Whatshisname's Big Music Video

Yesterday's adventure was a rig day for a music video (I'm off of Bones. The gaffer is leaving to do Fast and Furious 3 in Tokyo, and when a new gaffer comes in, he or she usually brings his or her own crew. If I can find out who the new best boy is, I might be able to get back on).

I'm lucky in that I've managed to spend most of my career not working on music videos (I think I've only done 10 or so), and that's a good thing. The hours are long, the pay's not good, and for some reason music video directors pick the crappiest, dirtiest, most uncomfortable locations they can find, such as yesterday's asbestos riddled airplane hangar - part of the former McDonnell-Douglas plant (which is now called the "Playa Vista Stages").

I'm being unfair - the actual hangars don't have that much asbestos in them. It's mostly oozing out the walls in the office buildings, which I've also worked in - ironically, on another music video.

This video that we were rigging was for some guy that used to be in Creed, but is now a solo artist, and the set is a raised lucite stage with about 400 nook lights underneath it - shooting up through the clear floor (actually, the real number of lights is 700. There are 400 under the stage itself and another 300 around the outside of the stage), in addition to a bunch of other BFL's* that are crammed into the 10-ton waiting for those poor bastards on first unit today.
When a gaffer lights like this (lots and lots and lots of lights), it's called "flamethrowing".



The thing about nook lights is that they get really, really hot. 700 nook lights get, well, 700 times really, really hot.
The running joke was that lunch for the shooting crew would be barbecued musician.



Nooks also blow globes a lot. I pity the fool that has to crawl under there and change one after those lights have been burning for 12 hours.

* BFL = Big Fucking Light