Location scout

There is a running joke among some photographers and cameramen that when they say they’re going “location scouting”, they really mean they are headed for the pub.

However, professional location scouts do exist and they spend many early mornings and late nights looking for interesting buildings which might make good places to shoot commercials, music videos, films or whatever happens to be in the wind.

It is a rather interesting job but it not always is glamour, cocktails and red carpets.
Natalie Duncan, of Queensland Film Locations, spends a lot of her time dropping leaflets into the letterboxes at houses that look like they might make interesting places to shoot-and then trying to convince the owners that it is an easy way to make a bit of money and get their house up in lights.

She has built up a database of people who are prepared to lease their houses to film production companies.
Natalie says that many location scouts start as runners in the film industry but her story was a bit different.
“I used to be a teacher,” she said.

“One of my relatives works in film and whenever I had a weekend or a holiday I used to go and help him on set.
“From my work experience with him, I saw a hole in the Brisbane film industry for a location scouting business.
“A lot of the big Sydney location scouting businesses have these huge databases of potential locations and, when a job comes in, they can just put the appropriate search terms in and hopefully find something appropriate.

“In Brisbane, the standard procedure is to go `I need a blue bathroom’ and then spend a few days knocking on doors and hoping for the best.
“I went for the database model and have been steadily building my database up so that I have a lot of properties on record.
“Now I can find a list of potential places straight away and, if nothing suits the client, then I can go out and look for something else.”

Recently “something else” meant a quarry that the Bank of Queensland converted into a wild west scene with the help of a well-placed ghost town.
Finding a place with the exact look the bank was after took three days of driving around the Ipswich area in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
“One of the best things about the job is that I get to meet so many people and in the film industry there’s lots of interesting and crazy people that you have a chance to work with,” Natalie said.

“There’s an exciting can-do attitude about everything that was missing a bit from teaching.”
Natalie said there were certainly a few tricks of the trade which helped to make particular location scouts popular with production companies.
“The secret is being able to find several locations close together so the whole crew doesn’t have to move across town to shoot another related ad or scene,” she said.
If there is a downside to the job, Natalie said it might be that she has become almost “too observant”.

“I’m not so great at driving anymore,” she said. “I’m always looking around me thinking: `that’s a great building’,” she said.
Anyone who is interested in registering their house for a potential film shoot can log on to http://www.qldfilmlocations.com.au/ to find out more.