Twenty minutes with the talent
Shooting an episode of GQ's 10 Essentials at Palm Heights, where the job was making a Grand Cayman hotel cut seamlessly into a series shot in New York.
GQ's 10 Essentials, published as 10 Things I Can't Live Without, is a franchise. It has run for years, it has a look, and viewers know that look whether or not they could describe it. An episode shot in the Cayman Islands has to sit in that run without anyone noticing it was shot two thousand miles from the others.
That was the job. Not making something new, but matching something exactly.
I was brought in as director of photography on a referral from another production company on island. The shoot ran on Monday 7 August 2023 at Palm Heights on Seven Mile Beach, where Hailey Bieber was staying.
The brief was a format, not a concept
Condé Nast Entertainment produced it, with their own director and coordinating producer on the ground. Ahead of the day I was sent previous episodes to study, along with a spec sheet, a shot list and a style guide.
That sounds restrictive. It is the opposite of restrictive to work with, because it removes the guesswork. You know what the frame has to look like. The work becomes execution: sourcing a backdrop, lighting it to match sessions shot in studios overseas, and putting the right cameras and crew behind it.
The skill being bought is not interpretation. It is the ability to hit an established international standard, on unfamiliar ground, first time, for a team who will fly home the next day.
A full day for twenty minutes
We had the talent for about twenty minutes.
Either side of that was a full day of setup and teardown with a crew of eight. That ratio is not unusual on a celebrity shoot and it is the most important thing to understand about scheduling one. The talent window is short, it is not entirely predictable, and everything around it exists so that when the door opens you are already lit, already framed, already rolling.
The night before, the general call time moved back half an hour. That is a normal piece of admin on a production this size, and it is also the whole point: a day built with slack in it absorbs a change like that without anyone noticing. A day built tight does not.
Delays happen on shoots like this and they are rarely anyone's fault. The only professional response is to have built a day that swallows them. If setup is genuinely finished before the window opens, a delay costs you waiting time and nothing else. If it is not, it costs you the shoot.
What we delivered
Camera, lighting and crew on the day. GQ's own team handled the edit, which is normal on a franchise piece where cutting to the house rhythm matters as much as shooting to the house look.
The episode ran on GQ's channel as part of the series.
Why this one is worth writing up
Honestly, it did not open a floodgate of work. What it does is answer a question a prospective client is entitled to ask: can a crew based in Cayman hit an international publisher's standard, to their spec, on their schedule, with their director watching?
That question has now been answered by Condé Nast rather than by me.