With David Tennant’s Decoy Bride on location at Auchindrain

Here is David Tennant, on location today at Auchindrain in Argyll, the setting for some scenes in his latest film, Decoy Bride.

Director Sheree Folkson’s new film, for Ecosse Films – the romantic comedy, Decoy Bride, also stars Alice Eve,  Kelly Macdonald and Michael Urie and is, we understand, to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.

The DB team has completed two weeks shooting in the Isle of Man. Now it’s in Mid Argyll, with its base tucked in beside Furnace Quarry and operating from there for two days. Yesterday, shooting was down the road at Minard Castle. Today it’s at Auchindrain, Scotland’s last preserved highland farm township (below). By tomorrow the circus will have moved on to Glasgow, filming in a location we have no intention of telling you and with the operations base already set up not far away. And we’re not disclosing that either.

The lead photograph is almost – but not quite – all you’re going to see here of the film’s frontline star – although several ecstatic children are biking around the village of Furnace yelling ‘We saw Dr Who and he gave us his autograph’.

We’ve left the stars where they live – up there – and gone underground, spending the past day and a half with the production crew, looking at the undercroft that makes location shooting work . The whole infrastructure – support services, technical facilities, kit – the maze of people, responsibilities and material that must be brought together to drive this part of film-making.

It’s all about trucks

The essentials in location shooting  distil to one thing – trucks. This covers unit transport in general – but think trucks.

Trucks aren’t just for hauling stuff, although of course they do. They’re mobile workplaces, stores, workshops, offices, eating places and homes. They are literally a complete and specialist business on the move, self-sufficient and self-contained. Everything that may be needed on the job, including repairs, has to come fast to hand and it is the facilities set-up that makes this happen.

On this job there are eight specialist trucks (some contents below) – hired from Movie Makers in London, – each with a specific function like camera/grips; lighting, rigging; actors’ sanctuary; make-up; wardrobe; dining. There is also a specialist kitchen truck contracted from J&J International and led by Clyde Lane, maestro of the crucial location food. Variety – the element of surprise – is all.

Then there is a fleet of general purpose trucks and vans hired from Arnold Clark. And the plankton in this motor food chain are the three or four 4×4 pick ups, whizzing back and forwards, endlessly carrying, doing odd jobs and able to take a load into places the heavier vehicles could never access.

Finally there are three brand new BMWs, each with its driver, used to cocoon the actors to and from shooting locations and to do runs between the base and the shoot, carrying, for example, wardrobe staff and costumes – which must be kept pristine.

On this job in Mid Argyll, with two nearby locations, the team works from a stable ‘village’ base beside Furnace quarry (above), with the core trucks staying put there and the smaller transports shuttling between this base and an operational set-up at the specific shooting locations on the day.

At Auchindrain (above) are the camera/grips truck, 2 lighting trucks, 2 props trucks, a rigging/construction truck and assorted vans, all attended by the hyperactive 4×4 pickups and the smooth BMW’s depositing and removing valuable human cargo.

The people

At the mechanical heart of this operation is Facilities and Transport Captain, Rod Patterson (below). A freelance from Bellshill in Glasgow, he has his own core team of Hefin Jones and Kevin Jones – yes, both Welsh (the Celtic fringe hangs together) and both from Bangor in North Wales.

Like very many folk at the centre of the web in making movies happen, Rod got into it by chance, as a driver. A film unit actually out on location suddenly lost the driver of its dining truck, barred by the demon drink. Rod, a personal friend, was phoned n the emergency and asked if, as a favour, he could step in and drive the truck. He was on holiday for two weeks at the time, said yes – and never left this new world.

At first he drove, then he trained with the grips truck, then he worked for Movie Makers and then he went freelance but uses Movie Makers to supply the specialist trucks at the core of all of the jobs he does.

Rod and his crew are self-taught – and emergency-experience taught – in many of the skills they bring to bear on their work – they are unqualified electricians, plumbers and mechanics. They drive, yes – but they also work with the specialist services, moving confidently and freely from working with the camera/grips team to costumes.

This is why they and their set-up is so central to the success of  shoot. There is no problem or challenge that will faze them and, one way or another, whatever it takes, they’ll sort it.

Yesterday the costume car stopped functioning. The ‘village’ was in the Argyll Fabricators yard in Furnace. Rod found a couple of old tyre hubs and steel frame sections, improvised a ramp, crawled underneath and discovered a broken spring.

This is the sort of wide-ranging inventive ability and confidence few people in any profession have. Without it, filming on location would come to a standstill nore often than not.

The nomadic life

The people and the skills in this particular world are like street artists – highly visible in one way yet below the radar of film-goers and critics, even of their colleagues on the creative side of production.

Steve Pugh (below), who leads the camera/grips operation, says that they work in this industry because they wouldn’t fit in anywhere else. They have a lot in common with each other. They are fiercely intelligent, independent, individualistic, self-reliant and they like the shape-changing world they work in.

