Sunday, October 01, 2006

I've got a truck full of cable and an ache in my spine.

Friday's work was on the Sony lot - rigging 8 or so sets (pickup shot days move fast because it's just a few snippets, hence the large number of locations) in different areas of the lot in one day.

It was the same drill as yesterday - rig a set before first unit got there, wrap it after they shot, use that gear to rig the next set. We ordered more equipment, which enabled us to leave three or four sets down at the same time, which was a good thing since the shooting order got changed (and a shot dropped at the last minute) and we would have been up shit creek without the extra stuff.

Our day started out with our 10-ton truck breaking down (I don't know what was wrong, but I overheard one of the drivers say to another "It's not going to get any better" as they were looking at the engine), so we had to offload all of our equipment onto a much smaller truck (not a big deal, since we were going to lay all of it out) for the day's work.

Since there were so many sets, we never stopped working for the entire 12 hours (there's usually some down time involved, even on rigs), and I was too worn out Friday night and Saturday to do much of anything.

It's Sunday night and I'm still worn out. I guess I've been set boy too long, and these two heavy rig days have hurt me bad - I know I've been mostly rigging lately, but I've not been throwing around as much heavy cable as I have been for the past few days - this rig was all 4/0 ( it's the heaviest cable we have - 100 foot coils of it weigh 100 lbs. It's pronounced "four ought", as in "I ought not to be lifting this shit by myself").

I have to be at work at 5 am tomorrow, which means I have to leave my house at 4 am in order to get there, park, make it through the security checkpoint and walk across the lot to where we're meeting.

We're wrapping the rest of the cable and taking it back to the rental house, as there were only two shoot days on this.

Today was the last day of the LA County fair, so a friend and I went, ate some deep-fried food (the deep-fried avocado was a disappointment), drank some beer, watched a pig race (video coming soon), and then came back home.

I'm off to bed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad I didn't know you were there Friday, I would have looked for you and said Hi. I was touring the electronics on Stage 14 and 9.

Peggy Archer said...

Small world! We were pulling power for one of the rigs out of the Stage 9 cans (of course, we were in there reaaaaalllly early in the morning).

How was the electronics show? Any super-cool stuff?