Two Cents

This is part three of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

More on driving, because that’s what you do here. (Dubai isn’t a place to stroll anywhere – it’s too hot, there are too many roadworks, fuel is too cheap.) Anyway, in Dubai, car number plates are allocated according to one’s place in the world. The lower the number, the greater the owner’s power and influence. 1766 might belong to a high ranking official, 45, a cousin of the Sheik.

Whatever you do, you don’t cut one of these low numbers off or flip ‘em the middle finger.  Grave punishments would be likely to befall you. Seriously. I saw a pimped black Mercedes G-class pass us at a leisurely 140km/h. His plate displayed the number 22. The traffic ahead was like the parting of the Red Sea.

Arvo of Day 3 – It’d never happen in Oz.

We took our QUT star out into the desert to shoot him (with a camera) on a sand dune.

At three o’clock, Maleet from Manila picked us up in his Landcruiser. 90 minutes and one stop at a reeking Pakistani tourist trap later (camel snow domes – 24 Dirham, frozen chicken gizzards – 12 Dihram), we paused at the edge of the road and waited for the 4WDs of some other tour companies to assemble.

And then, they came. Not 10, not 20, but more than 200 white Landcruisers slowly formed an endless line on the edge of the burning sand – like wildebeest gathering to drink at a waterhole.

When someone gave the sign we were off.

Up the first of a violent series of orange sand dunes, nose to tail, mere metres apart, in first gear the whole way, revving the bejeezus out of the engine. Maleet would play chicken with the other drivers, flooring the pedal and taking us to the very crest of a dune before chucking a 180, sending a wave of sand over the car, and sliding the 2-tonne vehicle back from whence it came. Impossible to see if another similarly crazed maniac was approaching from the other side of the dune, but amazingly, we witnessed no collisions.

This sort of hair-raising, public liability-warping stuff could never happen in Australia. Then abruptly, we stopped. 200 groups of gasping, giggling tourists poured out into the 47 degree heat. We caught our breath and reeled off a few feet of tape. Then one of the Indian drivers cranked up his car stereo and shook some impromptu booty to that classic 70s track from the buck-toothed boys from Woody Point: ‘Stayin’ Alive’.

Truly surreal.

This is part two of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

Shooting begins in earnest.

First stop, the Dubai HQ of the engineering firm our young QUT student already works for. They’re using a brand new and highly secret welding method to build secret components for a top secret engineering project I’m not at liberty to discuss here.

We continue on to various Dubai engineering landmarks. Our young star (a real student; no prior television experience) makes a good fist of repeating his lines to camera half a dozen times in eight different locations, in conditions that’d have an Aussie actor calling for his union rep.

Arvo of Day 2

Aston Martin DB9. Bentley Continental GT. Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Of the many exciting ways to die in Dubai, being mown down by a half million dollar supercar is just one.

Look left as you would in Brizzy and you risk becoming a new hood ornament for one of the countless exotic vehicles oil money has bought for the lucky Emiratis. For such a highly regulated and dare I say, punitive society, the average driver’s behaviour on the road is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Everywhere you look, Pirellis are being shredded and redlines are being ignored.

As for the Dubai cabbies… even though they drive Toyotas, not Lamborghinis, they still make like Dick Johnson at Mt Panorama. To a Dubai cabbie, speed signs are invisible, indicating to change lanes is for wimps, and if you can see bitumen between your cab and the car in front, it’s just not tailgating. I was sure our driver had a dicky throttle, such was the randomness of acceleration/deceleration on our drive from the airport. At least the violent motion helped loosen up my fused vertebrae from the plane flight.

This is part one of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

God gave man hair for two reasons. To stop him passing out after banging his head on the floor joist when doing a bit of illegal wiring under his old Queenslander. And, to prevent his scalp from being blow torched off by the Dubai sun while shooting a TV commercial for QUT.

The desert in May is no place for bald men. But true to the BCM never-say-die spirit, two of us have been doing just that.

What a blast. Dubai is insane. The whole place is a construction zone (despite the GFC having kicked in big time). The money they continue to spend on building engineering marvels is astounding. Everything is the world’s biggest, the world’s best, or the world’s most mind-boggling.

• A building just shy of a kilometre high? Check.
• A four-level shopping mall that would fit two Westfield Chermsides on each level? Check.
• A 400 metre ski-slope in the middle of a desert? Check.
• A 5×5km group of man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree? Why not two of ‘em?

When you’re shooting an ad which, in part, promotes the possibilities of a career in engineering, you’d be hard-pressed to choose a better backdrop than Dubai.

A 3am departure from Brisbane followed by a 19 hour flight made comprehending the place even more difficult upon arrival. I think my brain’s about to explode. Is it because it’s 45 degrees, or because the airport contains a 100 foot waterfall? Pass the tube of 30+ would you?