Moving vehicles, a big camera, and 37 degrees.
Moving vehicles plus a big camera on a crane is something I'd wanted to do since I was a kid. On La Grossesse we finally got to — at Longcross, on one of the hottest days of the year, with a schedule that couldn't budge. A first for us at that scale and a useful lesson in how much of an ambitious day is actually logistics.
The crane work was a byproduct, not the point. The goal was helping our director Renç Uran realise a sequence he'd been carrying for three years — vehicles in motion, camera tracking with them, the whole thing needing to feel inevitable rather than staged. Everything we built that day existed to serve one run of shots.
Vehicle work rewrites a schedule. Every take means a reset — vehicles back to mark, crane repositioned, camera rechecked — and in that heat each reset ran slower than the one before it. So the order was built around temperature as much as coverage: the shots that needed the most from the crew went first, and the ones we could carry in a cooler hour went last.
What happened in the first block: what went long, what you cut, what the crew worked out by lunch that changed the rest of the day.
A childhood dream and a producer's least favourite sentence. Both are true, and only one of them is on the schedule.
The crane and the vehicle rig earning their place: which shot only existed because of them, and what that bought you on screen.
The cost side: reset times, heat, crew size, the shots that went because of it.
Getting a day like that takes three things: a first AD who protects the schedule when everyone is tired, a stunt team who won't be rushed by it, and a director who knows exactly which shot he cannot leave without. Renç knew. That's what made it possible to cut the rest honestly when the clock ran out.
You are nothing without an incredible team around you, and complicated days are the reminder.
What we took from it
Ambition on a shoot day is almost never a creative problem. It's a heat, water, reset-time and goodwill problem. Solve those and the shot you wanted turns out to be achievable; ignore them and the shot is fine on paper and gone by four o'clock.
We'd do it again tomorrow — with one more hour in the schedule for the reset we always underestimate.
Thanks to George for bringing me on and trusting me with it, and to a crew who smashed a genuinely hard day out of the park.
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