
GUEST BLOG — How to Succeed as a Runner Without Making a Single Cup of Coffee
I’m a new team member here at 1ClickPromos, and relatively new to the film industry on the whole. Having now worked as a runner in the film industry, I thought I might write about my experience on a big-budget film set for the first time.
First thing, learn what it means to be on time. For example, the headline of the call sheet (which was emailed to us at midnight the night before the shoot) read ‘Unit Call Time — 12 Noon.’
Awesome, right? Runners are part of the unit (as opposed to makeup and that sort of thing), so we get to sleep in a bit before we’re needed, right?
If I had shown up at 12 noon, I would have been sent home (fired). The reality is I had to read the detailed fine print, which specified that the Art Department had a pre-call of 10 am, and that breakfast would be served from 11.
Who makes breakfast? Definitely a runner (me). Who sets up with the Art Department? You decide.
Herein lies the strategy of being a runner: get good at doing what you do and doing it in a timely fashion, because the leftover time is yours to try and get involved with the rest of the crew. I made breakfast as fast as I could, and spent the rest of the time making connections with the Art Department, learning about their job, helping them any way I could, etc.
By the time the rest of the unit showed up at noon, I was already in people’s good graces for having made their breakfast, and most knew my name or gave me a nickname. All because I was there and active before everyone else.
There were other runners who waited outside the location (we were shooting in a house) and chatted with the location managers while I did all of this. I won’t say that what they did was wrong, I will only say that by midday I was working with the Electrical Department ‘Sparks,’ while they were asking people if they wanted fries with their lunches and, yes, making coffee.
Here we get to my second principle of successful, coffee-less running: running. We were working between two locations — the original house and a makeshift rave (that I helped build), which were about one hundred yards apart.
Obviously, there was a lot of going back and forth between the two locations. The clue to maximising this opportunity as a runner was very much in the name.
The bad news: hustling exhausts you. The good news: hustling requires no experience or special skills. The best news: hustling looks really good to anyone important watching. By the end of the day, everyone from the Sparks to the Director to even the lead actor commended me for my hustle (and learned my name).
Most of the rest of running came from intuition and awareness: try to predict what people will need when they need it and be the one to bring it to them (e.g. we were working with a fog machine indoors, and so I knew that the smoke would dry out people’s throats and stacked two cases of water outside the room for when they were done. The act was needed, appreciated, and noted).
One last tip to running without making coffee: do the jobs that no one (including you) wants to do (that aren’t making coffee, obviously).
Our last location was outdoors on the street, late at night. We had a number of people, drunk (this was on a Wednesday, so they were really drunk), homeless, etc. try to come on set. Set up a film set in public, everyone thinks it’s for them, apparently.
Anyway, whenever someone would wander in, everybody in the unit would freeze and look around awkwardly. The other runners, weren’t able to do anything about it. After 13 hours of strenuous filming with another 4 to go, nobody had the energy to deal with this problem at the time.
This was a rather easily obvious opportunity to seize. I resurrected what energy I had left (and some that I didn’t), and greeted everyone like an old friend, wrapping an arm around their shoulders and leading them away to have a conversation.
It wasn’t 100% effective, but it was appreciated. And noticed.
Bottom line: at the end of a 17-hour shoot with a cast and crew of over two dozen people who had never met me before today, everyone thanked me. By name. They remembered my work in detail. And they paid for my ride home.
I still don’t know how to make a cup of coffee.
