To Sleep

Night shoots are wonderful because you can sleep in late and still have plenty of time to get to work.  Night shoots are awful because later on in the middle of the night, no matter now tired you are you can’t sleep.

During a night shoot, the six to eight hours after lunch (or dinner, really—or who knows what meal, because you eat it at anywhere from nine pm to twelve am to 2 am, depending on your call time) are the hardest for me.  Time seems to stretch out and slow down until the hours ahead of me before wrap appear to become an impossible infinity.  Wrap seems to be so far into the future that one doubts it will ever happen.

By the second half of the day (or rather night), most likely all my crazy, flat-out running to get work done and put out fires is over.  The conflagrations have been extinguished and the set has been established, meaning not much is allowed to change, paint-wise.

Of course every show is different.  Sometimes the DP will have me going in to paint shadows or dull down hot spots pretty much constantly all day (or night).  On this show, however, the pattern is to get the set ready, then lighting is adjusted to work around hot spots or shadows.  This leaves me with not much to do after the first rushes of the earlier part of the day, unless our on set dresser or props needs my help.

Today I helped them hang Christmas lights in driving rain and hail, move furniture in and out of the set to make room for changing camera set ups, and washed windows.  But that was hours ago and now I am trying to keep warm and not become obsessed by time’s elasticity.  I am very tired.  It won’t serve me to think about everything we have to do at wrap just to get out of here, or the hour long drive home after that.

I shiver, wonder if I should risk going back to crew parking to get my heaviest jacket from my truck (a good way to ensure they call me into set—-when I’m a mile away).  I decide maybe I can go inside the basement of the house where we are filming.  Nobody is in there; everybody is upstairs, somehow squeezed into three tiny rooms snaked with cables and blocked in by chairs, monitors and lights.

The basement is a dark, moldy, cobwebby space stuffed with old junk, paint and props, and I am sure many species of spiders have made their homes on the walls and ceiling.  In fact, it is a repulsive, disgusting space, probably perfect habitat for deadly brown recluse spiders.  But it is warm, and that causes it to glow with a deep attractiveness in this dark, frigid night.

Earlier in this shift, a couple of hours before sunset, it was 60 degrees and bright sun with a huge rainbow that arched over the house next door and brought out the crew’s cell phone cameras.  Now clouds scud through constantly, drilling us with rain and hail every ten or fifteen minutes.

Weather here in the Northwest—-it changes every few minutes and runs the gamut.  Why didn’t I just bring my heavy jacket in from the beginning?  When will I learn to cope with this weather?  I listen to channel one while I fret about coats and cold nights.

It’s easy to keep track of the movie as it is being created, though, and this is a great thing.  I listen and wait for “new deal”, and “moving on”, or “next set up”, and then I go inside the set to pitch in, to move set dressing and director’s chairs around in a musical chairs dance with camera, then step out after doing our work.  There are always other tasks that need doing, as well.

This time we cleaned a large glass door frantically, polishing the last few square inches of foggy surface to a clean shine, then stepping out of frame at the same second the first AD called “Rolling!”

To be able to do that reliably, to step out at exactly the last moment after finishing your little job on set is a sign that you know your way around the Business of shooting a film.  It carries a certain sense of satisfaction and forms a rhythm that helps this long, cold night finally begin moving toward wrap and home and sleep.

Solitude at the Next Set

A long day today, all of it spent painting, although not on set.  I have been fixing up the house next door to today’s set, readying it for when we move back here tomorrow.  I have been listening in on my radio, though, the rhythm of the first AD and his compadres’ chatter keeping me in the loop as I roll walls with primer and later, as I place dozens of silk flowers in the front yard, making them look like freshly planted rows of accent blooms.

I had a blog entry for today already written out in longhand, but left it with my clipboard back at the house that is going to be our set tomorrow.   And now, with my brain on idle after my long drive home, I can only muster these few lines as a poor substitute for a cogent essay on night filming.

That essay will appear next week, and until then, I am working and trying to get my blessed four to five hours of sleep for every twenty four.  But I love the work, even though this show, disappointingly, is one of those where I am not particularly close to the DP or the director—it happens, but I don’t have to like it.  I much prefer being called in to tweak this and that every few shots, making a contribution to the effort that is visible and more part of the shooting team.

