From the Endeavour to Mr Potato Head

Margo White finds out there’s a lot more to Grant Bailey than a carpenter who found his way into the screen industry.

Grant Bailey is officially a set construction manager. You could also call him a furniture designer, interior designer, even an architect. You may remember the ad; two lions lounging on a couch, watching a natural history programme about lions on the savannah. You may even remember some of the dialogue, as conveyed through the subtitles accompanying the lion’s roars.

“Hi honey, I’m home.”

“How was Africa?”

“Frantic. I’m shagged.”

You may also remember the punch line, that the lioness growls “Hey look! You’re on TV” just before the camera cuts to another scene, in which her companion has been filmed acquainting himself with some other lioness. (“You can learn a lot from Sky Documentaries,” goes the voiceover.)

The average viewer might think great ad. They might wonder who came up with that idea, and how they persuaded the clients to go with it, and how they got the lions to do that. They probably wouldn’t think too hard about the fact that the entire joke, the illusion of it all, depended on lions lying on a couch in what looked like a living room, both of which had to be built specifically to accommodate a couple of 200kg beasts.

“It wasn’t built like a normal set,” recalls Grant, the Auckland-based set construction manager who built it. “It was made out of really thick plywood and proper framing, and bolted to the ground.”

Looking at the ad on his laptop, Grant points to the wall behind the couch where he’d built a concealed wall and, behind that, space for a lion cage. It was part of a contingency plan. He’d been told lions would be unlikely to clamber up onto the couch from the floor, as they preferred to step down onto objects.

“So we set the whole thing up so that we could pop that wall out and the lions could step down on the couch. Of course, first cut, lions walk in and step up onto the couch.”

The couch in question was made of wood but made to look as if it was covered in fabric – Grant was advised that the lions would tear any fabric apart – wrapped around a steel frame strong enough to bear the combined weight of a couple of lions. “And the lions loved it!” says Grant. “Afterwards the lion man [Craig Busch] took it away and the lions sat on it for two years until it was falling apart. So then I made them another one, because they liked it so much.”

When asked what he has had to build in his career as a set construction manager (almost always working for production companies making television ads) Grant says that it has run the gamut, from a replica of the HMS Endeavour, to a pair of eyes for Mr. Potato Head, made out of jelly. “That’s the best part of the job,” he says. “You could be asked to do anything. That’s also the hardest part of the job. You’ve got a fixed time and budget. You’re going to be building something, for which there’s no reference of how to do it, or how long it will take or how much it will cost.”

“And you could be doing it in some crazy location. It’s not like pumping things out in a factory. A lot of filming gets done in the west coast [of Auckland] which is a pretty volatile environment to build anything, let alone something temporary and without foundations, and where you have to deal with the tide, the wind, the weather…”

Grant has an eclectic professional life: he began life as a carpenter, completing his apprenticeship under the tutelage of a man who taught him the most old-fashioned carpentry skills. “I’m now reaping the benefit of that. I learned the proper way of doing things.” But after completing his apprenticeship and unsure that he actually wanted to become a builder, he went to London where he worked in the fashion industry. After returning to New Zealand he toyed with the idea of studying architecture, eventually deciding that he didn’t have the patience. “I just couldn’t wait. I just started doing it instead.”

He began working on his own house. He also began designing and building cabinets, but it was the early nineties, and New Zealand didn’t yet have a developed market for designer furniture; “I just couldn’t make any money out of it.”

By then he’d begun dabbling in the film industry, building sets for friends at drama school or art-directing music videos. Then he built a complicated prop (a soccer game that would come apart and be put back together) for an advertisement. It was then that he met and hit it off with production designer Neville Stephenson. He and Stephenson have now been working together for twelve years.

There have been too many sets and too many ads to remember; there was a set involving a chocolate waterfall for the Whittakers chocolate ad, a set involving a Viking ship for a Mini ad, one involving an imaginary orange juice factory, one involving a tram that could split in two for an ad for a skin care product. There have been boats, planes, trains, trams, spaceships, carts, gondolas and so on. “I’m systematically working my way through every form of transport known to man!”

Grant has mainly worked for production companies aimed at the advertising industry, although he still regards himself as working in the film industry. “Ads are where the money is,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. But a lot of people in the art department will do ads or whatever to make money – that’s what it’s all about in the end – then they’ll probably do films for their creative satisfaction. Films probably are more creative; you get to do your thing and it doesn’t have to be signed off by agencies or several layers of bureaucracy.”

However, while he hasn’t worked for film, he has an unusually wide range of outlets for creative expression. A house that he designed and built for himself and his family (which he sold over a year ago) has recently featured in House & Garden magazine, one of two apartments in a two-story block located in a light industrial inner city area. The entire building was constructed to look like a converted Manhattan loft.

He has, in collaboration with other designers, built interiors for some of Auckland’s most fashionable stores, such as Adrian Hailwood’s store and Stephen Marr’s new salon in Takapuna. Last year he built the set for Nom D’s utterly unconventional show at Fashion Week, in which the usual runway was dispensed with in favour of something that was more like a piece of performance art. “That was a nice counterpoint to doing ads,” says Grant. “It was quite creative. It was an awesome show. It was like a crazy, dark, cross between a witches’ coven and French existentialist readings.”

He has also helped several New Zealand sculptors pull off some of their large-scale projects, including the sculptures of Jim Speers and the late Ant Sumich. At the request of Sumich’s partner, he has agreed to help execute Sumich’s last artwork, a commissioned piece that will be part of a new bridge-replacement project in Waitakere city. “That’s been a very long and drawn-out process, easily the most complex thing I’ve ever done. It’s a bridge for cars, over electrified train tracks, but an artwork as well.”

Grant’s work highlights how much goes on behind the scenes, or more precisely, before anyone has turned up to film any of the scenes. The Viking ship for a Mini ad, for instance, obliged him to drive up to Pakiri to measure the width of all the bridges on the way, and then design the ship to fit inside a legal envelope to transport it. The work generally includes a level of detail that few would ever notice; the HMS Endeavour built for a whisky ad was professionally rigged “by a salty sea dog”, as if it really was an 18th-century British Navy ship. “The detail was just incredible. This is all detail that you don’t see in the ad, but you always put it there because it puts the actors in a believable environment.”

“People forget that they are in a set if you’ve done it right. They just treat it like it’s the real thing, and you know it works when people instantly believe it. Often we’ll have been there for days and weeks beforehand, before the shooting crew turn up and film it. People don’t tend to see what has gone on beforehand, that every object has been sourced, every surface treated and painted. You just don’t see that, unless you’re part of doing it. But I guess the more people don’t notice, the more successful you’ve been.”

It might not be that side of the industry that gets awards or all the attention, but he’d still thoroughly recommend it. “Yeah, there are definitely some days that you think, it doesn’t get any better than this. You’re in a beautiful place, doing something that is interesting, and getting paid. Those are the days when think you’ve nailed it. There’s also times when it’s a beautiful day outside and you’re in some shitty shed in Henderson and it’s all blacked out…but every job has that. The diversity is one of the main attractions; it’s really all over the place.”