Take the Production Management category at the RTS Craft & Design Awards. The 2024 nominees were Squid Game: The Challenge, Race Across the World and Planet Earth III. How exactly do you build a set big enough for 456 people to play a game of ‘Red Light, Green Light’, and then deliver those 456 people to the start line? Or plot a racing course over 14,000km through seven different countries, while employing a crew agile enough to change course according to the whims of your contributors? How about adapting your shoots that are already in extreme locations, and whose schedules are determined by the seasons, to accommodate for a global pandemic?

Well there are people whose job it is to confront these logistical challenges every day. By juggling budgets, schedules and the management of the entire cast and crew, it falls to the Production Managers to maximise a programme’s resources without compromising its quality.

Ahead of the awards I spoke to each of the three nominated teams and they all agreed that awards like the RTS’ are a long time coming. Until recently, a lack of recognition only cemented the divide between editorial and production.

It’s a divide that has never really made sense; without all the nuts and bolts of production, editorial would grind to a halt. “It’s not just booking taxis and hotels,” says Abi Lambrinos, Senior Production Executive for Squid Game: The Challenge, “it’s a creative role; you’re a facilitator of ideas.”

Squid Game: The Challenge

As the first ever reality TV adaptation of a scripted drama, and a drama with an instantly iconic production design that was largely CG-rendered, Squid Game: The Challenge is the perfect case study of the role’s inherent creativity.

How do you recreate Squid Game’s blood spattering elimination, for example? “Obviously we couldn’t kill anyone,” says Lambrinos, reassuringly, “but we wanted to nod to the elimination of the drama.”

Their ingenious solution was to use squibs, i.e. tanks of paint embedded in each player’s shirt that the crew could detonate remotely once a player was eliminated. But there was a small hitch: “every company we spoke to that deals in squibs said, ‘We’ve only ever set off 10 in one go, and that’s with an actor who knows it’s going to happen.’” Finding a company who would do it for 456 people, all at the same time, when they don’t know it’s going to happen, was an altogether different challenge.

The scale of the competition meant that every artistic decision had similarly vast logistical implications. 456 contestants meant 456 people had to be transported, dressed, fed, mic’d up and monitored, and that’s not accounting for the 760 crew behind the scenes.

‘The Telephone Twist’, unique to the reality show iteration, illustrates the sheer manpower and agility required to cater for all the contestants, all at once. A guard brings a telephone into the dormitory, it starts ringing, and a panicked curiosity ripples around the room. Contestant #198 picks up, and he’s awarded a burger and fries for his bravery.

“Normally, you just put an hour in for mic’ing up and briefing. But if it takes five minutes to mic up each person, how long will it take 456 people?”

It sounds simple, until Lambrinos takes me behind the scenes: “We actually had about 20 runners standing by at all the local fast food places to allow us to quickly order something they would want,” she recalls.

As it transpires, #198 barely gets to eat the treat himself. He’s soon swarmed by his fellow contestants who grab most of his fries, and #097 even steals one of his hamburgers. $4.56 million in prize money is more than enough to trigger people’s survival instincts.

Wary of the extreme lengths the contestants might go to, they devised strict rules and honed their briefs through rigorous rehearsals with hundreds of supporting artists. “If you break the rules, you're eliminated anyway. So that was our strongest tool, really, for making sure people didn't put themselves or others at risk.”

Another danger of such a large cast is that somebody could be struggling and yet fall under the radar. So while the editorial team were busy building the story arcs by dialing into the players’ mics with specially tuned iPads, around 40 psychiatrists and welfare producers had the sole responsibility of monitoring the wellbeing of the entire cast.

The only way to pull off a show of this size, Lambrinos says, is by “planning down to the tiniest detail.” Even something as simple as the shooting schedule. “Normally, you just put an hour in for mic’ing up and briefing. But if it takes five minutes to mic up each person, how long will it take 456 people? Therefore how big a sound team do we need to make sure that we don’t waste four hours at the start of our day?”

