There's no better way for a phone company to say 'I love you' to its customers than to buy $40,000 in flowers. But just how many blooms is that? So many that even the spot's director balks when asked to recall the amount of flowers needed to transform Thailand's sunny beach vistas into a misty-eyed dream world, drowned in chrysanthemums, orchids and gypsophila.

The brief from French agency Marcel for "Flowers", a high-definition branding spot for mobile company Orange, called for aerial images of landscapes blanketed in flowers. With that in mind, director Rob Sanders, who's based in London but shoots a third of his jobs through Paris' Gang Films, says, "I didn't want it to look like an old lady's handbag." He also didn't want to get too heavily involved with CG, which is what the spot called for on paper.

Thailand's varied and closely situated locations of white sand beaches, freshwater rivers and lush tropical canopies, as well as cooler September climates at the onset of the rainy season, meant that Sanders could realize his in-camera vision for the spot. "It was pretty much an open brief," Sanders says. "At first, I wanted to shoot abstractly - lots of close-ups - but the wide shots showing the realism and the scale worked best."

To devise an approach to filming flowers, Sanders paid a visit to the flower market in London's Covent Garden, placed the flowers in an aquarium and studied how to best capture light hitting flower petals from underwater. The types of flowers used were selected based on availability and later matched to a landscape's color palette. Each set-up called for 10,000 flowers during the five-day shoot, which was divided between locations in southern Thailand and an Olympic-size swimming pool in Bangkok.

"I don't think that if we'd used CG, people would've connected emotionally," says Sanders. "Doing it for real was a major task, but we had a month of post booked and we didn't use any of it. As the flower budget went up, the post budget went down."

To ensure the flowers remained fresh and afloat, the set ups required extensive logistical planning and extra crew. Gang Films recruited Bangkok-based prodco Local Color Films, founded last April by executive producer Wicha 'Poon' Kokaphun. The crew was local save for the British DP and art director and a Canadian AD.

Local Color's biggest logistical challenge was, of course, the flowers. Conveniently, a friend of Kokaphun's brother is one of the biggest flower distributors in Bangkok. He acted as a point man, coordinating suppliers throughout the region. To keep the blossoms from wilting during the nine-hour drive from Bangkok to Krabi in southern Thailand, the flowers traveled in refrigerated trucks, usually used for transporting meat.

De-stemming was next. "We had to rent a room in the hotel for people to work day and night in shifts for three days cutting off the stems," says Kokaphun.

Shots of children jumping into a freshwater river were filmed in a fish farm. Thai children were cast and the area around the dock was sectioned off with nets and filled with flowers. Men in life jackets were employed to snag stray petals and re-arrange the watery bouquets for each take. Although the script called for aerial shots, Sanders opted to shoot close-ups so as not to reveal the visibly polluted water.

Krabi is a popular location for shoots because of its tourism infrastructure and film-savvy locals. Producers budgeted for a crew of 80, but that number ballooned, says Kokaphun, as every piece of equipment comes with its own crew member.

Overall, Sanders says the shoot went smoothly. The only hitch was a shot requiring a sea plane. The two planes that producers located had been grounded by aviation authorities, so Sanders comped in stock footage of a plane taking off. All of the underwater images, and the shot of old men playing chess, were filmed in Bangkok in an Olympic-sized pool with a HydroFlex camera. The final version blends the imagery to keep actual locations ambiguous, thereby giving "Flowers" a global feel.

"We shot shitloads," says Sanders. "In the end the film made itself, but there was a fine line between making it feel fresh and not making it seem corny."

GOOD TO KNOW
Exchange rate: $1 USD = 33 Thai Baht
When to go: Kokaphun advises European and North American EPs not to look at filming in Thailand as a vacation. Temperatures in the March-June dry season can reach 40C in Bangkok, making the cooler rainy season more comfortable to shoot.
Airport Woes: A new international airport just opened in Bangkok but local authorities unfortunately built it atop marshland. Once a natural drainage area for rainwater, the swamp's new tenant is now exacerbating flooding in the surrounding region.
Casting: Although tourists can readily be found, Sanders says casting elderly white men who don't resemble sugar daddies requires legwork. And next time, he'll bring his own casting director. "There's a different casting mentality," he says. "Instead of finding 100 people for one part, I'd see one."