and colors, the appreciate the talent of local crews, they understood perfectly well how to take full advantage of the possibilities offered to them by shooting in Mexico, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Scotland, Italy, Dominican Republic, and so forth. When a European or American director lands for the first time in Mexico and immediately asks if the Anthropological Museum is opened during the weekend I know that everything is going to be fine, if he or she asks for Starbucks or, and this is even worse, if the water of the tap is drinkable, I become very worried.

Summer (and winter) solstice

Today is the first day of summer in the Northern hemisphere and therefore the longest day of the year: meaning that the length of time elapsed between sunrise and sunset on this day is a maximum for the year But in the Southern hemisphere it is, of course the first day of winter and the longest night of the year.

Comparing costs

We know that may countries around the World offer great creative opportunities. At this point costs are to be considered in order to achieve the best production value for the available amount of money. We know that the economic factor is important because it determines the resources the director will get to shoot. At Mia Films we have developed a program that gives us a comparative estimate of a cost of a production in up to 27 different countries. We just have to answer 16 questions and we get the figures. The questions are related to the number of shooting days, size of the production, the number of actors and extras, the type and number of locations and so forth. We can for instance detect if Guatemala is more or less expensive than Brazil or Ukraine is a better option than Romania. These estimates, even if extremely preliminary, have proved in the past to have margins of error of less than 5%. Thank to this software we can easily establish how much a specific project would cost in several countries and decide where to focus our attention and bid more precisely.

Visual references

Visual and creative references other than commercials are scattered and difficult to detect and find. The work of an animator in Jakarta, a fashion designer in Buenos Aires, a short film director in India, an art director in Russia or a photographer in China is not easily put into the radar screen because the amount of information out there is massive. Therefore keeping track of new trend is very difficult but absolutely necessary to keep your work in front of the creative curve. The cooperation among creatives, directors and production companies in this area should be an ongoing process. Global production companies are usually well organized to monitor what’s going on in different parts of the World in different areas of the creation and will be able to partner with the creatives in this task. Sharing something new is a rewarding thing: when agencies and production companies work together the crosspollination is a fact. Production companies should create sites, blogs and wikis and invite the agencies to participate.

Production Services

Just like film commissions, most of the production services base their marketing strategy on locations and costs. Low production costs is a very risky proposition. If at a certain point you are not cheap anymore because of the exchange rate fluctuations or because some other countries become less expensive, you don't have any marketing strategy in place. There is always a cheaper option. One basic shooting day costs 50K in Argentina or Costa Rica. Does it look inexpensive? There are evn less expensive places: in India, for instance it costs 20K. You have fly 20 hours to get to India but....
Service companies should become more creative partners of the production companies. Partners, not just bidders and organizers.

Getting out of the comfort zone

Instead of exploring new territories, very often, we are moved to go back repeatedly to the same places: if we go to Italy, we shoot in Tuscany and in France the spot is La Côte d'Azur. Why not Piedmont, Liguria or Trentino. Why not the Loire region, Provence or Alsace? And why not Switzerland, Belgium, Liechtenstein or Luxembourg instead?

Flights, hotels and car rental shopping

Travel expenses constitute a big chunk of every global production. A business class flight from Los Angeles or Miami to Buenos Aires, New Zealand or Prague can cost between 4 to 8 thousand dollars. Maximizing the investment in this area is important, especially when several people are traveling. We all have the tendency of using always the same airline because of the miles we get that can be redeemed for tickets or upgrades. But sometimes it is convenient to explore different airlines and compare costs. A good place to do that is www.kayak.com: it covers fares on almost 300 airlines and its interface is very good.

Foreign actors and common references


The common references are the ones that people share and that make easy to communicate using analogies. When you mention to an American actor some characters of the movie “Office Space”, he understands perfectly well what you are talking about. When you are directing a Danish or a Costa Rican actor perhaps this reference is not understood. It is important for the director who is shooting abroad to do his homework keeping into account the cultural differences that he could face. Directors with an international approach, comfortable working anywhere in the World, versed in several cultures and possibly multilingual, will have no problem to find common ground with foreign professional actors. They will actually enjoy enormously the experience.

