One Shot...al Valle

This was one of those “wouldn’t it be nice” type of shots that just sort of came together at the last minute with a trip to the grocery store, a lucky stumble into some fake plants in a foyer, and a tiny crew of ride-or-dies.

"come to think of it, wasn’t there that ONE hallway that was sort of a stucco thing?"

We were in Murcia, Spain shooting what was supposed to be a pretty straightforward industrial capturing the manufacturing process for Al Valle Gazpacho.

Over 3 days, we filmed fields and factories from every angle you can imagine and had covered everything on our shot list 6 ways til Sunday (side note: in researching the etymology of that little idiom, I came across THIS TRAILER, worth a gander, though I can’t vouch for the movie itself).

We’d always planned on using existing commercial clips for the product shots the script called for. But towards the end of the shoot, it was brought to our attention that there was a new package and it was of the utmost importance that said package make it in THIS VIDEO.

I think the query went something like “If we could get a couple of the new packages, what do you think we could make happen with what we have here?”

The “what we have here” constituted 2 light panels, a gimbal, and no obvious place to film a tabletop other than some fairly stark factory or office walls.

The team (Including ride-or-dies . . . Ed Marmen, Bryan Margaca, and Adrian Cores Del Rio…) put our heads together . . . “come to think of it, wasn’t there that ONE hallway that was sort of a stucco thing? . . . did we spot some fake plants in the lobby?” A quick trip to the grocery store and a lucky find of a red and white checkered tablecloth and boom, we had our tabletop setup (and