However, in my solitude at the house today, I enjoyed the artistic flower arranging and there is satisfaction in getting work done, whether or not anybody is there to notice it.  I’m not scenic-ing anything, just painting walls with primer for a brief shot or two that we couldn’t fit in last week.

It’s certainly not glamour on this show, but it is still great—it’s a movie and I enjoy the crew, the camaraderie, and the creation of a new reality from words on a page.

It’s magic.

The Bridge That Never Was

One day into shooting this latest show, a sweetly inspiring TV movie, and I have been laid low, driven down to the depths of desolation by the dreaded Sorry Syndrome. I’ve mentioned this debilitating constellation of negativities in earlier posts, giving it a name (for which I intend to claim credit once psychology catches up with my description and discovery of the causes of this syndrome): the feeling so very sorry for oneself, the sudden bursts of defensive anger (usually experienced only internally, never expressed outright, but seething with poison inside one’s body), and the nagging suspicion that one is, in the final analysis, a whimpering, hopeless toad of fate.
I don’t know what that last means, but the toad phrase somehow gets at the feeling I’m trying to convey right now. With apologies to toads everywhere.
The Sorry Syndrome doesn’t usually present itself until after weeks of sleep deprivation, backbreaking labor, and “situation critical’ levels of non-stop stress. This time I only worked a few days before the horrific Syndrome set in.
Of course these past few days have been a marathon of activity, hurrying, and paradoxically, great attention to detail—checking figures, scales, measurements dozens of times, at least once or twice for each tiny piece of a 20 foot long mural of Portland.
I promised I’d have it finished in three days, then four, and then, around 8:00 pm on the fourth, supposedly finish day of the mural, I got bamboozled by a bridge.
“Bamboozle”, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary means: “to confuse, frustrate, or throw off thoroughly or completely.” This bridge was of necessity blown up from the original artwork via an overhead projector, but unfortunately by the time it was scaled up and then blown up, the girders and support structure of the bridge became a sort of abstract hound’s-tooth pattern. The bridge is real, it is a major feature of Portland’s cityscape, and it should have been accurate, but large black masses and pools of white highlights just hinted at the real steelwork of the bridge.
I thought I shouldn’t try to guess, especially when it was already late, a third twelve hour day, and I had no internet out where I was working to download better, more up close and personal photos of the bridge in question.
I stared at the projection in the dark and felt the hideous despair of not meeting my deadline, my promises broken. Should I stay up all night just making up large sections of the bridge (which was in the absolute foreground of the huge mural), and then go to work at the set directly from the paint shop? I’d done it before, and could do it again, but at the cost of a hugely compromised bridge—could I live with that?
Luckily for me the thing didn’t play for another week and a half, so I resolved, with the production designer, to give it up and get some sleep (it tuned out to be around 2 hours’ worth) before I had to get up and go to set for the first day of filming and my job as standby painter for the show, and deal with the rest of the mural later—putting another four to eight hours of addtional work into it to finish the bridges the right way.
While most other painters dread the pressure and craziness of the set during filming, to me it is much more fun than trying to beat the clock with a huge, unidentifiable structure faintly and only partially broadcast on to my painting surface, trading off more quality as I had less time and information to work with…
As it turned out, I concentrated on the set work and someone else finished the bridge, and they in fact improvised a great deal of the bridge structural details. I don’t know if I was relieved to see this when the day came and I saw the finished mural (my thought: “I actually could have done that myself in the time I had left, if I had known it would be okay to guess at so much of the bridge detail”), or if I was upset (my thought: “I actually could have done that myself in the time I had left, if I had known it would be okay to guess at so much of the bridge detail”).
Whatever. I have learned not to be attached to the things I create. After all, film is the ultimate collaborative creative endeavor. But the deadline thing—I will always fear and loathe that feeling of failure, when I gave up and went home. And of course the wretched situation triggered the now raging Sorry Syndrome which may very well play out during the entire remainder of this show, no matter how much sleep I get over the next weekend.
I can only hope that my dreams will not be forever haunted by the bridge that never was…

A Short Update

Just a short note to let you know that I have been away on a road trip, and then I jumped aboard the show I have been trying for, and it has been a crazy ride so far.  Monday I will be back with news from the front, and stories to tell.  It’s good to be working again, but not so good to sleep less than five hours a night.  Of course it has always been a part of the job, and I can’t figure out why I still get surprised by the sleep deprivation aspect.