How much wood can a woodchuck chuck?

People don't realise exactly how much effort us Production team members actually put into setting up a shoot.

It isn't like you can go "we're filming on Tuesday" and we set it up instantaneously. There is a long, slow, horrid process and something simple can literally take us hours to achieve.

Or days in some circumstances.

Take for example a shoot that my Manager has just set up in a Middle Eastern country. She had to liaise with the MOD and basically has spent about a solid week and a half trying to set up a situation where a Director, Cameraman and 2 presenters can fly out, do some filming and then fly back.

People don't realise how hard this is - there are so many hoops to jump through - so they kept changing things slightly, changing details, changing times, changing people etc until the point where I thought Wallie might explode. The moment they said they might not go through with it after she had finally managed to set the whole thing up I thought she might go postal and kill everyone.

So finally everything was solved. Everything was set up. Everything was happening.

Then this morning 1 small thing, 1 tiny, pathetic insignificant action almost destroyed a week and a halves worth of work and thousands of pounds worth of cost.

The taxi driver taking the Director and the Cameraman to the MOD airfield ran a right light. He then got pulled over by the police and proceeded to argue with them over this infraction.

They almost missed the flight. The careful planning and organising was almost completely eradicated by the actions of a total wanker.

Poor Wallie spent about 2 hours on the phone with a panicking Director, a taxi service and trying to beg the MOD to postphone the flight they were supposed to be in.

As you can imagine Wallie was not in the best of moods today.

I just sometimes wish that people would acknowledge and appreciate the amount of work that we put into this and realise how much effort, time and energy it saps from us.

Problem is when it goes smoothly and perfectly no one notices because that is how it is meant to be.

But when something goes wrong EVERYONE notices.