Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Ah, splitsville

For the next two days, we're working splits.

A split is a workday that's half daytime/half nighttime - some people hate them, but I don't mind them at all - today's 11 am call (noon crew call, but we've got an hour pre-call) means I'll miss the traffic both ways, and still get home at a decent hour (decent in that I don't have to see the sun come up as I'm driving home, which I hate).

Tomorrow's a split too, but I have to get up early to go back to the podiatrist in order to pick up my orthotics (about fucking time, too. My feet have been killing me this week).

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Not a bad first day

First shooting days are usually for ironing out glitches, but today went really smoothly - we were shooting in an abandoned hospital near Pasadena (yesterday makes the third time in a calendar year that I've shot there) which happens to have pretty easy access in and out. It's also helping that they've got a nice long shooting schedule (this is over 10 shooting days, and hour-long TV shows are usually on an 8 shooting day schedule), so we're not being run ragged.

Plus, this is one of the nicest crews I've worked with. Everyone's polite, relaxed and we made good time - it was only a 12 hour day.

We were still sorting out our Kino Flo order today - we have tungsten and daylight balanced tubes, and we're carrying enough tubes to do a complete swap (so we can make all the heads daylight or tungsten), but the rental house sent over too many tubes, so I was put to the job of sorting out and sending back the excess.

I was trying to explain my progress to my boss, and since he was busy with other things that were more pressing, he just said "I trust you to get it right" and walked off.

That makes me nervous. As soon as he signed off on it, that was pretty much a guarantee that I'm going to fuck it up somehow.

I had planned to go swim after work, but I got a terrible headache right at wrap and went straight home.

We're in the same area (not the same location, though) tomorrow, so maybe on my way home - since I go right by a gym with a pool.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Why?

For some inexplicable reason, Universal Studios Theme Park has a viewing station with those telescopes that cost a quarter aimed right at the lamp dock.

Why anyone would find the lamp dock worthy of three minutes and a quarter is beyond me.

Since we spent most of the day waiting on sub-rentals*, all we were doing was sitting on the liftgate, shooting the shit and putting on a really lame show for those folks feeding quarters into telescopes in the hopes of seeing something interesting.

Hopefully one of them complained to the management that the help weren't being interesting enough.

I'm off to bed - call time tomorrow is 5:30 am.



*When a rental house doesn't have a particular piece of equipment, they lease it from another rental house and give it to us to use. Rental houses hate sub-rentals since they don't make money on them.