Working as a network

Global production companies, besides the right attitude, should have a network-like international structure: They must be able to create and manage virtual teams of people based in several countries capable of working together resourcefully and creatively. I started the process of assembling a network of production companies in 1992: I knew that the real challenge was to find the right persons in every one of the countries where I wanted to establish an office. I needed not only talented, experienced and reliable professionals but first and foremost people with the right mind set: the ability to work as a team with other people based thousand of miles away, with a different culture and speaking different languages. This is especially important because, when a production company expands its operations to other regions, its productions tend to become more international and most of its projects have to be handled by two or more offices in a fully coordinated way. I knew I needed to create a company culture that allowed every office to operate with the same standards and understand the requirements of every market where our network was going to operate. From the very beginning we encouraged our producers to move from one office to another to learn and teach systems, methodologies, techniques and practices. In this way they quickly gained the knowledge they needed to properly work with agencies and clients from every one of our markets and to shoot everywhere in the World

Low Costs

We all know that costs are the main reason why clients are interested in shooting overseas. Low production costs are not at all a bad thing: they allow to produce one commercial that otherwise would have been impossible to make, to shoot one extra day, or to add one extra commercial for the same money; they make it possible to get some extra shot materials for other platforms (perhaps a short film for the Internet?); or they just save some money. But focusing primarily on costs has a very distorted meaning: “we shoot overseas when we cannot afford to shoot at home”. This automatically makes everybody lower the expectations and assume that by investing less you get less. Global production is for the contrary an extraordinary opportunity that instead of limiting the possibilities makes them enormously bigger. It’s a big, big World out there! Millions of talented people, incredible locations, amazing architectures, unexpected colors, textures and fascinating rhythms are ready to be part of a project. Many of them are indeed here, in the US, just behind the corner; many other are in other countries or continents.

Foreign actors

Many commercials don’t have any dialogue: therefore actors don’t have necessarily to be fluent in English. A few countries around the World have an incredible pool of talented actors and actresses that can very well be used for American spots. Think for instance of Italy, France, Argentina, Mexico, The Czech Republic, Hungry: often movies from those countries win prestigious awards at the most prestigious Film Festivals like Cannes, Berlin, San Sebastian, and so forth. Has somebody any doubt about the quality of the acting in “Cinema Paradiso”, “Amelie” or “Amores Perros”?

Scouting for car commercials

I have learned several things regarding the scouting for car commercials:
1. You have to scout with the actual car you are going to shoot: if you want to check the reflections on the body of the car you need the right one, otherwise the reflections will not be the expected ones.
2. It is a good idea to always carry a GPS. Especially if you are scouting from the air (with a helicopter of a fixed wings aircraft) you need to pinpoint the exact place. It will be very difficult to find the same one from the ground.
3. It’s important to have a chart with the position of the sun in the sky on the shooting date: it will help to define the best moment for every shot.
4. When scouting for aerial shots, go to see the location with the pilot or the aerial coordinator and double check the position of power cables and other threats. Also consider one or two alternative roads to be able to change your shooting spot if the wind is not appropriate to fly in that specific direction.

More about the Director's attitude: Chicago or Thailand?

Some directors, as I mentioned in other occasions, have the tendency to work with the same crew: if they have to fly to the antipodes to shoot a commercial, they take with them the key persons like the DP, the production designer, the assistant director, and so forth. It could make sense to fly an art director to Thailand if you need to reproduce there an American look (why are you going to Thailand to shoot a Chicago apartment anyway?) but, if you are looking for a South East Asia look, you should certainly use a Thai professional. But to work with foreign people the director has to be very openminded. When shooting overseas you have to expect different ways of making things happen. A director should fully understand that and respect the work of his foreign crew: if he doesn't, the situation becomes immediately frustrating for him and offensive for the crew. People all around the Globe are proud of their cultures and resent if somebody coming from another country treats them as idiots and tries to impose a different way of doing things.

