Leave this to me, I'm a professional truck monkey

Loading a truck is a bit like playing Tetris (tm). Everything has to go in a certain way, even if we've got a 'real' truck with shelves down the sides.

The reason for this is obvious - we have to be able to work off of said truck, and if stuff's just thrown in a pile (also called 'shovel-loaded'), it's impossible to find anything quickly, and stuff gets broken in transit.

On this shoot, our 'truck' is a cargo van driven by the DP, which is carrying our stuff, a small generator, two heaters (the big ones that are the size of a small end table), a bunch of propane tanks, camera cases and grip equipment.

Needless to say, we don't have a lot of equipment, but we're all possessed of the same burning desire not to have to unload the entire van every day just to find one stand that's buried.

Unfortunately, yesterday that's exactly what we had to do, as the van was shovel-loaded really badly.

We still had to unload everything yesterday (as we used all our lights), but at least this time we got some 'alone time' to sit and think about how to load all of the stuff.

There's a thought process that happens when you have to work off of a truck every day. You really do learn how to load stuff in a sensible manner, and once we were able to sit down and hash it out "Well, let's put the stands there, and the rags here, that way we can lay the ladders down on top of it all", it went in fairly neatly at wrap, despite the lack of shelving or 'tie off' points.

I'm sure it'll come out quickly tomorrow morning.

I'm tired, and am off to bed.

Venice Beach

Taken at the graffiti Pit, where I was working today on a still shoot (I don't do very many of those) for a clothing line that I've never heard of.

Today was a good day to be at the beach - it was a gorgeous day, and winter at the beach is always way less crowded than summer.





It was warm, too, until the clouds rolled in right after lunch.

Venice Beach is always an adventure. A drunk guy threatened our art director (she just rolled her eyes at him), and a street vendor saw my walkie while I was walking to the coffee place, mistook me for an undercover police officer and followed me for a whole block while yelling "Narc! Narc!" at the top of his lungs. Production hadn't gotten the proper permits for the graffiti pit, so until it got sorted out, the site rep literally chased us off the beach.

We also had no PA's, so we had to take turns sitting with our staged equipment to make sure that it didn't get stolen.

Still, it was a very fun day. This is a four day shoot (the last day is Sunday) that's paying cash.

I LOVE cash.

I'm totally wiped out (couldn't sleep last night), so I'm off to bed.

We're in the Valley tomorrow, and we have an 8 am call.

Yeah, that was worth it.

When I'm not working, I'm always hesitant to spend money - I never know when I'll work again, and I've spent too much when work was tight before and had to make the humiliating call to my parents for emergency funds.

So, yesterday, when I was in Best Buy looking at wireless internet cards for the new laptop (The Blonde dropped the old one, so she pitched in for a used IBM on eBay), I almost bought the cheap one.

However, the lure of the instant rebate made me spend the extra 20 bucks for the extra long range, high powered wireless card.

The result? I'm getting a wireless signal in my living room. I do not have a wireless network in my house - I think I'm picking it up from one of the office buildings nearby.

It can't be someone's home DSL - it's way too fast, and despite the 'very low' signal strength, I'm surfing away just fine, thanks.

Sweeeeeet.

We'll see how long it lasts.

I'm rigging for a TV show tonight. I get to spend the entire night changing fluorescent tubes in a warehouse in the valley.

I'm going to try to take a nap.

Pre work update: The signal is coming from the Los Angeles Unified School District. When using it, I can't access Yahoo, messaging services, MySpace, or anything deemed unsuitable for schoolchildren.

Fine with me. I can use the computer in the back for that. Right now I'm playing internet radio over the smokin' fast signal.

Hey, it's almost 7 pm. The kiddies aren't there. I promise I won't eat up the free bandwidth during school hours.

Random Link

The Steadicam Operator's Manual of Style.

It reads like a textbook at first, but give it a chance - it's really funny.

On a related note, I heart me some Firefox. The Adblocker plug in rocks.

Got ads on your site? I can't see 'em now!

