This is part five of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.
3am of the morning after we flew in, and nothing was going to make me sleep.
So I dragged on the trainers and ran down Sunset Boulevard, as Bentleys propelled partygoers home and less well-heeled victims of the night’s excesses lolled in every second doorway. Spotted a place the divine Anastacia had put us onto – the Griddle Café – which we returned to a few hours later, and then every other morning we were there.
An effortlessly cool place for brekky – so cool, in fact, that I bought the t-shirt, a singularly uncool thing to do. A highlight of the Griddle menu is the superb fat pancakes the size of a Chevy hubcap. Director Gerard ordered the short stack and managed to eat less than a quarter of ONE. He looked embarrassed, and people were staring, with good reason. It was a very ordinary effort. The rest of us managed to finish everything on our plates.
Sated, we began in earnest to suss out shooting locations.
Grabbed a rental Mustang to avoid being held to ransom by malodorous, mumbling LA cabbies. Finding a path through the Hollywood Hills to a place we could get a good shot of the famous sign took all morning. Many dead ends before we stumbled upon a clear vantage point free of gawking tourists. Our business graduate, Michael, was a star in every sense of the word. Doing all the (wrong side of the road) driving, smoking the Firestones when we needed to be quickly on the other side of a six lane road to grab a shot, eternally positive and helpful and full of good local knowledge.
We wanted to keep him.
Andy was like a kid in a lolly shop. He wouldn’t stop photographing: signs, textures, California girls, billboards, buildings, girls in short skirts, outrageous cars, freaks, ghettoes, pretty girls with LA haircuts… an art director’s dream.