The evolution of the Production Companies


Production Companies should evolve from organizations that shoot overseas when powerful reasons push them to do so (costs, locations or weather) to international structures capable of using the World as an inexhaustible fountain of creative, technical and economic resources. Global Production Companies don't just wait for a specific storyboard with a tropical beach in vignette number one, to go international: they have a global approach to the entire business. Reaction is not an option: production companies have to be proactive in this field. When one non-global production company is called for project that apparently has to be shot in Uruguay for budgetary reasons or in Kenya because of the location, reacts looking for a production service company in Nairobi or Montevideo and tries to make things happen over there. Service companies have the tendency to give "interpreted" information about the industry of their countries and to underestimate the cost of the project to get the business. Problems can surface later, when you land at the Carrasco Airport in Montevideo or the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Kenya. A global production company not only knows perfectly well how to shoot in those two countries but it is also capable of analyzing if there are better alternatives to Uruguay (Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile?) or to Kenya (Botswana, Tanzania?). This analysis comes from the ability of the executive producers to detect the essence of the project and to work with the director to determine where the challenges could be better met.

The missing Fireman


Just before sunset, I went to the marina to make sure that everything was in order for the next day. It was hot and humid and the Caribbean looked incredibly green while the sun was quickly disappearing behind the mountains. We were starting the shooting the morning after and the selected location was a little key just one hour away from the main Island. Obviously we hired a motorboat with capacity for 50 people to take the crew and the equipment to the location. Even if all arrangements had already been done and everything looked under control, I went one last time to the marina to make the final adjustments to the transportation plan. I spoke to the captain of the boat and I agreed with him that we would arrive at 5 am sharp to embark and leave promptly the pier at 5.15. He said: "Perfecto! No hay problema! I will be here!". Since I was not too confident about his punctuality I asked: "Where do you live? Can we have your address just in case?". The guy pointed at small yellow house one hundred yards away and said "That's my house!". "Fantastic", I thought, "if the captain doesn't show up tomorrow at 5, we will wake him up". The day after we arrived a couple of minutes before 5.00: it was still very dark and surprisingly the guy was there. "Very good" I said to my assistant, "we will leave on time". We loaded the equipment on the boat, all crew members, the agency and the client boarded and, after checking that everything was on the vessel, I said to the captain: "Lets go!". He shacked his head and said: "No. We cannot. I don't have fuel". "How can it be? We were supposed to sail at 5.15?" I asked and the guy answered, "Bueno! I just forgot to fill the tank". I tried not to lose my temper and just solve the problem quickly. "Ok. Let us do it now!" I urged him. "We cannot because the gas station is closed till 7.00" he alleged. I looked at the DP who was looking at the sky detecting the first signals of light. I knew what he was thinking: "Lets go or we will lose the sunrise!". The skipper didn't look worried or ashamed at all. I could read in his eyes that he couldn't understand my concern. "What's this hurry about?" he was thinking! "Where does the guy of the gas station live?" I asked. We learned where the gas station operator lived and we sent a car to pick him up: in 12 minutes he was there. It was already 5.20, five minutes behind schedule. "Please, refuel immediately the boat" I shouted to him. The guy seemed sleepy and pissed off by having been awaken so early. "Where is the fireman?" he asked looking around. "The fireman? What fireman?" I said! "We cannot operate the pump if there is not a fireman on duty!" "Where does the fireman live?" I asked hoping that it was the very last surprise. It was and we could undock at 5.38, twenty-three minutes too late. Since then, I always ask about the firemen, safety regulations and the amount of gasoline in the tank of any mechanical vehicle we hire.

Don't try to reproduce the methods you use at home.

