Shooting the new Bentley GTC CONTINENTAL, Feb March 2011

• Early this year Santa Monica Productions was contacted by a client requiring highly sophisticated and wealthy looking locations for a stills and digital  film shoot to promote a new top of the range luxury sports car.
• The vehicle was top  secret so the location scouting would be difficult as although we needed up-market backgrounds and driving scenes, we could not take the risk of the hero-cars being photographed by the general public.
• This is an extremely common situation when shooting secret cars, naturally the agency and photographer/director desire the best possible enviroments for the shoot.
• However a compromise has to be reached between the difficult task of the security officers responsable for keeping the vehicle secret and the ad´agencies obligation to show the car in the best location  suitable to its  luxurious image.

• This is what we at Santa Monica do best and in record time an enormous selection of locations shots were on the clients desktop.  The selection process began and as we knew quite a few of the favourites would be vetoed due to security issues we kept “B” and “C” options at hand.
• A couple of weeks later the photographer, director and security flew out for an intense week-long tech recce of the first selection of locations.Almost every province in southern Spain was covered and also some regions in the North.

• The recce  crew flew home and an initial shooting schedule was drafted then re drafted until we had something that would work.In order to get the enormous variety of  shots and locations  required it would mean a grueling 2 week shoot , starting at pre-dawn shooting until night and  travelling overnight to the next  location.
• This can be a worrying situation which often occurs on long intense shoots as the crew rapidly becomes very tired and the production manager has to decide if his runner drivers  are able to drive long distances at night after 17 hrs non-stop. The wrong decision can be catastrophic.
• Due to budget limitations we were down to one runner driver and a production manager to look after a crew of up 25 on occasions. However experience and common sense prevailed and there were no incidents.

• The main crew and clients flew in and the job commenced and ran smoothly throughout without major problems.
• Production is not an exact science and no matter how well organized you are, there will always be unexpected situations.
• The secret is to be aware of  this and thus “be prepared” then you can get on with minimum fuss,do the best job possible for your clients and ensure  everyone gets home safe .

Chalk up another successful car shoot to the Santa Monica team!