Tuesday, June 28, 2005

"Lack of Planning on Your Part..

...Does Not Constitute an Emergency on My Part".

Yesterday was exactly as bad as I thought it was going to be.

The crew were all terrific - I'd not met any of them before (except the other 'day player' with whom I've worked on on a number of projects), and they're the nicest bunch of guys..

Production, on the other hand, were useless. They kept changing things at the last moment, and they were unbelievably disorganized to the point of comedy.

Our first location got changed at the last moment, so we ended up having to frantically rig a location that we thought we'd have hours to work on, and folks kept stopping us from working, as they were trying to rehearse while we were rigging. There was also another movie shooting in the same building, which made communication on the walkie fun.

Scratchy voice: "Move those 20K's now, we have to roll!"
Me: "What 20K's? Oh, it's the other show. Nevermind."

We were shooting in the auditorium of a high school, and it had this catwalk that had about a 4 foot ceiling you had to stay doubled over the entire time you were up there - EVERYONE working up there hit their head at least once, and one of the guys did it so hard that they sent him to the hospital to check for a concussion.

Meanwhile, production were yelling at us constantly to hurry up -which isn't possible when one is trying to work while bent at a right angle.

The day ended up not being that long, though.. only 14 hours.

It's low budget season - I'm going on another one tomorrow.

3 comments:

EcamirG said...

Scratchy voice: "Move those 20K's now, we have to roll!"
Me: "What 20K's? Oh, it's the other show. Nevermind."


lol.

God, we've all been there, sister. At least you're getting a few bills paid, right? ;)

Anonymous said...

"The day ended up not being that long, though.. only 14 hours."

Gah! Remind me not to work in the film industry!!!

Norman said...

Catherine's right. This business is the only one that I know of (except for medical interns and computer software creation) where 14 hours seems like a light day. In fact, as an editor, I'm always amazed that the union contract doesn't specify overtime until after 56 hours in a week. That's basically a 12 hour day.