Lambrinos anticipates that people might point to their hefty budget as a cure-all (each episode reportedly cost over $1 million). But she says it doesn’t help as much as you’d think. “[The budget] needs such meticulous management, which is quite daunting because if you forget something it's never a small amount of money.” Say the crew suddenly need to carry out another rehearsal, or all the players start demanding Vaseline (true, apparently): all that Vaseline adds up.

Essentially, if you peel back the glossy surface of a big budget reality show, you’ll find a lot of email chains and some very scary spreadsheets. Be it ‘bloody’ elimination or catering for the cosmetic demands of 456 contestants, each idea needs a carefully sliced portion of the pie. This is what Lambrinos means by “facilitating ideas”.

Race Across the World

While these ideas often come from editorial, sometimes the very nature of a show calls for more joined-up thinking. “Race Across the World is the kind of show where production is the editorial,” says Senior Production Executive Kezia Walker.

The series sees five teams of two race across a part of the world (series four saw them race from Japan to Indonesia) with a limited budget, no phones and no air travel, using any means they deem most efficient. The difficulty for the production team therefore comes in the forward planning: how much forward planning can you do when the teams all have minds of their own?

Walker tells me they have to exercise something they call their ‘and-then brain’. “You’ve got to think through everything that could happen – ‘and then, and then, and then’ – so you’ve got a plan for every eventuality.” In this sense, production managers, says Maria Kennedy, Line Producer for series four, are really “professional catastrophisers,” and they are crucial in a show like Race where the eventualities are almost infinite.

Unsurprisingly, then, there’s a “very long” and “incredibly complicated” pre-production process, says Walker, of which no small part is the route planning. Plotting a safe and race-able route across several borders is one thing on paper, “but until you’ve got people on night busses and ferries in these far-flung places, you don’t really know if it’ll work or not.”

Once plotted, they send out a team to recce the course. That way, as well as timing how long it takes to travel between checkpoints, they can gauge first-hand how easy it is to cross any borders and whether a film crew can feasibly stay one step ahead. “If it takes the contestants three days to get between checkpoints, but it also takes the crew three days, then that won’t work!” says Kennedy.

Production managers, says Kennedy, are really “professional catastrophisers”

Crucial to facilitating the cultural immersion of the contributors (and, by extension, us viewers) are the local fixers, who source interesting jobs and experiences. It’s up to the production managers to find these fixers, but “it’s quite an odd job for them,” Walker explains.  

“Normally you tell them exactly what day we’re coming, what we’re filming and who’s going to be there. Whereas, on our show, we can’t tell you because we don’t know […] It’s [the contestants’] race, they run it and we have to follow it.”

This unpredictability sometimes comes to a head at the checkpoints. “The amount of crew that we have at each checkpoint is designed for doing maybe two teams arriving at the same time,” says Kennedy. “But as soon as there are four teams arriving at the same time, being able to film them if they're going off in different directions and getting lost – the actual coverage becomes quite complicated.”

“It’s also incredibly fun,” says Sophie Barr, Senior Production Manager for series four. “You can just feel the energy from everyone on the cast and crew when you know it’s coming down to a foot race.” And by the sounds of it, that adrenaline rush reaches all the way back to their head office in London.

Back there it’s all go on the group chat: “It’s almost like a live gallery,” says Walker, “but it’s just WhatsApp.” They were filming series five as we spoke, and 15 minutes into our interview, their group chat had been flooded with 92 messages. Throughout series four they worked out that they had either sent or received a total of 117,000.

“To start with it can be very overwhelming,” says Walker, “but you get into a rhythm with it once you get the knack of having your brain split across five different teams.”

Planet Earth III

Clearly, in production management, cooler heads and nimbler brains prevail. Given the sheer number of moving parts, problems constantly arise. Especially in a wildlife documentary like Planet Earth III, where shooting in extreme locations is par for the course.

But even the most professional of catastrophisers couldn’t have predicted a global pandemic.

