TRUE STORY:
It’s ten days until a cross country multi-state shoot and the client Boss Man calls. “We have not renewed the contract with the talent that we were going to use in our upcoming spots. We need to go in another direction.” What… we have all 12 scripts written and approved. (PREGNANT PAUSE) NO PROBLEM!
The mix of nausea and fear combined into a jumble of terror sweats and sleepless nights for the next nine days. A mad scramble to turn this steaming pile of you know what into the cherry on top of the Sunday.
Step 1 – IDEA
Address the core plot of the spots and get agreement from client that while the actual dialog will need to change the concept is still good and they are still on board. CHECK.
Step 2 – CREW
Address the crew that will be traveling around to shoot, at this point God only knows what. Ok team it’s not a cake walk but hey when is it ever. Think of this as your exercise in improv and way to extend your creative flexibility. No mutineers, so that’s good.
Step 3 – SCRIPT
Write, write, write and write some more. Your Zen like mantra “scripts flow like water down the valley.” Thank God the client has a good team of copywriters to help out and they are willing to pitch in during the crunch. By the time the plane lands and we reach the clients HQ we have what is as solid a plan as you can create in nine days. I think it was the sleep deprived manic excitement during the pitch meeting that was infectious. Everyone leaves the planning meeting nodding and excited about how we have weaved the core concept into a new idea. We tied into the national print campaign they just launched and the concept actually makes sense. Shots for the whole team before we start shooting.
Step 4 – SHOOT
Now since all our time in the last nine days has been focused on the creative we now faced the fact that we have a massively broken shooting schedule and production plan. Well at least we have nailed down what we will be shooting… WRONG!
Next morning after a night of spread sheet fun adjusting the production plan WHAMO! Client Boss Man “We found out late yesterday that some of our top executives are in town and we want to shoot them today. They are all leaving tomorrow and we need to catch them now to get them on the video. We also need to be courteous of the meeting they are in so we need to catch them on their breaks. Oh and we want to shoot them on green screen.” (GULP) Sounds good give us just a few minutes to work out some logistics and we will get back to you.
A blur of gaffer’s tape, bright lights, flop sweat and a miraculously packed small green screen kit smears the memory like some sort of Photoshop Gaussian effect. One of our guys had thrown the very small green screen kit in with the gear. His reasoning was based on a concept that need a green screen but later got thrown out in pre-production meetings, but he missed that part thank goodness. We were already Googling green sheets in local stores. At the first meeting break, by some small miracle, we have a green screen set up in an unused conference room. Talking heads of executives based on new creative is in the can.
The remainder of the trip went progressively better as we went along. In fact, the further from HQ we got the easier it got, Hmm…
Not that any of it was easy. We had to run and gun based on a schedule that was created the night before half the time to be scrapped by the next morning. 
At one point one of our shooters came back and he was blue. I mean Smurf blue. After the laughing stopped we found out he was taking shots at the manufacturing facility in a room with a bunch of blue powder in the air. He was blue for days. I still laugh.
Step 5 – POST
After a multi-state crazed production phase we finally made it back home with all our hard drives and camera cards in tow. Now the dreaded phrase we all hate came out of my mouth. “Well I guess we WILL fix it in post.” In the end the client was very happy and we delivered a quality product. You really can do amazing things in post, just for God sake please don’t let the client know that.