Got a last minute call Tuesday to go to work (call time 3:30 pm about an hour north of L.A. - I got the call at noon) on "Goal" - the scene was some folks trying to sneak into the US from Mexico - only they're sneaking through a hole in a fence next to the aqueduct in Acton which had been dressed to look like the border.
It wasn't actually a bad day. Yesterday was supposed to be the last night of the show, but because they're working with kids, the clock ran out on them and they had to add the day. It was only a few shots that they didn't get the night before, so we were out of there by midnight (that's including the time it took us to load our truck). The entire crew had moved on to other projects, so they had to bring in all new grip and electric for the last day.
I went home, crashed, and then the next morning, decided on a whim to go up to Death Valley to see the wildflowers - the heavy rains we've had have resulted in the flower bloom from hell, and it's not likely to do this again anytime soon, so I may as well do something on my day off other than stare at a computer screen or run on a treadmill.
Drove out in the morning (okay, I stopped for coffee first), saw the flowers, shot a bunch of photos, sat in the hot spring (I love hot springs), had more coffee, and then headed home just as it was getting dark.
On the way back, I managed to have a decently long phone conversation with Mr. Movie Star - in which I had to confess that a) I've never seen any of his movies and b) I had no idea who he was until someone told me.
He thought this was hilarious, which was a good thing given that most actors I know are insecure as hell.
We were supposed to have dinner tonight, but I've been called into work last minute (again - some TV pilot called "When I Met Your Mother"), and so I've had to postpone.
He says he'll give me a call after he gets off set tomorrow.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Monday, April 04, 2005
Okay, I'm not insane. "Enterprise" is still a wrap.
Back on "Enterprise".
When I got the call on Friday, our call steward told me it was a rig, which threw me into a state of confusion.
Confusion cleared, though. They're not starting back up, as they have to be out of Stage 8 pronto as Mission Impossible 3 is rigging that stage soon.
6 am call, which was fine, as it gets us into the commissary for coffee and lunch before the crowd hits. The breakfast/coffee crowd hits at 8:30, and the lunch crowd hits at 1:30. With a 6 am call, you have breakfast at 7:30 and lunch at noon.
There wasn't a lot left to do - it was pretty much just clearing the cable that was up in the perms. There were four guys upstairs dropping cable out, and four on the ground wrapping it as it came down to avoid the previously mentioned 'fucking mess'.
One of the guys pissed off the rigging gaffer, though - well, actually he pissed off everyone. Right before lunch, the producer walked on set, and this guy marched up to him and announced that the rig was coming out fast and we'd be done in 'no time'.
This resulted in the producer cutting the crew, so 5 of us (including me) got laid off.
Generally, crew members don't speak (beyond small talk or the occasional sports conversation over coffee) to anyone who 'outranks' them by more than a notch or two.
If you are having a sports conversation with a higher up, and they ask you a work question, you generally refer them to your supervisor ("Gee, Bruce, I have no idea when that's going to be done. Why don't you ask Chris? I'm sure he'll be able to tell you that. Say, how about those Red Sox?"), but most producers know better than to ask questions of anyone except department heads - it's a waste of time, as information is parceled out to us on a 'need to know' basis.
The worst thing you can do on a crew is go over someone's head like that (and he did it right in front of the department head, too). It's seen as brownnosing folks who normally wouldn't speak to you anyway, and it's disrespectful to your supervisor. And it doesn't make you any friends.
The surprise of the day was Mr. Movie Star calling me about 2 pm 'to see what I was doing' - I told him I was glad to hear from him, but I was about to get brained by the crap that was falling out of the perms (the grips were taking out the 'greenbeds', which are temporary walkways hung from the perms - they're heavy wood flats about the size of a door that hang on brackets suspended by 30 feet of chain - they swing like crazy when they're being lowered to the ground, and it's best not to be anywhere near them when the grips are dropping them in.) and asked if I could call him back - only to notice, after he'd said 'no problem babe' and hung up, that his number reads as "Private Call" in the phone's received call log.
That is a serious blonde moment.
D'oh.
Some friends from New York are in town tonight and their band (Slunt) is playing the Roxy tonight, so although all I really want to do is sit home and stare obsessively at my cell phone, willing Mr. Movie Star to call back, I have to go see the girls play.
Getting out of the house will be good for me.
When I got the call on Friday, our call steward told me it was a rig, which threw me into a state of confusion.
Confusion cleared, though. They're not starting back up, as they have to be out of Stage 8 pronto as Mission Impossible 3 is rigging that stage soon.
6 am call, which was fine, as it gets us into the commissary for coffee and lunch before the crowd hits. The breakfast/coffee crowd hits at 8:30, and the lunch crowd hits at 1:30. With a 6 am call, you have breakfast at 7:30 and lunch at noon.