It’s kaleidoscopic really. From job to job – never sure when the next will be, the nature of the film changes, the locations change and the people change. They live in a professional tumble dryer, often fetching up with people they’ve worked with before.

Kevin Jones, one of Rod Patterson’s stable team, loves – as they all do – the variety of this world but, with three children under 13, says that the longest he has been away from home is two months – and that this is the limit of what he can hack. Rooted in his place and with his family, he misses them sharply.

Louise Allen, the costume designer, says the ideal is to try to take a break between jobs because you’re pretty spent by the end of one – but that, at the moment, with the recession, no one has the freedom to turn down an assignment because there is no certainty that another will be available later.

Louise travels with her extensive personal stock of jewellery, rings, cufflinks etc, built up over the years, including vintage items and invaluable for solving unanticipated situations on location.

She trained at art school, in painting and feels that she brings a painter’s eye, compositional sense and palette to her work on costumes. In fact she describes a designer’s palette as a sort of fingerprint, knowing herself from watching a film which of her peers has done its costume design.

Kathryn Donaldson (above), in the costume departmner, used to be a nurse and says she brings calm to her work – with her original training, she’s not a panicker, whatever goes wrong.

Julie Falconer, the unit’s nurse – on hand to deal with the inevitable series of, usually, fairly minor injuries, is still a nurse. She’s a full tine A&E nurse – the most appropriate for film unit work – at Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital. An agency – Stars – was the entrepreneurial notion of a former nurse who recruits nurses to sign up and then assigns them to film unit jobs in their off duty and holiday time.

Donald Cameron, like Rod Patterson also arrived in this world by accident. He went for a job as a drier with a film unit didn’t get it but they liked what they’d seen of him, slotted him into another job and he’s now Locations Manager.

Out at the shoot, Geoff (above), a trainee working with the camera/grips team, is always on the move, lugging equipment around and engaged in endless teasing banter with Steve Pugh and Kevin Jones. The trainees who make it not only get hold of the job fast but are good at fitting in with the team. Occasionally anxious, Geoff nevertheless looks as if he’s enjoying it all.

The loneliest station of them all must be Clare Glass’s (above). 2nd Assistant Director, she’s always at the base, in the office by the phone, monitoring activities in the ‘village’. She dreams of winning the lottery and going travelling.

The BMW drivers are the weave, they connect with everyone, somehow. Driver Jas Brown (above) is Glasgow-born with all the open-eyed witty realism of the natural Glaswegian. He stayed in Rothesay for a while, loves to be back in home places like this, has ambitions to put down roots again sometime and fancied the look of Jim Boyd’s Fyne Signs home and business.

Jas – do not mention jazz music (he hates it) – respects actors and finds them fascinating people from whom he learns a lot. He says the good ones are always impeccable in their behaviour. His theory is that the prima donnas are the less confident ones, striving to throw up a smokescreen. We have been told that Russell Crowe had no fewer than 5 trucks on the set of Robin Hood, some for guests and one a 55′ gym truck. None of the crew feel that this is excessive. It’s seen as what is takes to let the best actors perform to the limit of their ability.

Jas’s fellow driver, Charlie Zimmerman (above), is the oldest of them and quickly says: ‘and my name doesn’t mean I need a Zimmer frame’. At one, not far off, point in his career, he took time out and did a degree at Queen’s University in Belfast. The camaraderie between the drivers is warm and lively. They share a very particular job with very particular insights and there’s a readymade mutual understanding to found good relationships.

Kit with an unusual history

The crew love what they do and they love to pass on the information they themselves most enjoy having. Kevin Jones takes pains to introduce us to the camera dolly, the piece of kit that bears the camera on a track, keeping it steady and fluent as it follows the action in a scene.

On this job, in physical circumstances like the evocative Auchindrain township, they are using the smallest dolly, Panavision’s Chapman PeeWee MkII, a compact 21-stone example of engineering beauty that deserves it’s own role in a film.It would see K9 off the park. Steve Pugh simply says it’s a great example of what happens when form follows function. And how right he is.

So what’s the story of the dolly? Kevin explains that it was born as a specially designed bomb loader for aircraft in World War II. With 1,000 ton bombs in its cradle, it could be pushed under the fuselage, manoeuvred in any direction by changing the wheel front and rear wheel controls and then, with its  ‘elbow’ lift engaged, raise the bomb into the bay. All, crucially, done wiht the bomb kept straight and level.

After the war, someone had the inspired idea of simply replacing the bomb cradle with a camera head and using the machine on a track to take the operation of film cameras to a new level of stable but mobile sophistication. It’s still the same machine. They don’t carry bombs any longer but they cost a bomb – £60-70k – so they’re hired.

At Auchindrain

The car park at Auchindrain is, of course, at the entrance to the historic township. The buildings used for the filming – mainly the Munro house – are at the opposite end of the site.

The trucks and the vans are in the car park – with traffic masters directing the flow – and this is where the BMW’s deliver and ecover the actors but Auchindrainls management have given the company access via a second gate where the 4×4 pickups (below) can cross a field of highland cattle and get more quickly to the Munro house.

