Chapter 1: Four Time Zones, One Dream
It's Saturday, October 5th at 6:50pm. We just wrapped up our Chicago campaign video and photoshoot in a derelict industry-Greenpoint studio. The video needs to drop at 10am on Monday morning, the photos 24 hours later. Our flight to Iceland leaves at 11:15pm tonight. Henry gets straight in an Uber and heads to the film lab in Manhattan and convinces them over the phone to stay open until he gets there. He drops the film off and calls Jeremy, the videographer on both the Chicago and Iceland shoots, to coordinate getting to the airport together. Jeremy's carnet form that he needs to declare an enormous dollar amount of rental video equipment before he can travel internationally is delayed. It's either we risk getting pulled aside at customs and being taxed on all of the equipment, or he misses the flight and we pray it comes in before the last flight out the next morning. We roll the dice on the latter.
We're at the airport. Check-in for the flight closes in 20 minutes and Henry is stuck in traffic with 150 rolls of film that we absolutely know is going to cause an issue at security. Henry, refusing to let TSA put the film through the x-ray machine and zap it to oblivion, submits to a full body search... The not so chill kind where they take you in another room.
He gets through and meets us as we're convincing the gate to keep boarding open just another minute (for the 7th minute in a row). We get on the plane one short. Iceland here we mostly come. The next day Jeremy meets his carnet form at Newark airport and catches the last flight that would get to us before we took off for the glacier. (More to come later.)
The video footage for the Chicago video is with our editor in Downtown Brooklyn. As we're flying through the air, she's on the first of what will be two back-to-back editing graveyard shifts. We spend the day getting the rental cars, picking up the models who are on flights in from Paris and London respectively (which was a strategic move to save $$$ on 2 less roundtrip flights from the US #supersaver), meeting with the helicopter tour company to discuss the situation for the next day, checking into our Airbnb, and getting the looks out of two giant duffel bags, steamed, and hung up. It's 3am on Monday morning in Iceland, 11pm (still Saturday) in New York, 4am Monday in Berlin, and 8pm Saturday in LA.
We picture-lock the video and send it off to the sound designer in Berlin who is scheduled to wake up at 7am his time. He finishes sound at 2:30pm Monday in Berlin, 9:30am US time (which is an absurd turnaround) and sends the file back to the editor in New York. They put the final sound together with the final color and voila, we have our finished video. It's 9:54am in New York, 6 minutes to post time. Meanwhile, it's 1pm in Iceland on Monday and we're sitting in the helicopter on a crater in the middle of a remote part of Iceland. To this day, I still don't understand how, but the cellular connection on the crater was perfect. By some sort of creative miracle, we post the video to IG right at 10am. If you followed that time travel madness, Inception was probably a crystal clear, very straight forward film for you.
Chapter 2: The Helicopter
The helicopter has 4 open seats. The Bandit team has 8 people. We need to hit three different locations (glacier, crater, mountain range) and we have 8 hours to do it. The helicopter only has enough fuel to make 1-2 trips at a time and there’s only 2 places to get said fuel. Long story short, we had ChatGPT create our “run of show” schedule for shuttling the team to each location… optimized for not running out of gas and not letting anyone get stranded at night. Both of which we came a little (way) too close for comfort to. This was far and away the most logistically challenging project and probably will remain so for quite some time.
Chapter 3: The Aftermath
From Sunday to Wednesday, the Bandit team slept a whopping total of 11 hours. Needless to say, we were cooked… deep-fried if you will. Unfortunately, Henry was already in rough shape going into the shoot. He’s one of those “I never get sick” folks, so big-tree-fall-hard when it hits. Henry came down with a nasty case of the sniffles (pneumonia) and booked himself a three night stay at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. Kick the boy when he’s down, the doctors hit him with a lil frostbite diagnosis on the right ring finger. Feeling is supposed to come back any day now!
The shoot is over. We pack our bags and get ready to head to the airport to fly direct to O’Hare to open our pop-up doors for the Chicago Marathon the next morning. Unfortunately, the Johnny boy hasn’t had eyes on his passport since we arrived four days ago. And why would you bring your driver’s license on a trip if you already have your passport? Who needs two forms of ID these days?! Let the begging and pleading begin... We didn’t see exactly what John did to ultimately get on the plane, but we can imagine it was an Oscar worthy performance. We all made it to Chicago in one piece (except for Henry who was down bad in NYC) and got to work all night preparing for the pop-up opening just a handful of hours later.
Before Chicago came Berlin, after Chicago came New York, and here we are—after New York and at the final boss: the Winter Collection. Four huge projects in as many weeks. The Bandit team, which is just 13 soldiers strong, will be taking some much needed hibernation after this week. Hell, everyone deserves a half day every now and then.
Thank you for running with us. We do it all for you and it's worth every sleepless night. Right, Henry?
Ps. We got to see the Northern Lights in Iceland and while we were there... for the first time in history... they were visible from New York. Gotta love it.
