Tim Katz

in Iceland, Lisbon, Hong Kong and Langkawi
The producer of London-based production company Knucklehead oversaw a four-country shoot for P&O Cruises through MCBD Hotshot no less. He kept a diary for shots.

DAY 1: I pack for more than three weeks away. Freezing glaciers, roasting beaches and tropical jungle mean a big bag. I stuff in endless chargers and cables, but can't locate my iPod, which is a nice touch. Manage to find a shuffle. Lie to small son about how many sleeps it'll be until I get home.

DAY 2:Cab to Gatwick at 0450, which is a lovely way to start the trip. Customs can't find the man to do the carnet. Wait for him for 30 minutes, then sprint to the gate. Coming in to land at Reykjavik, I realise that I've never been on a plane that has got so low to the ground before the cloud gives way and we can see the landing strip.

The weather in Iceland is an interesting mixture of thick fog and rain, which makes everyone very relaxed as we're shooting in two days' time. We go straight from airport to recce the locations, the first of which is a dainty two-and-a-half hours away. Stop for lunch en route, for a service station hot dog. Who said glamour's dead? Arrive at first location (big waterfall) to find that rain has made it unworkable. Hmm. DOP Robbie Ryan knows a great black beach nearby, so we go and recce that. Good call. It's unbelievably beautiful, with black volcanic sand and rocks, and white crashing surf. We all love it. The sun comes out. Life is wonderful. Everything's going to be fine.

Drive back to Reykjavik. Find another waterfall, check into the hotel, dump our bags and go straight to casting. The boys are okay but the girls are crap. We'll have to try again tomorrow. Back at the hotel we meet the agency [MCBD with producer Russell Taylor] in the bar at 8pm. Show them pictures of everything on our little digital cameras, then take them out to dinner, which lasts forever. Too much red wine.

DAY 3: Try to do emails while eating breakfast. Get director Joe Roman out of the door to the casting, and wrangle agency and client into cars. Go to casting to discover that the wardrobe girl hasn't seen the storyboard or treatment or anything. Calm things down, realise we have some good new cast, get them approved, have a brief moment of happiness.

Get into biggest vehicle I've ever seen and go to recce a glacier for crevasses. Get very cold. Listen to the glacier man tell us that we must only walk on the ice and not the snow, to avoid falling into unseen chasms. Concentrate hard on where I'm walking. Great location gets found. Totally forget what glacier man said. Walk off ice into snow and immediately fall waist deep into a crevasse which goes down, down, down below me. Can't decide if it's my pride or my knee that hurts more. Feel quite glad that I'm fat enough not to have slipped through and fallen all the way down to the bottom. Get back to hotel for wardrobe call. Take agency to supper. Too much red wine.

DAY 4: Leave at 7am for first shoot day. It's a two-hour drive to the first location, a beautiful black sand beach. Spend the morning not seeing anything, as the CCTV wireless link doesn't work. The agency is worried about the weather, what we're shooting, how we're shooting it, when we're going to stop shooting it and when we're going to shoot the next bit. I feel exhausted by lunchtime, but make sure the love is still flowing between everyone.

Frantic unit move to second location. The agency relaxes. We shoot lovely stuff in front of a beautiful waterfall. There's constant rain but the waterfall soaks everyone anyway, so we're okay. Back at the hotel I do two hours of emails to the next three countries we're going to. Try to send my son pictures of what Iceland looks like but realise the file size is too big to go through. Suppress urge to smash laptop. Redo pictures smaller. Try and watch a DVD. No chance.

DAY 5: Second shoot day, with a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the glacier location. There's a big storm on the mountain and no chance of shooting. I endlessly call the Met Office and ask them what the weather is going to do, as though hearing from them that we're fucked will make things better. We stand around in a glacier hut comparing wet weather gear. Convince client to cough up ten grand to pay for a second unit to go back for pick-ups when the weather's better.

