Peter, meet Paul. He’ll be paying you. Maybe.

At the start of this show, we were told that we’d have no swing sets. Ever. For any reason. So, of course, for our last episode, we have four really big swing sets. Since our stage is 200 feet long by 100 feet wide, and it’s 44.5 feet from the floor to the perms, we’ve had some problems with power. Not that we haven’t got power available, it’s just the cable – or lack thereof.

The head of the waterfall (the cable that comes up from the dimmer packs on the floor to the perms) is at one end of the stage, and our swing sets are at the other.

So that’s  40ish feet up the perms, and then 5ish feet to the ‘head’ of the waterfall, and then 2 pieces of 100 foot cable to get to the new set that’s on the other side of the stage long-ways, and then another 30ish feet of cable down to the pipe grid where the lights are.

The thing about powering lights is that you can’t ever have a cable connection in the air – you can have one on the deck of the perms or at the light itself, but nothing in between.

Why? Because if something is going to go wrong, it’s going to happen at the connector and if that connector is 10 feet above the lights we can’t get to it without really making a spectacle of ourselves, and no one wants that. So, if I can’t get to the grid with what I have leftover, I have to add cable.

We don’t have any more cable, and because of the budget crackdown, we can’t order more.

Even if we could, getting cable up to the perms is an ordeal – we have to rent the winch from the lamp dock, have the grips go out into the ozone (as in off the walkways) to hang the pulley from the pick point (which is right over one of our sets), and then spend an hour or so hauling cable up to the perms. Don’t tell me we can haul it up by hand. That shit is heavy. Imagine hauling 70 lbs up a line to the roof of a two-story building. Now do it 30 more times and then work for another 12 hours.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

So we figure out where we can steal power from the standing sets, and now we’re on the hunt for stingers because we’re out of those as well.

Only to have the DP stand in the set that’s in the shitty far away corner of the stage  and demand two more lights.  At the top of the list of things one simply can’t do is to tell the DP that he or she can’t have a light rightfuckingnow.  Even nice DPs don’t react well to the word ‘no’.

We all looked around in a panic and then figured out that the set we need the lights in won’t shoot until Friday, so we can steal power at the end of the day on Thursday.

Two more wake-ups and then we wrap. At least gravity will be working in our favour when we drop the stuff to the floor.

Filed under: rants, studio lots, Work, heavy, hello, lifting, reality, swing sets

I haven’t spent an entire day lifting cable in some time.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s good because, well, I haven’t had to lift cable in quite some time, and bad because the only thing that gets one fit for lifting cable is lifting cable. Last I checked, they don’t have a 4/0 machine at the gym.

I got a call from the union hall (haven’t had one of those for a while) to wrap a location yesterday at one of our local sports arenas. Arenas are great because they have nice wide ramps and large freight elevators, but bad because most rigging gaffers feel the need to run cable all the way around said arena.

As most arenas are not small,  that’s a lot of cable.

I don’t have any problems pulling (rolling the stretched out cable into a coil – it’s called pulling because one straddles the cable and pulls it into a coil while it’s flat on the ground) cable. I can use the overdeveloped swimmer’s muscles on my back all damn day – plus it increases my sprint speed in the pool, so everybody wins.

What hurts me is lifting the cable – and moving cable from one place to the other is just about the same as it’s always been.

One picks up the 100+ lb coil of cable. One deposits said coil onto some sort of wheeled contraption. Then, one wheels the cable to the truck and lifts it again.

Coil, lift, drop. Coil, lift, drop. Coil, lift, drop. Lunch (light, unless you want to puke while you’re lifting), then repeat.

We were very, very lucky that the temperature stayed relatively low at 78 degrees, so the heat wasn’t the factor that it will be later in the year.

After we finished loading the truck, the best boy asked me if I wanted to unload the truck at the lot today.

I was sore, but work is work – and these are really nice guys that I’d love to call me back again, so of course I said yes.

The sequence for unloading the truck is just about the same for loading it, but without the coiling part.

Lift, drop, count, lift. Lift, drop, count, lift. Lift, drop, count, lift. Lunch (light, unless you want to puke while you’re lifting),  repeat.

Someday I’m going to produce a ‘Get Fit With Cable’ exercise video and make a mint.

Or not. The shipping costs would kill any profit margin.

Since I haven’t been doing many cable lifts lately, I started to hurt a little bit before lunch on Thursday, and really, really started to hurt before lunch today.

Right after lunch, we found out we had to rig two sets, which was a bit of a relief as it would allow me to use different muscles for a couple of hours.

By the time we were dismissed, I was filthy, smelly and sore. I briefly considered going to the Korean spa and soaking myself in the hot tub, but settled for  take-out (I am so not cooking tonight) and got the side-eye from just about everyone in the place.

Fuck them. I’m eating dinner after enjoying a very hot shower and a smearing of the biceps with ointment.

Filed under: crack of dawn, locations, long long drives, studio lots, Work, cable, heat, heavy, labor, lifting, muscle, Paramount, Work