When you shoot overseas you cannot reproduce the systems, the processes, and the methods you use at home: you just have to understand how to make things happen in a different way. This doesn't mean that you just sit, wait, and pray for the production to go smoothly. It means that you have to understand "the local" methods and try to make them work for you. At times you discover that in the most remote areas of the Globe, a place with an incredibly limited production industry, they are able to achieve remarkable goals in a very unsuspected manner. Occasionally, on the other hand, you realize that it's the moment to teach something to improve the system. But you cannot pretend that shooting in the jungles of Guatemala is the same as shooting in downtown L.A.
The principal thing to understand is that, with the exclusion of a few cities worldwide, there are not many places with a supporting industry as the one we know in the US. That means that local production teams cannot count on a sophisticated structure to achieve their goals. They sometimes have to invest hours in solving problems that in L.A., New York, Miami or London could be solved with one single phone call. But if they are good, they can put together an extremely complex production with excellent results and, often, with a very limited amount of money.
I spent the last 27 years watching production teams in all the Continents organizing productions: I like to observe them, to understand how they proceed and how they work. I accept the local methods that are proving themselves efficient and, from time to time, I import them back home. When I realize that it is necessary, on the contrary, I ask the local production team to work as we are used to in the US. I explain why I believe that our systems are better in this case and why we should operate in this manner.
Only once have I had to fire the production team and start over: only once in so many years and it was in a country where I considered from the beginning it could happen.

More about the director's attitude.

As I pointed out in aprevious posting, the personality and the attitude of the directors is a key factor when shooting abroad. Some directors, for example, can work only with their usual crew and in their environment and therefore are incapable of shooting overseas facing a different culture, new teams, and even eat different food. Some directors can be very creative when shooting in studio in Burbank but they cannot travel to Istanbul without getting sick the first day as soon as they eat their first döner kebab.

Lost opportunities

As a consequence of these two tendencies, the almost exclusive focus of agency creatives on the directors and the interest of the clients of maximizing their investments executing the production in countries where the costs are lower than in the US, many great opportunities go lost. There is a lot of attention paid to the two extremes of the equation: the director and the bottom line but there is very little analysis dedicated to the rest of the factors. I believe that not enough thinking is applied to the multiple ways of taking full advantage of the global opportunities: not only reducing costs but also increasing the quality of the productions and widen the scope of the projects to make them evolve into the multiplatform world. Instead of choosing the directors in the same old way and, after having him or her selected, trying to make the project happen looking for the cheapest place around where to shoot, the advertising community should create a broader and more comprehensive process. We should work to conceive a completely new equation in which all the factors are creatively and properly considered and more aspects are taken into account. There are millions of opportunities out there: We need to open our minds, revisit the old processes and create new ones.

Production Services and the bidding process

To properly bid a job, a service company needs good production specs and detailed information about how the director sees the job. My perception is that many production companies just send a board to a production service company and ask for a bid. They receive a bid that they don't fully understand because practices and regulations are sometimes very different in other parts of the Globe. Later on problems arise about what was included or not included in the bid. Before asking for a bid, a producer has to do his or her homework very carefully.

The Winter Guest


Last night I watched again the movie "The Winter Guest" directed by Alan Rickman. The film is the directorial debut of this actor who is best known for playing the bad guy in "Die Hard" and Severus Snape in "Harry Potter". There are several things I would like to highlight about the movie, which I suggest to see. First and foremost the locations: the film has been shot in Elie and Pittenweem, on the Fife Coast, Scotland. The landscapes help immensely to tell the story and to create the right atmosphere. Secondly, the work of the Irish DP Seamus McGarvey: he started as a still photographer and his recent credits include movies such as Butterfly Kiss by Michael Winterbottom, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and World Trade Center by Oliver Stone. I like the way he lights the interiors of The Winter Guest, a lot of white light coming in through the windows that make the viewer feel the snow outside. And finally the delicate work of the production designer Robin Cameron Don. He designed the original sets for the Almeida Theatre's production of The Winter Guest. He worked for the Royal Opera House in London, the Welsh National Opera, the Sydney Opera House, the New York City Opera and the San Francisco Opera. His work in the movie is remarkable because of its incredible simplicity.

