Another road trip beckons. This time it’s up north to a Scottish island. We’ve got the shoot set up, the plane tickets booked and the permits sorted. Now it’s time to pack the gear.
One of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people is Marie Kondo. She’s an organizing consultant. Or in layman’s terms, her job is to tidy things up. Her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has been published in more than 30 countries. She knows the value of organizing, tidying and having things that only ‘spark joy’. We need her to help us.
Normally, packing for a shoot is easy. Open the car boot and throw everything in. You never know if you might need the track, the extra lights or even that bag of cables. Job done. However, because we’re flying, we’re limited to three carry on bags and three hold bags. Add in the fact we’re away for two nights and the place we’re going to is notorious for having four seasons of weather in one hour, and what to pack is at a premium.
So we start with the must-haves. Cameras x 2, check. Tripod – also two of them, check. Then we think about what lenses we need. We could take just the big one and then the little one. But what about the wide one and the even wider one? Might we need something for extreme close ups?
Just as women get a reputation for having too many shoes (is there such a thing?!), cameramen and directors have a reputation for their love of gadgets. And there are so many gadgets now that do so many wonderful things. And the reasoning is, we wouldn’t want to be stuck on a Scottish island without that one gadget that we know would make the shoot perfect. So let’s take the go-pro (two or three to be on the safe side), the gimble, the gadget that does the thing the gimble can’t – oh and don’t forget the drone ….
If you apply Ms Kondo’s organizing criteria for what to keep and what to throw away, she recommends holding it in your hands and seeing if it ‘spark’s joy’. She’s obviously never met the Tallboy team, who in turn, have never met a gadget that didn’t spark not only joy but often invoked full-on euphoria.
However, the Tallboy team has a solution to the packing problem. Take the gadgets and leave the spare underpants at home. After all, one pair of pants can be worn at least four ways….