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Notes on light, dust, rain and traffic from a year of shooting on the equator, and how a Nairobi call sheet is actually built.

The one thing that never moves

Sitting on the equator, Nairobi hands you a sunrise and a sunset within minutes of the same clock all year.

There is no long European summer evening to stretch a schedule into, and no excuse for missing the window either. It arrives when it says it will, in March and in October alike. For a production planner this is a considerable gift and it is the single most underrated advantage this city has.

In London a summer shoot day and a winter one are different jobs. Here, the day you plan in January is the day you get in July. A crew that has worked a season together stops checking, because the check keeps returning the same answer.

Two golden hours, and what each is for

We plan two golden hours into every schedule now, and we use them for different things.

The early one goes to wides. Low light rakes across a street or a field and gives you depth that a midday sun flattens completely. Landscape, architecture, anything where the frame needs to feel like a place rather than a backdrop.

The late one goes to faces. The quality of light in the last forty minutes before sunset does something to skin that no lighting setup convincingly fakes, and the direction of it is naturally flattering in a way that costs nothing to use.

The middle of the day goes to interiors and to the work nobody sees: the setups, the moves, the coverage that will be graded into the dark anyway. That is not a compromise, it is the correct allocation. Fighting the midday sun outdoors is expensive and the results are worse than what the same money buys at either end of the day.

What actually moves is everything else

The light is the constant. The variables are weather, dust, and the city itself.

The long rains. They push a shoot indoors with about fifteen minutes of warning, and the warning is visual rather than meteorological: you watch the sky over the Ngong Hills and you start moving. Every outdoor day in March, April and May needs an indoor fallback that is genuinely usable, not a corridor nobody wants to shoot in. We scout the fallback with the same care as the main location, because in that season it is used often enough to matter.

Dust in the dry months. It does something to a long lens that no filter sells you: a haze that lifts blacks and softens contrast at distance. Sometimes that is exactly what a frame wants. Often it is not, and the fix is to move closer rather than to correct it afterwards, because the correction never quite holds.

The traffic. A call sheet that ignores Mombasa Road at half five is a call sheet that becomes fiction by six. Distances on a map are not the unit that matters. We plan location moves around the city's actual rhythm, and we do not schedule two distant locations in one day unless one of them is at dawn.

Building the day backwards

The practical method, after a year of it, is to build the day from the light rather than from the locations.

Start with the two windows, which are fixed. Assign the frames that can only happen in them. Then fill the middle with whatever survives flat light. Then, and only then, check whether the geography works, and move locations rather than times if it does not.

Most schedules are built the other way round, from a location list, with light treated as a constraint to be worked around. That produces days where the best light of the morning is spent in a van.

The corollary is that a location which cannot be reached in time for its window is the wrong location, however good it is. That is a hard note to give and it saves entire days.

The dawn call is worth it

The most useful scheduling habit we have adopted is being willing to call a crew for dawn.

It is unpopular, and it buys three things at once. The light is the best of the day. The city is empty, so a street location is actually available rather than notionally available. And the traffic that would eat two hours later simply is not there yet.

A dawn call for a street exterior routinely delivers in ninety minutes what a mid morning call would not deliver in four hours. The crew cost is the same. The difference is entirely in what the city is doing around you.

Sound outdoors, and the thing nobody plans for

The light gets all the attention and the sound is where Nairobi actually costs you.

A street location that looks perfect will have a generator two doors down, a matatu stage around the corner, and a construction site that starts at seven. None of that shows up in a photograph of the location, which is how it survives a scout and ambushes a shoot day.

We listen on the recce now, with the same seriousness we look. Stand in the frame, close your eyes, and give it two minutes. Two minutes is long enough for the generator to cycle and the stage to fill.

Where a location is visually essential and audibly impossible, the answer is to plan for a clean recording elsewhere rather than to hope the edit rescues it. Hoping the edit rescues it has never once worked.

Altitude, and what it does to a crew

Nairobi sits at around 1,800 metres, and a crew arriving from sea level feels it on the second day rather than the first.

It is not dramatic. It is a slightly shorter fuse, a slightly slower pack down, and dehydration arriving faster than anyone expects in weather that does not feel hot. On a long schedule that compounds.

The fix is unglamorous: more water than seems necessary, a real break in the middle of the day rather than a notional one, and not stacking the two heaviest days back to back at the start of a visiting crew's trip.

The sun is stronger than it feels for the same reason. Anyone standing in it all day needs to be told, once, at the start.

What this changes about budgets

Two line items behave differently here than they do in a market with unpredictable light.

Contingency days. In a temperate market a weather day is standard, because a week of rain can take the whole shoot. Here the light is reliable enough that the contingency belongs elsewhere: in the rainy season, and in the days where a location is doing work you cannot control.

Lighting packages. When two thirds of the exterior work happens in windows where the sun is doing the job, the package that gets specified is smaller than the one a visiting production would bring. That is a real saving, and it is one of the reasons producing here costs less than importing a production without any drop in what ends up on screen.

Power, and the generator question

Mains power on a location is a maybe rather than a yes, and planning around that is routine rather than dramatic.

Most days the answer is batteries, because the lighting package is small for the reasons above and battery capacity has stopped being the constraint it was five years ago. Where a generator is genuinely needed, it needs to be far enough away to be inaudible and close enough to be practical, and finding that spot is a recce job rather than a shoot day job.

The habit worth keeping is simply charging everything the night before, every night, without deciding first whether tomorrow needs it. A day lost to a flat battery is the most avoidable kind.

A note on colour

Shooting on the equator, with this much reliable natural light, produces material that is very easy to grade badly.

The temptation is to push it warm, because the light already is, and warm reads as pleasant. Two clicks past pleasant it reads as a stock photograph of Africa, which is the exact cliche any campaign made here should be trying to avoid.

We grade towards what the room looked like rather than towards what a reference deck expects. That is easier when the colourist was standing in the room, which is one of the arguments for finishing work in the same city it was shot in rather than sending it abroad.

None of this is a complaint

Light this reliable is a gift most crews never get. The variables that remain, rain, dust and traffic, are all knowable, and knowing them is most of what local production experience actually is.

A visiting production can shoot beautifully here. What it usually cannot do is schedule accurately, because the scheduling knowledge is specific and unwritten, and the cost of learning it is a day.

Rossiter and Co. produces campaigns end to end in Nairobi, and the schedule is the part of that we are quietly proudest of. If you are planning a shoot here and want a second opinion on a call sheet, that is a conversation we are happy to have before anyone signs anything.