Seagulls

I just got done working on a Honda commercial. The commercial was Japanese, for a car that’s only available in Japan. Most of the crew was Japanese as well, including the director and producers, and a translator accompanied them for when they had to talk to the crewmembers who didn’t speak Japanese.

Since this was a car commercial, most of the shots were of the car driving through various neighborhoods. The only real “set” was an RV that followed the Honda, outfitted to look like a hip trendy mobile radio station, which I guess was supposed to be the spirit that this new Honda embodied.

Anyway, on the first day the shot was of the RV and the new Honda in a parking lot. We needed to paint over the white parking lines with gray paint, and then lay down our own parking lines with white tape, because the spaces had to sit at a slightly different angle than the real parking lines. That took about two hours, and after that, our work was done. We’d prepared the RV the night before. Most of us stood around either tidying up our truck, or grabbing some food from the Craft Services table. But at some point the Producers had told my boss, the Production Designer, that there might be too many people in the art department. He was seeing a lot of standing around. So for the afternoon, we got busy, cleaning the RV that we had cleaned the day before.

My boss handed me a spray and told me to use it on the wheels. When I was on number three out of six, he walked by me and said “Not the tires! The wheels!” He came by and told me to start over on the wheels, and then handed me a different product to use on the tires. After about five hours of cleaning the van, production wrapped for the day.

The next day we had one less person in the Art Department. And today the set wasn’t a parking lot, it was a driveway and a back yard. We were responsible for even less today, this time just a surfboard and two bikes sitting in the back yard. We looked for things to do. I drove forty minutes to return a single chair that we had rented. I came back to set and there was still nothing needed. We put another coat of wax on the van.

Then we packed up and moved to the next location, which was a beach in Marina del Rey. The shot was the Honda at the beach, the driver getting out and looking at the ocean, and a seagull flying by overhead. With only the Honda in the shot, we weren’t responsible for anything.

Until the translator came over to my boss, and said “What methods do you have for attracting seagulls?”

Apparently when the crew scouted the location, there had been hundreds of seagulls on the beach, but now there were none. “I’ll get right on it,” said my boss.

Two of our people got on the bikes that we had used in the last shot, and rode up and down the boardwalk with bags of potato chips. The plan was to find some seagulls and use the potato chips to lure them towards the car. The rest of us stood on the beach with bread and potato chips and other snacks we’d taken from the Craft Service table. Whenever a seagull would fly by overhead, we would all throw food into the air, and in the direction of the car, trying to catch his attention. There were four of us at first, but then the Production Assistants, who also had nothing to do, caught on, and soon there were about ten people at various points on the beach, throwing confetti-like showers of crumbled bread into the air whenever a gull flew past.

The people not throwing food became runners, going back and forth between the Craft Service table and the people on the beach, resupplying the throwers whenever they ran out. At some point the Art Director figured out that cheese was the best because of its shape – it could be tossed into the air like a frisbee, thus reaching a higher altitude, closer to the seagulls.

I noticed one of the Producers talking to the translator, who ran over to us. “There are too many people,” he said. “You will scare away the seagulls.” So the rest of us backed off the beach, and only the Art Director was left, throwing pieces of cheese into the air by himself. I jogged over to Craft Services for more cheese.

“You mind if I borrow some more of this?” I asked, picking up a stack.
“Sure,” said the Craft Services person. “But it will never work. Seagulls don’t eat cheese.”

When I came back, a seagull was hovering in the air about fifty feet above the beach. He started making slow circles towards the ground. Everyone struggled to contain their excitement. The Art Director threw cheese with increased fervor, to make sure that the seagull saw and understood. The Director said something to the camera person, the Producer said something to the actor, everybody scrambled to get the camera ready to shoot, and the seagull got startled and flew away.

I went to the Art Director with more cheese. The translator jogged out and met us. “You can stop now,” he said. “They are giving up on that shot.”

I took the cheese back to Craft Services, and joined the rest of the Art Department in tidying up our truck. But a few minutes later I heard a caw, and looked over to see that not one but two seagulls had landed on the beach near the car, and were eating some of the food that had fallen to the ground. And while I was looking, a third landed, and then a fourth. I looked down the beach. Hundreds of seagulls were flying in, directly towards the set. More and more landed, eating all of the food we’d thrown at them earlier.

“Well, now they can definitely get that shot,” I said to the Art Director.
“They’re not going to, though,” he said. “They’ve moved on already.”

So as the sun was setting on the beach and the Producers and Director and Camera Crew were hurrying to finish before it got dark, we all stood around, eating food and drinking coffee from Craft Services, and more seagulls landed on the beach, and at one point the crew had to turn the camera slightly, to keep all the seagulls out of the shot. Like the rest of us, the seagulls were no longer needed.