COVID-19 tore up the schedules for Planet Earth III, Line Producer Bronwen Thomas explains. A landmark like Planet Earth typically involves two years of filming; a lot of the sequences are seasonal or behaviour-led, so the second year gives them a second chance to capture an animal proving elusive. They were scheduled to start filming the third series in 2020 and 2021 but, thanks to the pandemic, they ended up completing just “4 out of the 45 or 50 shoots” they had scheduled in 2020. “Everyone was working at home in their little pods, so trying to keep the show on the road was quite difficult.”

When they managed to start shooting again, the ongoing restrictions continued to inhibit the crews. But it didn’t stop them from pulling off some of the series’ most ambitious shoots to date.

They can also boast its biggest. For episode six, ‘Extremes’, Thomas says the team wanted to film Arctic wolves on the uninhabited Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. Because it was so far away and they wanted to observe the wolves’ behaviour across seasons, the crew planned to stay there for 10 weeks.

There was one habitable building but they weren’t allowed inside because of COVID restrictions, so the team had to fly to the small research base of Eureka carrying more than 30 bags of equipment, 23 barrels of food and 29 bags of camping kit. Yep, they lived in tents for 10 weeks on ice.

“Interestingly, the most accidents that people ever have are actually car accidents”

But that’s only the half of it. The crew were hit by gale force winds, swarms of bugs and a polar bear sighting. Their ATVs (all-terrain vehicles, their only means of transport which also had to be shipped in) got stuck in the mud and they had to dig them out with their hands after they’d left their shovels back at the campsite. When it was finally time to leave, wildfires in Canada had grounded all helicopters, so Thomas and her team had to source Twin Otters (a type of utility aircraft) to rescue them. The cherry on top: because of heavy snowfall the crew had to rapidly dig out a runway.

They only made it out with six hours to spare, otherwise they would have been snowed in. “So, yeah, there are definitely some challenging aspects to [the job],” Thomas laughs. “But it’s really interesting.”

For when things go really bad, they make sure they always have a thorough medical evacuation plan in place. “We’re always looking at where the nearest hospital is. How long will it take to get them out? Who do we call? Will it have to be a helicopter? You just plan for the worst, because if it happens, you just want everything to click into process.”

When it comes to risk assessments, the risks are mostly about filming in remote places and filming animals. Although, “interestingly,” Thomas says, “the most accidents that people ever have are actually car accidents.” Beyond all the elaborate health and safety measures like deploying dive buddies and decompression chambers for underwater shoots, or sourcing anti-venom if there are going to be poisonous snakes nearby, they can’t forget the “basic things.” Carefully considering people's schedules, for example, might just ensure that their dedicated drivers haven’t worked the kind of long hours that can lead to a lapse of concentration on the road.

Sometimes, though, it’s the little extras that go a long way towards keeping a production on track. Thomas glowingly recalls how the Junior Production Manager for the Ellesmere shoot handwrote little pick-me-up notes for their researcher, given that she would be joining the crew for the full 10 weeks in the barren tundra. “To think of that amongst all the other stuff that you’re thinking of is exceptional,” she says.

“How do you stay calm?”

So let’s call production management for what it is: TV’s spinning plates department. Be it sourcing hundreds of tubs of Vaseline, reading thousands of WhatsApp messages or booking last minute rescue planes, how do you keep all those plates spinning?

Here Lambrinos offers a vital trick of her trade. “People often say to me, ‘God, how do you stay calm?’ But I think the only way is to never think about everything. Just take the thing that you’re doing at that time and try not to snowball into what it might lead to.”

There must be occasions, however, when you can’t help but take in the full extent of your logistical achievement? Lambrinos, whose team went onto win the Production Management award for Squid Game: The Challenge, remembers one.

As the producers moved the 456 players into position for ‘Red Light, Green Light’, they got them to start cheering. “The noise through that hangar…” Lambrinos recalls. “And when they all they all just walked in and saw the set and the doll, I turned to my Line Producer and I think we both nearly cried.”