Extra Salt & Sauce

Rich The Tat, Leith’s celebrated tattoo artist is scrolling the word ‘diarrhoea’ onto someone’s hand. Next to him another man is having his arm shaved. A third bloke with strange writing on the palms of his hands is being fed a banana by a girl with feathers in her hair.

We’re on a Scottish Executive film shoot making an ad to promote ‘Hand Hygiene’. They reckon something like 80% of all infections from ‘flu to MRSA are spread by hand. The very thought of this has acted subliminally on the entire creative team and ever since we got briefed we’ve found ourselves feverishly washing our hands at every opportunity, like mad Lady McBeth.

I’ve just been speculating to our client Trish Quinn that the finished ad when broadcast will trigger a national outbreak of obsessive compulsive disorder. She tells me there have been serious discussions about this already.

Meanwhile our Head of TV Les Watt, having guzzled down his microwaved porridge like Daddy Bear, is contemplating a snooze on the sofa in front of the sofa. We’re worried he won’t wake up till spring. The eskimoes have something like 47 different words for ‘snow’. Les has almost as many euphemisms for a sneaky snooze. Last time he called it “a long blink”. Today, he says “ I’m just recce-ing the insides of my eyelids.” There is a framed picture on Les’s wall containing a montage of, oh, sixty photos of Les slumbering at shoots all over the world.

Finally, the camera turns over. The amount of kit they need to film a bloke washing his hands is staggering. We’ve got four hand models – chaps with well-manicured cuticles and names like ‘Geraldo’. We also have three wash-hand basins. The camera needs to get in really tight as if it’s actually in the sink. So we have one basin bisected across its length and another bisected across width – on yeah and one intact basin. The art director briefed a stonemason to do the needful with his big angle-grinder. When she came back, the guy had cut one basin into four quarters. Words were exchanged. Mainly sweary-words. The poor guy had to start all over again.

The lighting cameraman, D.O.P., call him what you will, is using a Fraser lens for these basin interiors. It costs a bomb to rent and there are only two of them in the UK. They’re specially designed to squeeze into tight close-ups and keep all the detail. Which probably means most of the world’s supply of Fraser lenses are beavering away on porn shoots in the seamier quarters of downtown Los Angeles.

Here in downtown Leith we’re working ourselves into a lather with plain soap and water.

Later in post, we’ll be correcting the colour of the ink, animating the ink in the sink to give it a slightly evil quality and adding a soundtrack of effects and explanatory voiceover.

Here’s the finished film, finally.

Let us know what you think and after you’ve watched it, please wash your hands.