Monday, August 17, 2009

Sacrificing The Art - Chapter Four / Part 2- A Drunk A.D and A Slowly Swelling Eye

I’m driving the forty five minute route to the location and my eye was really starting to bother me. I’ve never had a stye but I’m going to assume my eye hurt like that of a stye. My stomach was growling as it had for the past 48 hours and counting.

I showed up on the set looking for something to eat. 

Crackers. 

Cheerwine. 

Water. 

Hot beer and microwaveable cheeseburgers--- 

Shit-- all of it. That day, the menu didn’t matter. I heated up the cancerous celled toxic cheeseburger and chugged a Cheerwine for my morning caffeine rush. I didn’t speak to anybody but the Director and went right to work. My Camera Assist was there with my daily Adderall. I was working on two days with less than 5 hours of sleep so I felt the caffeine may not last me the duration I needed. The first scene of the day was the good guys bringing one of the bad guys into the mold infested basement. The first set up was simple. One of the actors puts the bad guy over his shoulder and walks across the room, dropping him in a metal chair. We shot nine takes of it. From still camera flashes going off, to LATE crew and cast barging in upstairs making enough noise to wake a 90 year old, to lights being in frame, the day did not get started very good. My eye was getting worse and worse with every squint and bead of sweat leaking into it. I stepped off the set for the first of many 15 minute breaks to wring out my sweat drenched shirt. I walked by the computer table to find six half drank soda cans surrounding my two $4000 computers. On top of that the computers’ AC adapters looked like a noodle salad resting right on the edge of the table. There are light stands and lights on the ground underneath the Logger’s feet. I go looking for the A.D. Can’t find him so I have the Director’s brother, (one of the money guys,) and have him put a sign on the CPU table that stated, “NO FUCKING CANS OF ANY SORTS ON EDIT TABLE.” 

I walked up to the lunch table to find the A.D talking with one of the Actors. The two had a cup of beer or a cup of piss in their hand. (The Home Owner had locked us out of the upstairs that morning because crew men were caught the day before watching his Friends Box Set while the real crew was down stairs working.)  I said nothing. It didn’t matter. It was clear by this time that we didn’t really have an AD. Granted, we had “titled” somebody that but who were we fooling? The AD is normally the “asshole” on the set and I had clearly made a name for myself as that early into the shoot. I had already done the call sheets and called all the actors to brief them on times, location and wardrobe for the first week and we had no trouble getting them there. The A.D we hired or should we say titled was more a Producer, Location Manager and Logistics Guy. He was a creative guy who really knew how to fix anything and always came up with resourceful ways to fix problems we ran into along the way. Unless he could fix my eye, there was nothing he could do at the moment. He would come in real handy in a couple of days. For now, he was doing his job. I stepped back in the “oven” to shoot. From that moment on, I referred to me as the “Drunk AD” which was a reference to where I would like to be rather than being the “DP” that’s sober and sick of being “basemented.” Despite my nerve racking OCD about my gear poking at my focus on the matter at hand, the shooting was phenomenal. Every angle I shot on the “dark wall” without the drywall was fantastic. I had some dutch angles that put one bad guy in the foreground and the other in the background that were remarkable. The silver covered air ducts above the actors glowed with rich blues. The cinder blocked wall behind the subjects illuminated purple mixing into orange to convey electrical lights in the corner. The Director watched out his monitor, praising my every shot knowing I had thrown out his shot list for this scene that rivaled (in pages,) that of most Medical reference books. I began cutting in camera again and knocking off shots of pure brilliance for what we had to work with. As the day went on despite the quality footage I was capturing, the walls in that basement were becoming smaller and smaller. The heat of the 36 hours down there began to rash my skin. I had never been claustrophobic but something about the prolonged time down there began to get to me mentally. My volume and growl raised amps at a time. My temper grew shorter and shorter and the crud, sweat and heat punished my vulnerable eye like a Chinese Water Torture. I had gotten to the point where I just wanted to cut it out and be done with it.

The last hour of the shoot on Day 3 found us at about 9 pm. Nearly, 14 hours of the “oven,” and the weariness of the dislodging of my gear all over a small Shelby Farm was about all I could take and we still weren’t finished. My skin crawled. Anger clouded my mind and there was still the biggest day down there.... The BIG FINAL SCENE to do the day after. So we’re down to the final setup. I was laying on the floor, shooting a couple of low angle shots where we had a couple of key shots where the actors talk “under their breath,” so clean audio was of the essence. The audio, I never worried about as long as my Camera Assist was running it. He had the boom mic and headphones and was not only a Pro Tools Professional but also a Hip Hop Artist so he could hear a penny drop in the next county through those cans where as I can barely hear when my wife is screaming at me from the next room. (They may be what they call selective hearing too.) It’s renowned that I’m very hard of hearing. From years of utilizing Surround Sound to watch films, to beating on drums, to listening to Pantera at volumes that added “wear and tear” to my ear bones, I was half deaf and not very good with multi-tasking to boot. So shooting camera and monitoring sound was not a good idea. I was cutting the film too, so I couldn’t be mad at anybody but myself if I had taken on that responsibility as well. So I depended on him. If he said the take had good sound, it had good sound, period. 

So when Take One of the final set-up began and the first take was the best, BUT one of the actor’s lines was stomped on by a slow, long, rising growl of my hungry stomach, it was heart breaking. I had eaten lunch eight hours before, why would my stomach be growling, right? On the second take we got the same results so I calmly asked for two minutes where I asked somebody to go to the lunch table and get me something to whiff down real fast to stop the problem so we could wrap Day 3 up. Our Slate slash Makeup guy came back with, “this is all I could find.” 

He handed me two packs of crushed Saltine Crackers. I then asked for ten more minutes. All the stress and bullshit of the past three days, (basemented aside,) spewed out of my pores. I handed the camera to my Camera Assist and walked outside without saying a word, only stopping by the Edit table to again remove two half cans of soda from the Editing Table while my Logger was watching Indiana Jones on one of computers instead of doing his job.

Trounced outside to the cool evening air. I didn’t noticed how nice it was this time, walking past four crew men all enjoying a cold Budweiser.

“Wow,” under my breath as I passed them into the field and in cool Tom Cruise fashion from a scene in ‘Rain Man’ screams at the world: “SUNUVABITCH!!!!!,” I began to yell. Although I think I said something much worse.

Minutes before I explode at the end of Day 3.


The Story Continues with Chapter Five - The Importance of Fuel

Posted via email from Diary of A Shoot Stuff Guy

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