Make the decision to cut our losses and do a very quick three-hour unit move to shoot in the aquamarine thermal pools on the edge of Reykjavik. Lots and lots and lots of rain. Shoot wet girl in wet rain in wet pool, which actually looks rather nice. Wrap.

Eat rotten shark with schnapps and drink body weight in sambuca and red wine. Try and pack at 2.30am, which is a mistake.

DAY 6:Two hours of sleep. Hangover. Leave hotel for airport at 4.30am, fly to London, sit in Terminal 1 all afternoon and then fly to Lisbon. Meet the two wonderful Nicks (Nick Page and Nick Roycroft from Page International) at the airport. Feel happy to be working with them again. Check into the Hotel Lantis. Bad brown hotel. Too hot and too old. Crap beds.

Long casting call-back, wardrobe call and art department meeting, before we finally finish at 10pm. Dinner at favourite Lisbon restaurant. Never remember the name but know how to get there and how to order plates and plates of prawns, clams and mussels. The agency loves it.

DAY 7: All-day recce. It always gets a bit stir crazy in the minibus - constantly getting in and out, endless shoot stories, banter, piss-taking, location stress. Offer silent prayer that we remembered to buy an iTrip so we can play music while we're driving. Beaches, hill towns, orchards, horse farms. Shoot pick-ups while we go, with a Bolex, a Minima and a Super-8mm camera. It becomes a bit of a film-stock frenzy. Stuff looks great though.

I always love shooting in Portugal: good locations, good weather, nice crew and top food. Phone call from home says England have knocked Australia out of the Rugby World Cup. I could not be happier. No one else likes rugby or cares. Philistines.

Back to Lisbon, where we move hotel by popular demand. I don't even check in, just ditch everyone and find a bar showing the France-All Blacks rugby quarter final. Bliss. After an entire week with other people 24/7, I get 90 minutes on my own to watch the game and decompress. End up hoarse from cheering on the French, who amaze the universe by winning the game. Tempted to stay in the bar all night but don't. Go and join agency and crew where they're having dinner. The agency are revving up for a night out. I lead them to a bar in Barrio Alto then run for my life. Find out later that they kept going till 9am. Ouch.

DAY 8: Production meetings all morning then everyone has the afternoon off, as we've been going non-stop for a week now. Joe wants to shoot an additional scene in the evening, so we scramble together an open-top car and two models, and cram Robbie into the back seat with his Minima. Great stuff of Lisbon at night. Realise that what three of us are shooting low-fi, ultra-guerrilla style could easily be done with a unit of 40 people, tracking vehicles, police riders, unit base, catering, Winnebagos and lots and lots of stress. I love working this way. It doesn't suit every job but when it does, it rocks.

DAY 9: Steal an extra afternoon of shooting on the travel day. Give the creatives, Danny Hunt and Gavin Torrance, a Super-8mm camera to shoot extra footage, which works a treat.

I realise just how many people suffer from low blood sugar mood swings; just before lunch and mid-afternoons always seem to be war zones. Navigate through tricky waters with the agency, who want to shoot a fast, fast, fast lomo-style commercial and grab lots of extra scenes, but who also seem to want a proper video village set-up. It's the classic adage: you can have good, quick and cheap, but only ever two of those at a time.

We steal a shot in the main square in Lisbon after dark. Just Robbie Ryan and the gaffer with a sun gun, with all of the rest of us hiding in a café round the corner. It works a treat. Mark Wilson, supreme 1st AD to the stars, arrives from a job in Prague. Now we're the complete unit.

DAY 10: Shoot all day on a beautiful beach an hour from Lisbon. Perfect weather, great light and a medium-sized battle with one of the creatives just after lunch about one of the five scenes we've just shot. Calm everything down. Attempt to break the world record for the amount of stock shot in a day. Offer a silent prayer of thanks that it's only 16mm.