Suspended Bridge in Costa Rica

We were bidding a job for a SUV. The truck was supposed to run through the tropical jungle, climb a mountain and reach a cable bridge suspended over a spectacular and deep canyon. The truck stops in the center of the bridge that starts swinging. The passengers of the truck take a nap taking advantage of the slow swing. I knew that several countries around the Globe such as Thailand, Brazil, New Zealand, Guatemala, Costa Rica or Venezuela offered the right geographical conditions for the spot. But in this case we needed a complex combination of elements: not only the right locations such as deep canyons, roads in the jungle and suspended bridges but also a sizable infrastructure to handle the complexity of the project. In fact we realized that real suspended bridges don't swing (they can fluctuate but they don't move back and forth sideways) therefore we needed to find a real bridge where to shoot the beginning of the spot and then build an 80 feet long swinging replica of it somewhere else. We also knew that it was going to be impossible to find a suspended bridge crossing a 300 feet deep canyon and, as a consequence of that, we needed to shoot separately the bridge (with a huge blue screen) and the canyon (using a helicopter). After a few calls, we realized that in Costa Rica, where we have one of our four offices since 1995 (the other 3 are in Miami, Mexico, and Argentina) we could find a very impressive location and at the same time handle more efficiently the production. We located perfect roads in the rain forest and a beautiful bridge in a region called Pocosol, not far away from the Arenal Volcano. And an aerial scouting led us to find an amazing canyon with a 400 feet waterfall in the region of the river Toro. We were quite happy with the locations but Costa Rica became the winning solution when our office in San Jose found an engineer with experience in building suspended bridges.

Foreign actors and the language barrier

I produced and directed commercials with actors of over 10 nationalities and I never found that the language barrier was a relevant factor. Most of the actors I worked with spoke with some degree of fluency one of the languages I can understand and speak but even when that was not the case, I could easily communicate with them through the local first AD. I have no doubt that, when the production takes place in a foreign country, a bilingual and local first assistant director better serves the director. Some American directors want to fly around the globe with their AD. I always found that practice completely absurd. Before the shoot, I always have long conversations with the local AD, I explain to him or her with precision what I want to achieve, and I make clear my objectives and my directing strategy in relation to the acting. Following these basic rules of communication I always established a perfect professional relationship with AD’s of every nationality. In every occasion they have been able to help me in the task of establishing the connection with the actors and communicating with them without usurping my role. Actors still felt that I was the director and reacted properly to my indications.

Daylight

On June 21st, Madrid has 15 hours and 2 minutes of sunlight (from sunrise to sunset), while Buenos Aires has only 9 hours and 52 minutes. But, on December 21st, the situation is almost reversed: you get 9 hours and 17 minutes of daylights in Madrid versus 14 hours and 45 minutes in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires and Madrid are two very similar cities in terms of look: many streets give the impression of being absolutely identical. But in June, a two days shoot in Madrid is equal to 3 shooting days in Buenos Aires in terms of available daylight hours. It is worth estimating if the cost of two days in Madrid, including overtime, is higher or lower than shooting 3 days with no overtime in Buenos Aires.

25 hirsute elephants

Many years ago, we were setting up a shot with 25 elephants in Surin, Western Thailand. When we were ready to shoot, the director looked through the lens of the camera and said "We need to shave the elephants: I don't like the hair on their heads!". After losing almost half an hour, the director was convinced that the operation of shaving the animals was impossible because, if we did that, we would have lost the right light he shot. The shot came out amazingly spectacular and, evidently, the hairs were not an issue on the screen.

The submarine

Sometimes the type of resource a project requires are not specifically related to the films industry: for a Passport spot that we produced a few years ago, we needed an Atlantis Submarine capable of being submerged to a depth of 100 feet. It is a touristic sub with capacity for up to 64 passengers that at that time was available in several locations: Grand Cayman, Barbados, St. Thomas, Aruba, Cozumel, Guam, Kona, Maui and Oahu. We immediately discarded all the locations in the Pacific Ocean because the agency was more interested in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. We compared weather conditions, local availability of technical support for underwater productions and costs of the transportation of equipment from several Caribbean islands. As a consequence of the research, we narrowed down the list to two locations: Grand Cayman and Cozumel. Grand Cayman is located 450 miles south of Miami, in the heart of the British West Indies while Cozumel is an island located approximately 50 miles south of Cancun in Yucatan. We had some conversations with Jordan Klein, a very experienced underwater cameraman and he strongly recommended Grand Cayman because of the swimming pool-like transparency of the water and the beauty of the coral reef. The advantage of Grand Cayman was also that some of the best underwater locations were situated just a few hundred yards from George Town and the Seven Mile Beach where most of the hotels are located. We spoke with Bob Soto, who runs a diving shop in Grand Cayman and has extensive experience in supporting film crew shooting there: Bob convinced us that the Cayman Islands were the winning option because they had the submarine, the perfect water, the support services and the proximity to Miami, the city from where most of the equipment and crew were going to be flown.