Were I audio blogging, you could actually hear the maniacal laughter as I see the little x's where the ads were.

I think this means I need to go outside for a while.

Friday Photo

Taken on Paramount's Stage 30.

Soul Train was a fun job today.

Turns out, Soul Train doesn't shoot once a week - they shoot two shows a day one weekend a month, so the Friday before a shoot weekend, riggers have to come in and put up the moving lights (which are an expensive rental, so they can't just hang there while the stage isn't being used. The lights that Paramount owns can stay there, because they're not costing anything). The show will shoot Saturday and Sunday, and then that'll be it until next month.

I won't be on the shoot crew, though. I just came in with the crew that was hanging the moving lights.

I gotta tell ya, though; I'm impressed that those high-heel wearing girls can dance as well as they do on that flooring - it's slicker than snot (so to speak).

Postcards from the cattle call.

I love Craig's List.

Entourage posted a notice for an open call - they were looking for 'model types' to do background work (note for non-film industry readers: an 'open' call means anyone can show up, regardless of union status, representation or lack thereof. Most casting calls are not open, and one must be referred by one's agent in order to get in).

Casting calls, while a necessary evil, can be extremely tedious. One sits in an uncomfortable chair for hours, watching a parade of people who all start to look and sound alike after the first 20 minutes. At the end of the day, one ends up with a stack of photos of a bunch of people who all continue to look alike despite the notes on the bottom of the photos ("Good energy!" "Seems fairly sane" "Bad read but looks great").

The Blonde hasn't had to cast as much as I have, so although she didn't understand my motivation for attempting to avoid it at all costs, she did understand the saving money and time part by not doing this ourselves, and we do use the same 'type' quite a bit.

We swung by the casting call, scoped out some of the women and collected phone numbers, and then left. The Blonde was bummed because there were no model-type guys (so was I, actually. Eye candy's never a bad thing).


I bowed out of the Grammy party at Paramount, mainly because I'm still really tired, but I'm also under the gun with this next project and have to work on it.

Okay, fine. I didn't have the energy to get dressed up and deal with the cluster fuck.

Plus music industry people give me indigestion (no offense to any music industry people who happen to be reading. Of course I didn't mean you).

The Blonde called last night from the party and said it was fun.

I can breathe, but I can't think.

I'd purposely waited until work slowed down to start taking the new allergy medication - trying to work with 'antihistamine head' and the accompanying delayed reaction time is miserable at best, dangerous at worst ("Look out!" "Uh, what?" :Clang: "Oh. Look out. That really hurt.").

The doctor tells me these effects are temporary, and as my body gets used to the medication, that wrapped-in-cotton feeling will go away - hence my attempt at timing. I'm hearing the next couple of weeks are going to be dead, which is just about how long I figure it will take me to get accustomed to this stuff.

Have I mentioned how happy I am to be able to breathe (and hear - the congestion had gotten so bad that I had fluid building up behind my eardrums)?


Of course, not even 12 hours after taking the first pill, I got a last minute call to work tonight, which I unfortunately had to turn down. I hate turning down work, but I'm currently not able to work safely so I'd rather stay home and work on the script for this next project*.

Even when I'm not doped up, I have a hard time with last minute night calls. They didn't bother me so much 10 years ago, but now staying up all night after not having had any sleep during the day is really difficult for me.



*Hey, Lewis Carroll churned out a masterpiece while he was on Zyrtec, right?

Oh, wait. That was opium.

Never mind.

Let's try this one more time

Here's the photo that I tried to post on Friday:

:Groan:

Blogger's gone nuts. I spent an hour trying to update my blogroll (which makes me insane - I hate the html cut/paste), only to have everything I'd done disappear.

Any changes made after Feb 2nd won't stay up - posts, template changes, etc..

I'll try again Monday - and no, I'm not really expecting this post to stay up either.

Piles and piles of them.

After my previous rant about Kino Flos and how much I hate messing with them, I got called to help wrap a car commercial this morning - just a few hours this morning to help them wrap out since there was someone else coming into the stage this afternoon.