There wasn't a lot left to do - it was pretty much just clearing the cable that was up in the perms. There were four guys upstairs dropping cable out, and four on the ground wrapping it as it came down to avoid the previously mentioned 'fucking mess'.
One of the guys pissed off the rigging gaffer, though - well, actually he pissed off everyone. Right before lunch, the producer walked on set, and this guy marched up to him and announced that the rig was coming out fast and we'd be done in 'no time'.
This resulted in the producer cutting the crew, so 5 of us (including me) got laid off.
Generally, crew members don't speak (beyond small talk or the occasional sports conversation over coffee) to anyone who 'outranks' them by more than a notch or two.
If you are having a sports conversation with a higher up, and they ask you a work question, you generally refer them to your supervisor ("Gee, Bruce, I have no idea when that's going to be done. Why don't you ask Chris? I'm sure he'll be able to tell you that. Say, how about those Red Sox?"), but most producers know better than to ask questions of anyone except department heads - it's a waste of time, as information is parceled out to us on a 'need to know' basis.
The worst thing you can do on a crew is go over someone's head like that (and he did it right in front of the department head, too). It's seen as brownnosing folks who normally wouldn't speak to you anyway, and it's disrespectful to your supervisor. And it doesn't make you any friends.
The surprise of the day was Mr. Movie Star calling me about 2 pm 'to see what I was doing' - I told him I was glad to hear from him, but I was about to get brained by the crap that was falling out of the perms (the grips were taking out the 'greenbeds', which are temporary walkways hung from the perms - they're heavy wood flats about the size of a door that hang on brackets suspended by 30 feet of chain - they swing like crazy when they're being lowered to the ground, and it's best not to be anywhere near them when the grips are dropping them in.) and asked if I could call him back - only to notice, after he'd said 'no problem babe' and hung up, that his number reads as "Private Call" in the phone's received call log.
That is a serious blonde moment.
D'oh.
Some friends from New York are in town tonight and their band (Slunt) is playing the Roxy tonight, so although all I really want to do is sit home and stare obsessively at my cell phone, willing Mr. Movie Star to call back, I have to go see the girls play.
Getting out of the house will be good for me.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Finally! It's over.... Maybe.
We shot the last bit of this short Sunday morning, which is the only time we could get The Drama Queen.
Of course, our call was 8 am and everyone forgot to set the clocks forward, so everyone was an hour late - we still got done by noon, though.
It worked out well. We had a couple of extra actors that The Blonde wanted to add, and they were terrific. Hopefully, the entire mess will cut together.
On my way home from the shoot, I passed a Coffee Bean in Beverly Hills, and decided to get some coffee (I stressed Saturday night and didn't sleep at all, so I needed a boost). Miraculously, I found parking right in front of the Coffee Bean, and as I opened my back door to get my purse, the box full of prop vodka bottles fell out and rolled all over the sidewalk.
Did I mention it was noon on Sunday?
I wish I'd looked a little more disheveled. That would have been even funnier.
Of course, our call was 8 am and everyone forgot to set the clocks forward, so everyone was an hour late - we still got done by noon, though.
It worked out well. We had a couple of extra actors that The Blonde wanted to add, and they were terrific. Hopefully, the entire mess will cut together.
On my way home from the shoot, I passed a Coffee Bean in Beverly Hills, and decided to get some coffee (I stressed Saturday night and didn't sleep at all, so I needed a boost). Miraculously, I found parking right in front of the Coffee Bean, and as I opened my back door to get my purse, the box full of prop vodka bottles fell out and rolled all over the sidewalk.
Did I mention it was noon on Sunday?
I wish I'd looked a little more disheveled. That would have been even funnier.
Friday, April 01, 2005
They call it "Double Dipping"
It's working two jobs in the same day - i.e. working one job during the day, and then going to another one and working at night - it's generally not allowed (if you do it, and the boys at the union find out about it, they'll fine you), but when it's busy, the union will let you do it..
I wrapped a music video (Green Day - I hate them and hearing the damned song over and over and over didn't help) Thursday night ( 11pm - 6am), and then went to rig some TV pilot ("Halley's Comet") today (8am - 2pm). Thank God it was a short day.
Actually, thank God they were both short days. When I was in my 20's, I used to double dip all the time (I think I worked 24 hours straight more than once), and I'd just sleep the next day and be fine. Now, it hits me hard - I can tell when I'm REALLY tired and shouldn't be driving when I see animals that aren't there running across the road. It's really freaky. I'll see some brown furry thing running across the traffic lanes, I'll freak out and slam on my brakes, and then it'll disappear. That means it's time to pull over and take a nap before I kill myself or someone else.