Two reasons

Unfortunately when I shoot overseas, many times the main reason is money. Some projects are not affordable if not shot in a country with very low production costs. But nevertheless I have the policy that no matter where we go and shoot, we try to find at least two other creative reasons why we go there besides money. We work hard to find those little details that are available only in that country but that are able to make our project unique.

Volcanoes

Yesterday the Indonesian government ordered the evacuation of the region of the 9,700-feet high Mount Merapi volcano, fearing an imminent eruption. It’s contemporary, the Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador is giving signal of a forthcoming eruption, prompting evacuations. Volcanoes are beautiful, intriguing and at the same time dangerous places. Of course it is almost impossible to put a big film crew on the ground close to a lava flow or an explosive eruptions: there are many dangers such as pyroclastic clouds, falling stones or debris, ashes and gases. But there are some volcanoes that allow a production to unfold pretty safely: they are either extinct or dormant. In the past years I had to shoot several times in the proximity or even in the interior of the crater of a volcano. It took place in Costa Rica. We produced two spots for Repsol (a Spanish oil company) and Toyota. Both of the mountains we used, the Turrialba and the Irazú are active: they have limited volcanic activities such as smoke and gases ejections. But, because both picks are approximately 12,000 feet high, the altitude and the lack of oxygen in the air created the real complications of shooting in those locations more than volcanic activities. When you park the cars in the proximity of the crater of the Irazú, the rangers in charge of the National Park where the volcano is located, ask you to do it with the vehicles facing the exit trying to minimize the time needed to evacuate the place should an eruption unexpectedly start. But that possibility is very remote because seismologists, as in the case of the Mount Merapi, usually detect the approaching eruption hours or days in advance by monitoring volcanic tremors and gas emissions. Many countries around the World offer volcanoes where shooting is possible: Nicaragua, for example, Guatemala, Iceland, Chile, Italy, New Zealand, Japan and of course the US.

The director's attitude

In a global production environment some directors are able to extract the best out of the opportunities offered anywhere while others don't. It is a combination of personal and professional attributes what makes a director more prone to work globally. Having to arrive on the set and face an entire crew that is speaking an unknown language and has never worked with you before is undoubtedly intimidating. Even if most of crew members around the World speak English and are used to working with American and European directors, shooting with them requires a certain dose of flexibility and adaptability. To me, working with new people, is an exciting experience and I know that many directors enjoy the process. They feel that working with people belonging to a different culture is enriching, intriguing and fascinating. It is a joy working with them.

The dolphin, the giraffe and the motion control rig

For 3 commercials we had to shoot for an agency based in Texas, we explored several possibilities in terms of location. Even if our office in Miami was handling the project, we thought that the shoot could happen in Mexico, Costa Rica or Argentina. They are all countries where we have offices and where our local structures could give us an efficient production structure.  The selection criteria were based on the main requirements of the project: the presence of a motion control rig in the region, the possibility of finding the 3 needed locations in a short range, the availability of a trained dolphin and a giraffe, a competent underwater special effects team and good weather in February. For the shoot we needed also an animatronic of a dolphin but that could be easily made in Los Angeles and shipped to the location. We decided to shoot in Mexico, because we could find the equipment, the technicians, one giraffe and 2 of the 3 locations in Mexico City while we could locate the 3rd location and the trained dolphin in Acapulco. 