The narrow paths through the township are firm enough but they’re narrow and the pickups negotiate them porkily (below). No one wants either a disabled vehicle or an obstruction on the route.

The day is punctuated with an endless procession of the 40 odd team, gathering at the scene locations (below – David Tennant back to camera),  walking to and from between the trucks and the sets. Without giving anything away, one set has a lavatory and odd snatches of conversation were heard to enquire ‘are they shooting the toilet scene?’

At the centre of Auchindrain is a visual oddity surrounded by the dispersed stone long houses, thatched cottages and ruins. Bang in the middle of all htis, and on riased ground, is an obviouly modern timer frame bungalow.

This is the ‘Colt House’. It is a listed building in its own right, built by WH Colt in 1954. It is example of the early timber frame ‘cottages’ built by this quality firm for the major estate owners who, by then, were having to rehouse traditional tenant families in homes with running water and flush lavatories. This one was for the Argyll Estates and specifically for the McCallum family, the last of the traditional tenants to farm at Auchindrain.

The Colt House (above) was the natural half-way station for the Auchindrain shoot. It was turned over to be the actors’ Green Room, the traditional sanctuary on set or in performance, and a place for costume changes.

In wardrobe, there is always one person at the base truck, sorting everything out; one at the shoot doing costume changes; and one on set monitoring continuity.

The wardrobe department supplies wellies, umbrellas (pit stop above en route to the sets for those caught out by a shower), large padded coats to go over costumes  and keep off-duty actors warm – even hot water bottles. Wellies are exchanged for costume shoes once the actors are on set. This keep them clean and Auchindran – like anywhere in the clay soil of Argyll, can do mud. Back at the wardrobe truck, onboard water tanks, boilers – and a bank of two washing machines with two tumble dryers stacked on top, are the survival kit of the endlessly pristine costumes.

Everywhere you look around the shooting area of Auchindrain are temporary shelters to keep essential kit dry; people and pickups waiting for instructions; refreshment stations; and crew rigging, carpentering and seeing that silence during shooting is maintained.

Some very special skills are necessary – as with a members of the production team is ageing a book for the set.

At one point in the late afternoon, Strathclyde police arrived on site by appointment, to close a section of the nearby A83 – Auchindrain is only a few miles south of Inveraray and beside the main road – so that exterior shots would not have their period character undermined by passing cars in the background.

The ‘village’ and its leaving

The way location works, a core of trucks stay in the ‘village’ – built to fit the physical nature of each base but with certain guiding principles to the fore.

The make up and wardrobe trucks must be beside the actors’ truck/s (array at Furnace base above) so that they can go straight from their own temporary base into make up and then into wardrobe, without much exposure to the elements. The kitchen truck and the dining truck must, of course, be together (as at Furnace base, below). And the base office, controlling movements within the ‘village’, must be obvious and accessible to film personnel and site visitors alike.

As well as this basecamp, a second setup of trucks travel to and base themselves at or near each specific location where shooting is done. We’ve described above the setup at Auchindrain (glimpsed below from inside visitor reception), which gives the sense of what is involved. For security, drivers sleep with their trucks each night, whether at base camp or at the shoot location. On this job the rigger drives the construction truck – another example of cost effectiveness.

When shooting at a location wraps, everyone disperses, actors first. (‘Wrap’ – the industry word for ‘job over’, was born in the pre-digital age of film and was an acronym for the sequence of jobs to be done when the Director calls time: ‘Wind Reel And Print’.)

The team go round the area removing the small signs directing transports to the base (above), leaving a tidy ship. The experts in charge of each specialist truck get everything back in place. The core team virtually spring clean the trucks ready for the next location shoot – and they’re off.

Tomorrow they’re in Glasgow. The big three , Rod Patterson with Hefin Jones and Kevin Jones (above) are the last to leave – Rod is the very last , waving goodbye (below) – driving the huge trucks and trailers across the narrow bridge and up through the village.

As they pass The Furnace Inn the trucks give a last gentle toot in farewell. Furnace children on bikes pursue them to the last minute, probably convinced that David Tennant is in there (below).

And they’ve gone.

It’s after 8.00pm. They have to get to Glasgow – a two-hour drive in these machines – and then get the ‘village’ built and operational, ready for the usual 6.00am crew start in the morning. The rest of the team will roll in to work in another place and just expect the operation to have been beamed down ready and waiting.

It’s a joke in Rod’s team that directors, cameramen and actors live in the fond belief that their world is peopled with convenient ‘villages’ like this and wonder aloud how alike they are. Rod, Hefin and Kevin know differently. There’s one village and they move it.

The photographs above are self explanatory and are linked to the text. The lead photograph – of David Tennant at Auchindrain is by copyright holder Rebecca Martin. The rest have been copyrighted to For Argyll by Lynda Henderson.

And here, below,  is a sign off distant shot of  Tennant at Auchindrain – for those fans who have kept searching to see if there are any more. He’s on the far right and our extreme discretion means that you can just about see that it is indeed him.