We started out in Van Nuys at a crappy warehouse stage (no 'permanents' - the wooden walkways in the ceilings of a real stage - the warehouse stages just have 'pipe grids'. That's exactly what it sounds like - a grid of pipe hung from the ceiling to rig hanging lights from. Pipe grids are a pain in the ass as you have to use a lift to get to them, whereas on a real stage you have a walkway to get to the lights. I'll be able to explain this better when I'm not insanely tired).
We were "off production" - just taking the lights and cable out before the next video came into the stage at 7 am this morning.
Rock and roll lighting is similar to movie lighting, but different. It's rigged differently - they don't use stands - everything is hung from the ceiling, and they cable differently than we do. That's fine, but it means that you have to think when you're wrapping. If you pull rock n' roll rigs out the wrong way, you end up with a big fucking mess that takes hours to sort out (you know how Christmas lights get all tangled up? Our cable does the exact same thing. It's just a LOT heavier than Christmas lights, and you can't get pissed off and throw it in the trash. You have to untangle it - so it's better not to let it get fucked up in the first place).
One of our lifts died, and the stage manager had to call a condor mechanic to come out and fix it. I had three 'new guys' on my crew, so someone had to babysit them all night - they did fine, though.
Then, after the Starbucks version of a "Big Gulp", I went out to Pasadena to put this TV pilot rig in. It's shooting in a closed hospital (there's a bunch of those in Los Angeles, and they all have film crews in them all the time), so we just had to change tubes in the fluorescent fixtures (actual fluorescent tubes photograph green as the proverbial ' fucking shamrock'. Movies use special "color balanced" tubes. Light is measured in degrees of Kelvin. Different degrees of kelvin results in a different color of light. Again, something I'll have to explain when I've had some sleep), and run a small amount of cable.
It's still busy as hell - on my way home, I called the union hall to register as 'out of work', and got sent right back out for Monday. I'm back on "Enterprise". The call steward said it was rigging, which confuses me, as I thought that show was done.
I'll find out 6 am Monday.
I'm off to bed.
I wrapped a music video (Green Day - I hate them and hearing the damned song over and over and over didn't help) Thursday night ( 11pm - 6am), and then went to rig some TV pilot ("Halley's Comet") today (8am - 2pm). Thank God it was a short day.
Actually, thank God they were both short days. When I was in my 20's, I used to double dip all the time (I think I worked 24 hours straight more than once), and I'd just sleep the next day and be fine. Now, it hits me hard - I can tell when I'm REALLY tired and shouldn't be driving when I see animals that aren't there running across the road. It's really freaky. I'll see some brown furry thing running across the traffic lanes, I'll freak out and slam on my brakes, and then it'll disappear. That means it's time to pull over and take a nap before I kill myself or someone else.
We started out in Van Nuys at a crappy warehouse stage (no 'permanents' - the wooden walkways in the ceilings of a real stage - the warehouse stages just have 'pipe grids'. That's exactly what it sounds like - a grid of pipe hung from the ceiling to rig hanging lights from. Pipe grids are a pain in the ass as you have to use a lift to get to them, whereas on a real stage you have a walkway to get to the lights. I'll be able to explain this better when I'm not insanely tired).
We were "off production" - just taking the lights and cable out before the next video came into the stage at 7 am this morning.
Rock and roll lighting is similar to movie lighting, but different. It's rigged differently - they don't use stands - everything is hung from the ceiling, and they cable differently than we do. That's fine, but it means that you have to think when you're wrapping. If you pull rock n' roll rigs out the wrong way, you end up with a big fucking mess that takes hours to sort out (you know how Christmas lights get all tangled up? Our cable does the exact same thing. It's just a LOT heavier than Christmas lights, and you can't get pissed off and throw it in the trash. You have to untangle it - so it's better not to let it get fucked up in the first place).
One of our lifts died, and the stage manager had to call a condor mechanic to come out and fix it. I had three 'new guys' on my crew, so someone had to babysit them all night - they did fine, though.
Then, after the Starbucks version of a "Big Gulp", I went out to Pasadena to put this TV pilot rig in. It's shooting in a closed hospital (there's a bunch of those in Los Angeles, and they all have film crews in them all the time), so we just had to change tubes in the fluorescent fixtures (actual fluorescent tubes photograph green as the proverbial ' fucking shamrock'. Movies use special "color balanced" tubes. Light is measured in degrees of Kelvin. Different degrees of kelvin results in a different color of light. Again, something I'll have to explain when I've had some sleep), and run a small amount of cable.
It's still busy as hell - on my way home, I called the union hall to register as 'out of work', and got sent right back out for Monday. I'm back on "Enterprise". The call steward said it was rigging, which confuses me, as I thought that show was done.
I'll find out 6 am Monday.
I'm off to bed.
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