Get back to Lisbon and have a round-table love-in with the agency. Much mutual congratulation and affirmations of love and respect. After several beers and a steak I pass out. Have a weird dream about my bag getting thrown into sea with all my stuff in it. I'm constantly trying to get it back but can't seem to reach it.

DAY 11: An old, mirrored dance studio is the location for an early morning shoot, then we move to a horse estancia. It's blazing hot. We grab an extra scene for the creatives with one of the farm hands. It looks great, though I am slightly distracted by being put in a stable full of horseshit with the agency to watch the monitor. The location manager denies complicity in this.

Robbie doesn't need to light anything, so we shoot, shoot, shoot, which results in another stock massacre of epic proportions. I realise at one stage that we have an SR3, an Aarton, a Bolex and three Super-8mm cameras all rolling, and almost have an aneurism. I resist the urge to physically grab all the cameras and lock them away, and try to take the long-term view that good footage makes good commercials which win awards which lead to good scripts and more work. Try very, very hard to repeat this mantra to myself. Almost believe it.

We end the day filming horses galloping through an orchard in the dark, hanging on to the back of a pickup truck while quad bikes with big lights on chase the horses towards us. Assuming no one dies in the process, this will be a great shot. Who says health and safety standards are different overseas?

DAY 12: Have to arrange a change of plan at the airport, as 1st AD Mark Wilson's pregnant wife is not well and he needs to get home to Lyon to see her before coming to Hong Kong. Our London-based PM at Knucklehead performs a miracle in re-routing Mark's flight schedule to get him back to France then out to Hong Kong one day after us, via four flights and three sleeping pills. The rest of us are delayed on the tarmac at Lisbon for three hours, which is always a lovely touch. Finally get to Heathrow, which increasingly resembles some kind of training video for a post-apocalyptic disaster. Transfer to the Hong Kong flight. Four drinks, one supper, 1.5 movies, one sleeping pill.

DAY 13: How much fun is Hong Kong? I always love it. Meet Carson Ng, the Hong Kong fixer, and go straight out on recce. We're shooting within three hours of landing, which has got to be some kind of record. All of us are captivated by the city lights and take endless bad digital photos of the skyline until we realise we can't recce any more because we haven't eaten forever and need to stop. Carson takes us for a backstreet dinner of amazing chilli crabs and cold beer, then dumps us all at the Happy Feet foot massage place in Wan Chai. It's a very surreal moment. Director, producer, DP, art director, copywriter and agency producer all sat in a row squirming and shrieking while the masseurs pummel our feet and screw their knuckles into the pressure points. I have had more authoritative moments.

End up in savagely awful ex-pat bar to watch England vs. France in the RWC semi-final. England win in the last ten minutes. Ha ha ha ha ha.

DAY 14: Recce, recce, recce. Cast, cast, cast. We've switched client and account director for this leg of the shoot, and have to work hard at integrating them into a team that's already been away for two weeks. Weirdly, we find all the locations quickly, they're all great and everybody seems to want the same thing: more foot massage. Bizarre. This is the first shoot I've ever been on where people prefer foot massage to drinking.

DAY 15: We shoot Hong Kong harbour at night from the water. Lots of zipping about in boats trying to coordinate passing ferries with the 8pm harbour laser show and the animating lights on the Bank of China building. Apparently, if you shout at boat drivers who can't speak English it makes them understand you better. There's a great moment when one of the creatives drops the playback tape into the harbour and we manage to convince him that he's just dropped the rushes into the sea. Slightly worried that on a month-long round-the-world shoot, people still don't know the difference between mini-DV and film, but hey.

Finish shooting and go for a late-night hotpot with the Chinese crew. Have a great time until Carson tells me the snail sashimi I've been eating is supposed to be cooked in the hotpot and I'll probably be ill. Nice moment.