Finding a location



Finding the right location requires to properly balance the aesthetic aspects the director is looking for with operational considerations. The balance between both perspectives is absolutely key in this phase. The first task is indeed to define a list of places that offer the perfect look and atmosphere for the project. If you access the website of one of the major stock image companies and, in the search options box, you type “waterfall” you will be presented with almost 5,000 pictures of cascades from all around the planet: big and small, surrounded by jungle and rocks, idyllic and scary, touristic and inaccessible. If you click one picture you will probably get the complete information of where it has been taken: country, region and even the name of the waterfall. You can do something similar using Google, Altavista or visiting websites of production service companies of all Continents. There is a lot of information out there that is easily accessible and in someway organized. But the reality is that one picture is only a very limited part of the story. I firmly believe that talking to experienced people is a much better solution to perform a location research. If you talk to a DP, an art director or a photographer who already worked in that area, you will get a much more reliable information: they know how the place looks in the reality and how it works in front of a camera and they can often suggest alternative locations with a similar or better look.

The right personality

Production companies, agencies and clients have to make sure that the persons they are sending overseas for a project have the right personality to deal with the experience and, more importantly, enjoy it. Humility, interest for foreign cultures, international, and multilingual education are indeed fundamental and irreplaceable virtues.

 Textures



Lavic stones and bricks in Mexico City.

Producers have to think globally

Every project has to be evaluated from a global angle no matter how big or small the budget is and how conventional or innovative the idea and the concepts are. The World gives opportunities not only in terms of costs but especially from the creative viewpoint: a good producer has to be able to administrate very wisely the money of the client and also to apply the very best to every project.
These are some ideas about global producing:
-Define the challenges of the project: what's really important
-Have one person to deal with the production from start to end
-Find always two more reasons to go to a specific overseas location besides the evident one (costs, location, weather): the style of one city (Milan, Barcelona, Tokyo?), the unique talent of a local artist, the textures or colors of one region (Malta, Provence, the Bosphorus, Kos? ).
-Keep a network of contacts: especially DP and Art Directors to get creative inputs.
-Explore new alternatives from the creative perspective.
-Understand procedures and way of working of other countries

Information before traveling overseas

When we shoot abroad, we try to inform the agency and the client about the country where we are going: visa requirements, food, currency, electric power (it is unbelievable how many different plugs there are out there!), phone codes, and so on. We take care of finding out where the closest hospitals and health centers are and give clients and agencies a list of useful phone numbers including the American Consulates. We also put together a special report with information regarding the climate such as average temperature, humidity, precipitations and other relevant factors. Having local contacts, we can recommend the right clothes and the necessary gears to be packed into the luggage. I saw hundred of times people arriving in a tropical country without t-shirts, light raincoats or mosquitoes

repellents and showing up in Patagonia in winter without any boots, sun block, thermal cloths or heavy shoes.

Hule Lagoon

Hule Lagoon stands in the place where a volcano exploded and collapsed millions of years ago. The caldera was filled with rainwater, which is extremely abundant in this region of Costa Rica, approximately 50 miles north of San Jose, the capital of the country. I shot in this place a few times, both from the ground and from a helicopter. Using an A-Star chopper with a Wescam, we flew into the lagoon from the north, passing over a little volcanic cone, descending toward the surface of the lake and approaching a little boat with 3 actors on it. The total absence of wind made the fly fantastic: we were able to put the lens of the camera 2 feet from the surface of the water while flying at aalmost 45 mph.
 

A Thousand shades of color

Lisbon

Runaway production or the quest for the best

The business of producing TV Commercials and other forms of content is based on the quest for excellence: we are compelled to find the very best for every job, no matter where and how. Unfortunately most of the productions that go overseas leave the country for one basic reason: costs. Not many productions are shot abroad for purely creative reasons. As a consequence of that many great opportunities are lost.
It is clear to me that the concepts "Global Production" and "Runaway Productions" are not the same thing: the latter just looks for cheap opportunities; the former is focused on creativity.

I would like to set the following hypothesis for this Blog, a proposition that will help me focus on the topic: "Global Producing offers an unlimited spectrum of alternatives, creates new exciting challenges but it also requires a special attitude, a different approach, a profound understanding of the World, a great flexibility and an enormous respect for other cultures"

I will talk about that.