This is the stuff of logistical nightmares: you’re a director with no substantial experience shooting on a big location, and you’ve just been asked to direct a spot that involves closing down 10 blocks of a prime New York City street. That daunting challenge-an NCR spot entitled "Customer"-was handed to director Ringan Ledwidge of bicoastal/international The End by London-based agency Circus. The agency’s concept, part of a new branding drive for the information hardware and services company, was to show that the advertiser’s technology can make a person, who otherwise feels lost in the crowd, feel like an individual. In Circus’ original outline for the spot, a businessman receives hyper-individualized attention amidst the deserted canyons of normally overcrowded New York locations such as Grand Central Station, 57th Street, and Wall Street.
Once Ledwidge knew the challenge, he wanted to shoot the spot in New York on locations, as specified, without using special effects or postproduction to achieve the deserted streets. "Just from my point of view, I like to try and have everything in-camera and have it there for real," he says. "If you’ve got an opportunity to do it and you can do it for real, then why not? It’s far more exciting for me seeing it for real rather than sitting in a Flame [session] for weeks or hours and comping it together."
Preparation
Ledwidge avoided the potential nightmares by having an effective team produce the shoot. The End’s Dominic Wilcox was the spot’s producer, and he requested location shots from companies in New York once Ledwidge was committed to the location shoot. After confirming the job with Circus, Wilcox had about four weeks to set the preparations for the spot. Through a recommendation from another staffer at The End, Wilcox contacted Jim Parker, president of New York-based Christopher Films, a production services company that handles all facets of production from coordinating live action shoots to overseeing postproduction. In ’98, Parker scouted a shoot for a BMW commercial via D’Adda, Lorenzini & Vigorelli, Milan, Italy, that involved intermittently blocking a stretch of FDR Drive, a busy highway on New York’s east side.
After Wilcox and Ledwidge agreed on the desired locations, Tom Betterton, a freelance location manager, wrote a proposal for the city in preparation for obtaining the permit. In his proposal, Betterton detailed the impact of closing down the locations on pedestrians and car traffic and made a series of location maps. The maps showed the streets affected and included other important elements such as bus lines and stores that would be impacted. "From our perspective, the important thing was showing them ahead of time that we knew what we needed to do," he says. "We could say, ‘This is exactly what is going to happen.’ The city is looking for you to have that preparation and control over the shoot."
The Mayor’s Office
In New York City, permits from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, are free, and, in addition, any police needed for the production come free of charge. Patricia Reed Scott is commissioner of the office (see related story on page 60), and her office grants about 50,000 permits per year and last year logged 22,851 shooting days in the city (these figures include commercials, features, and television shooting).
Once an exterior location has been requested, the Mayor’s Office has two key gatekeepers who examine the shoot’s impact on the city: Assistant Commissioner John Valles, of the NYPD Traffic Enforcement Division (TED), and Supervisor Anna Maria Rhynie, another member of TED. "They are the people whose judgment we have counted on for years to help us figure out what is doable and how far we can push the envelope," Reed observes. "They’re the perfect civil servants because they know their job inside and out, but they’re disposed to help us find a way to say ‘yes,’ which is what we’re supposed to be doing. If they tell us that they don’t think it’s workable, we always listen." Depending on the scope of the request, the Mayor’s Office will contact other city agencies to grant approval.
One criterion for allowing shoots to occur is that the spots don’t present a major disruption to the location’s normal patterns. In order to comply, shoots are usually scheduled for times when pedestrian and car traffic are at a low point. Streets will not be closed down at the height of rush hour, for instance.
Before the NCR shoot could receive a permit, Betterton went on a technical scout of the locations with both Supervisor Rhynie and Lieutenant James Cook, who is the head of the NYPD’s Movie and Television Unit, a division of the NYPD’s Traffic Control Division. Whereas TED is concerned solely with the traffic logistics of on-location shoots, the TCD’s Movie and Television Unit’s task is to ensure the safety of people on and around the shoot. "They always have a sort of a professional skepticism about something like that," Betterton says about Rhynie and Cook’s perspective when scouting the proposed NCR locations. "They never want to [immediately] say, ‘Yeah, sure go ahead.’ I think you get a sense when you’re presenting something that’s doable and something that’s not."
