Renting containers to film production

What productions actually need

Not, generally, what they ask for. The first call is usually "we need some water tanks", and the actual requirement turns out to be one of about six things.

• Rain effects. A rain tower needs a reservoir and a pump, and the reservoir has to be on the ground near the rig. Two to six containers, linked, refilled by tanker.
• Dust suppression on unpaved locations. The single most common actual requirement and nobody ever calls it that.
• Ballast. Filled containers as wind ballast for lighting towers, tents, greenscreen frames and signage. C grade is perfect and the containers do not need to be clean.
• Wash-down and clean-up water, particularly on anything involving practical effects.
• Set dressing. A yard, a factory, a farm, a post-apocalyptic anything — containers are visual shorthand for industry and productions want them to look used.
• Potable-adjacent supply for crew facilities, which is the one where we have to have a careful conversation.

Why rental rather than sale

A production has a four-week window, a location it does not own, and no interest whatsoever in owning containers afterwards. Selling them twelve containers means somebody on the production team has to solve a disposal problem in week five, on a day when everybody has already moved on.

So we rent: deposit, weekly rate, delivery and collection, and the containers come back to the yard. It is administratively fiddly and it works well for both sides.

Past about twelve weeks the arithmetic says buy, and we tell people that rather than quietly running a long rental. A customer who buys at week thirteen and sells the containers back at the end has usually done better than one who rented for twenty weeks.

The rules that are different

1. Speed beats specification. A production that needs containers on Thursday needs them on Thursday. Grade conversations that take a week are not useful here.
2. Appearance is sometimes inverted. We have been asked for the ugliest containers on the yard, specifically. C grade with heavy staining is a premium product to a set decorator.
3. Everything gets moved by people who have not driven a forklift around containers before. We deliver, we place, and we ask that nobody moves them afterwards — and we build that into the rate.
4. Containers come back with paint on them. Frequently. It is fine; it comes off, or it does not and the container joins the set-dressing pool.
5. Nothing is ever where the delivery note says it is. Locations move.

Why we keep doing it

It is about three percent of revenue and it is not especially profitable once you account for the handling. We keep it for three reasons: it fills C-grade stock that would otherwise sit, the containers come back rather than leaving the loop, and it is the part of the business that reminds everybody that a container is a general-purpose object rather than a chemical industry artefact.

Also, a production once returned eight containers that had been dressed as a derelict industrial plant, complete with convincing rust effects. Four of them are still in the yard doing ordinary work and they look tremendous.