DAY 16: Big shoot day. Three major locations and unit moves. We film a very game girl walking into Hong Kong harbour up to her knees, amidst the detritus on the shore, and get fantastic footage of a car driving through downtown neon lights. Wrap at 2am.

DAY 17: We finally lock down our cast for Langkawi, which has been a Herculean task. All we need are four Caucasian scuba-diving models who aren't too young, don't have dark hair and are willing to spend five days in Langkawi for £1200 each with a total buyout for ever on all media in perpetuity. Lots of helpful suggestions from people about how easy it should be to find these people. Joe remembers that an old friend had a French boyfriend who was a dive instructor in Thailand seven years ago who might look right. Track him down to Phuket, and get him to take a picture of himself and email it. He looks good, so I get him approved and book him. Feel faintly pleased with self.

Leave for shoot at 4pm. It's our third night shoot in a row and jetlag is really starting to make itself felt. Robbie Ryan wearing a gold motorbike helmet two sizes too small and sat in the sidecar of a Vespa scooter is an image that will probably never leave me.

DAY 18: Two hours sleep then out to the airport. We just make the flight to Kuala Lumpur, change planes and fly to Langkawi. Down the steps of the plane into proper tropical wet heat.

Check in, thinking we're going to recce, but realise that everyone is totally fucked now and we need to have an afternoon off. We've been on the go for 17 days with no rest days, and have so far shot something on all but three of them. The entire group - production, local production and agency - are like zombies, and we spend the afternoon getting away from each other and trying to recover.

DAY 19: Big recce day. We start off by visiting a river that needs to look like the Amazon. There's lots of discussion about what that means. Of the nine people involved in the conversation, not one has actually been to the Amazon; it runs through several countries and probably looks like quite a lot of things. There's much talk about it needing to feel like Heart of Darkness. Which isn't set in the Amazon. I decide to keep that observation to myself. We agree that the Langkawi river will work; it looks sufficiently like the way we imagine the Amazon to be.

We drive to a yacht club and load into boats for an hour's journey out to the dive islands where we can do our underwater shoot. When we arrive we do a recce with snorkels and flippers. It's undoubtedly a great moment. Spend the afternoon in the water choosing areas. Get back on the boat and realise that we all have the same annoying patch of sunburn in the middle of our backs where we couldn't quite reach, yet didn't want to ask for help in an unmanly fashion. I'm slightly jealous of Joe for having swum in a T-shirt.

Back to Langkawi and off to recce beaches, hotel spas and possible "temple" locations. Realise that we really do have a lot to shoot in three days, and will need perfect weather and a loving agency to get everything in the can by the end of Monday.

DAY 20: Final prep day. We've got much too small a crew for what we need, but morale is really high and all the different units, from the UK, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi, are getting on well, respecting each other and seem bang up for it. Grab a shot of Robbie Ryan hand-holding the camera from a parasail off the back of a speedboat. The client insists on having a go, flies into a tree and drops like a stone from about 30 feet straight onto the beach. I watch this while on the phone. Have a strangely disjointed moment wondering if he has broken his back or just his legs. Amazingly, he is okay.

DAY 21:Big underwater shoot planned, but it's cloudy all day and we hardly shoot anything. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

DAY 22: Better. Much better. The sun comes out and we shoot. A lot. I mean really a lot. I am in a Zen place with this and try not to let it bother me. It is only film stock. It cannot hurt me as a person.

DAY 24: Shoots so often end like this. We have two days of work to do in one, as the client declines to buy a weather day for the one we lost. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Hurtle through the morning, hurtle through the afternoon. Rain storms, boats, cloud bursts, sea storms: the full shebang. Eventually, at 10pm, when everyone is hanging in rags, the immortal words "Thank you everybody, that's a wrap" ring out and everything stops.

We've come through what feels like a massive undertaking: more than three weeks on the road, four countries, some pain and lots of laughs. I resist the urge to make a drunken speech proclaiming brotherhood and eternal friendship towards the people on the trip.