What did I get stuck doing?

Kino Flos. For five hours, I sorted Kino Flos from four different rental packages (they used a LOT of kinos - car commercials love them because they're a soft directionless light).



Stupid poetic justice.

The one you want is always buried.

When a stage is rigged, we lay the cable down in layers, and when it's time to take the whole thing out, of course the cable that I'm trying to wrap is always at the bottom of the stack - but it tricks me; I wrap about a quarter of it, think I've got a good one and then discover that the remainder is buried under 500 lbs of cable - I then try another piece only to discover that one is buried, too.

No matter how neat everyone tries to keep everything, it always turns into spaghetti.

I've been pulling out a rig that I worked on back in the summer, and it's been fun (it's a great bunch of guys that I love to work with). After sitting on set for the past few weeks, the physical work feels good for a change.

However, I'm still suffering side effects from Thursday's food poisoning. I don't have much of an appetite, and when I do eat I don't want to eat very much.

It's actually kind of funny - I'm normally a pretty good eater, but lately I've been nibbling these Lilliputian portions of food; half a salad and a few spoons of soup, the filling of part of a sandwich, one piece of toast and half a cup of tea.

Even when I've managed to get a good amount of food down, I'm not wanting to eat very often. I had lunch (half a sandwich and two bites of salad) at noon, it's now 7:30 and I'm still not hungry. I forced down a whole turkey burger on Monday at lunch and didn't eat again until this morning.

Good side effect: weight loss

Bad side effect: exhaustion and a complete lack of strength - a serious liability when one is wrapping cable for 10 hours (which is what I did Monday).

My boss pulled me off the 'up high' team today (I don't know if it was because I was visibly struggling of if we were so successful against the spaghetti that he needed another body on the ground), and I spent the afternoon catching cable*, wrapping out some of the smaller lights, sorting the spare globes, etc.

I'm not nearly as tired tonight as I was yesterday, but I'm still pretty beat.

We're going to finish the cable tomorrow (which is my last day), and then I'm going to lay on the couch all day Thursday while I write that article (many, many thanks for everyone's input).

I'm surprised I even had the energy to type this much.


*One end of the cable is dropped out, and it's wrapped as it's sent down. The person wrapping on the ground is catching the cable. For me, catching cable is less energy-intensive than sending it out.

Call for gripes!

Well, not gripes, but I'm writing an article for an actor's magazine about what they can do to help make crew's day go smoother.

Instead of doing my usual lighting-centric thing, I thought I'd poll those of you in other departments and really make this something well-rounded.

So, aside from the obvious general advice (stay on your mark, show up on time, know your lines, lose the attitude), what department-specific advice would you give to actors?

Leave 'em in the comments or email me at randomblogmail [at] yahoo dot com.

Last day on this movie.

The last day of a movie is always filled with busy work. Stuff that got shoved somewhere in the set weeks ago has to be found, sorted (the gaffer has his own equipment, the stage has it's own equipment, and there's a rental house package as well. Over the course of a movie this all tends to get jumbled up no matter how careful you are), and packed.

Since there's a wrap crew coming in, what we had to do was pretty minimal, but it's nice to help the brothers out a bit, and production wants the gaffer's stuff off rental ASAP.

The main thing we had to do today was de-rig all the Kino Flos and change out the tubes. For the elevator and hallway sets on this movie, they used 'cool white' tubes in the kinos, which on film have a greenish tint to them (that weird color light in the parking garage scenes in Fight Club was cool white tubes). This is a great effect if you want it, but most folks carry color balanced tubes in their kinos, so they have to get changed back before they're returned.

Kino Flos are the devil - they're fluorescent lamps that are a great idea on paper (lightweight, easy to rig, nice even soft light), but are a HUGE pain in the ass in practice - they have a lot of parts to them (housing, reflector, fluorescent tubes, plastic grid which breaks easily, lamp harness, ballast, mounting plate, head feeder - all of which get lost if they're not inventoried every 90 seconds*), and since nearly everyone takes them apart (in order to tape the tubes to a wall or cannibalize for parts when the lamps break), at the end of the show, they have to be completely disassembled and sorted in order to make sure that all the parts of each lamp come from the same rental source.