Something that wasn’t doable was a shot down both lanes of the 57th Street artery between Second and Fifth Avenue, which had previously been done for a scene in the film Devil’s Advocate. But the implications of closing down a two-way street were a bit too elaborate even for a film office inclined to saying "yes." In addition, New York’s Consolidated Edison electrical company was beginning some construction on the street that would mar the shoot. The production team selected an alternative location of Fifth Avenue-a one way boulevard-between 48th and 58th Street.
On The Scene
Wilcox and Ledwidge visited each location at least twice in advance of shooting to make sure that they knew what they were getting themselves into. Ledwidge and Wilcox say that the shoot went smoothly, and they were extremely pleased with their interaction with the police as well as the Mayor’s Office. Ledwidge says the toughest part of the job was getting the shots done on schedule at each location.
"We had a certain amount of time when the sun would be right, when everything would kind of be perfect," he explains. "On a lot of shots, we had quite big camera moves. I was so concerned with concentrating on getting those right and really focusing on the lead guy to make sure that his performance was what I wanted that everything else became [secondary]."
The roughest going, according to Ledwidge, was the first exterior shot, which took place between 40th and 42nd Streets underneath a Park Avenue viaduct that leads to Grand Central Station. Ledwidge and the crew were working out the logistical kinks of coordinating the shots so there were no cars or pedestrians straying into the frame. In the scene, the man walks under the viaduct next to a totally empty city street that stretches off into the distance.
For the Fifth Avenue shot, Ledwidge was allotted 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The light would only be just right for a short span between 8 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. Traffic control officers from TED were stationed at each of the intersections that crossed Fifth Avenue. Because each shot typically took only a minute or two, traffic was intermittently held only for as long as it took for each shot to roll. When Ledwidge was ready to go, the assistant director informed the TCD, who checked conditions and then signaled the TED officers who held the traffic.
While it was not a walk in the park, shooting in Grand Central wasn’t quite as difficult as it might seem. The Metropolitan Transit Authority controls the building, and permission to shoot there is granted by Kyle McCarthy, Grand Central’s film liaison. Because Grand Central is closed to the public from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., Ledwidge and company scheduled to shoot during that time. The crew was able to do a pre-light which included a massive Musco lighting system, just prior to 1 a.m. From then on, it was another race against the clock as the station’s floor is cleaned every morning promptly at 4:15, at which time the crew had to be out of the location.
Shutting down major locations in New York is not something that happens every day. It was only after the Fifth Avenue shot was over and the pressure was off that Ledwidge realized the enormity of what he had just accomplished. "I turned around [and] there was just a mass of cars being held behind us," he recalls. "That’s when I realized the extent of what we’d actually done."
The Spot
The spot opens in silence to an overhead shot of a completely deserted Fifth Avenue. We are then introduced to our protagonist as he walks a crosswalk with an eerily empty Fifth Avenue stretching off behind him. As he begins his journey, a mellow and creamy jazz piece begins that blends a tinkling piano line against a high hat measuring a subdued beat and periodically punctuated by plucked strings. The solitary wanderer purchases tickets at a travel office set in an ornate and empty hall, and then walks outside, past a deserted bank building. He stops at Barney’s, where he buys a shirt and tie, and is once again, the only customer. He descends the escalator into Grand Central Station and walks through the cavernous main room of Grand Central, which is completely empty. Next, he is the only spectator in a stadium, cheering on a team. He walks past the Park Avenue viaduct with the quiet and empty street stretching off into the distance.
"NCR technology processes and analyzes over 100 billion transactions a year," explains a narrator, "enabling businesses to treat each customer as if they were their only customer."
The spot ends with a return to the initial long shot of Fifth Avenue, which is suddenly transformed into the busy boulevard that it is, bustling with traffic, people and the sounds of the city.u