What I really want to do with Kino Flos is throw them into the nearest dumpster, but I don't think the gaffer would like that. They're expensive and I'm pretty sure his insurance doesn't cover damage done by frustrated employees.

We got them all sorted and packed (except, of course, the ones that were working in the set that we were shooting. Those, the wrap crew will have to get), and it was only a 10.5 hour day - mostly due to the director needing to go to some awards ceremony right after work.


I've got a one day weekend (get up, get coffee, do laundry, script meeting for the TV show, try to clean the house, and then go back to sleep), and then I'm back to work (on something else, of course) on Monday.



* While I'm on the subject - Kino Flos are responsible for set lighting having to carry C-Stands in our rental package. I fucking hate C-Stands. They're grip stands and are designed to be versatile enough for a million uses (the name is short for "Century Stand", supposedly because there's a hundred different ways to set them up), but they're hard to set properly (if you do it wrong, the stand falls over and breaks your light) and drive electricians nuts.

What is it with me and catering trucks lately?

Thursday, I got food poisoning again. This time, I think it was the sausage.

I showed up for work at the LA Port (where they'd turned an old cruise ship terminal into JFK, since it's impossible to shoot in an airport anymore), and since I got there about 10 minutes before call time, I ate off the buffet instead of ordering from the truck (since the chefs in the truck make everything to order, this can take a few minutes and is not an option if you're cutting it close).

I was fine for about three hours, and then I started not feeling so good.

Luckily, it hit after we'd finished lighting our big shot, so I figured I'd throw up whatever it was while we were sitting around, be fine afterwards, then go back to work and no one would be the wiser - except that this time, I got dehydrated and collapsed as I was trying to wrap cable (I was afraid to drink anything in case I threw it up on set).

After a gentle admonition from my boss ("You really should tell me if you're sick"), some fluids and a nap in the truck, the medic sent me home just in time to get stuck in rush hour traffic.

Amazingly, I felt well enough this morning to come into work (at the stage again), and aside from the medic watching me like a hawk ("What did you have for lunch?" "How much water have you had?" "No, you may not have coffee."), which I appreciated (good to know someone cares - even if it was just because he didn't want to peel me off the floor again), the day went fine, although I had to pass over some of the yummier-looking stuff that crafty put out.

I'm glad I went into work today - they added a day tomorrow, so I'll get three days this week, which will just about cover what I spent in Vegas.

Yesterday: Call time: 6:30 am
Wrap time: 8:30 pm (although I got sent home around 5 pm)

Today: Call time: 8:30 am
Wrap time: 10:00 pm

One well placed bomb would have meant you'd have to read for entertainment.

I just got back in from Vegas - I'm exhausted.

Conventions are all about connections, so in addition to pacing the floor all day (and the Mandalay Bay convention center is HUGE), it's vital that one go to the bar after the convention closes to network.

Since all of the heavy hitters were staying at THEHotel, that lounge was the place to be - The Blonde and I circulated and chatted like crazy and gave out all our cards and flyers (jokes about the name of the hotel provided an instant icebreaker, for which I was thankful). Most of the executives, while a bit defensive inside the convention, loosened up considerably once they got to the bar.

If someone thought our show wasn't a good fit for them, they'd yell across the packed bar to someone they knew - "Hey, Pete! Come here and listen to what they've got!", and Pete would come running to hear what we had to say. This is the only time I've ever seen television executives like this. Normally, they seem to be afraid of new shows. Must be something in the water.

Craziness.

Although nothing is ever a lock until you're actually on the air (so hold the congrats), we're reasonably certain that we've sold the show to a cable network.

The only problem now is my bar tab. I had to buy drinks for way too many people. I'm broke for the next month.


I have a 6 am call tomorrow (across town, of course), so I'm off to bed.