Stunts ahoy!

Stunt days are usually slow for us. We light the shot, and then read the newspaper while the stunt guys do… stunt stuff.

Especially in light of recent train track events, stunt people are very resistant to being rushed. The set up takes as long as it takes, and if you don’t like it feel free to stroll over to crafty and help yourself to a big cup of shut the fuck up.

So most of yesterday was sitting and waiting for the stunts to get set up.

To these particular stunt guys credit, they moved pretty fast, but we still had a 14 hour day.

Which was fine with me, since it’s going to be completely dead in about a week.
Our last shot was inside a hallway of an empty building in an office park. It was another stunt, so we were in there well past dark.

When we stepped outside, we heard this:

Night music from Peggy Archer on Vimeo.

Frogs. Such a strange thing to hear in drought stricken Southern California. Not at all unpleasant, mind you, just odd.

Call time: 7 am.

Wrap time: 10 pm.

Filed under: locations, Work, frogs, lake, night, office park, sounds, stunts

Friday Photo

Update: Posted this on Thursday. I lost a day in there somewhere. I really have no idea how that happened.

When warning labels rage out of control:

I get padding the pointy parts of the helicopter when the film crew is around. We’re clumsy and prone to not looking where we’re going.

I can’t help but imagine that the pilot knows damn well to remove those things before flight. Also, you know how people run to the helicopter and duck to avoid the spinning rotor blades?

They’re nuts. Those things are scary and not very far off the ground. I’m not going anywhere near the damn helicopter until they’ve stopped spinning.

Filed under: hazardous, locations, Photos, Work, flying, helicopter, label, location, Los Angeles, movie, safety, stunts

Weekends can be dangerous

Some locations are only available on the weekends.

Parking garages in business parks, for example. Not shootable on weekdays when workers fill the spaces, but on weekends, they’re a wasteland just begging for some stunt driving, which is what we were shooting on Saturday.

This particular parking garage was in Santa Clarita, which, if you’re not familiar with Southern California geography, is north of the city and approximately three degrees cooler than the surface of the sun. It was so hot up there that I stopped having to pee despite drinking copious amounts of water all day. I’d just go to the bathroom for the opportunity to make a big puff out of toilet paper and desperately dab at whichever body part I could easily reach in a futile attempt to dry off.

We were shooting on the lower levels of the parking garage and were all very grateful for the cover provided by the roof. It was hot inside (and full of exhaust fumes, of course), but not nearly as hot as it was outside with the sun beating down and reflecting off the acres of cement and steel. Near the end of the day there was a shot on the roof of the garage (involving a helicopter and gunfire) but as we didn’t light it (a wide shot during a day exterior means little, if any lighting) our boss was the only one who had to be up there. Poor guy.

Despite the heat and the humidity (storms over the desert, while they’ve given us some lovely puffy clouds in the sky, have made it feel like Miami around here) the day went fairly smoothly – since we were doing driving shots all day the lighting was fairly simple and there’s a huge difference between the ‘artiste’ type of director and stunt directors. Stunt directors just want to get the stuff shot and move on so they can get their day while the drivers are still fairly alert.

Even the fairly simple stunts take a lot of time to set up, rehearse and shoot (and it’s not possible to rush stunt people) so we had a 14 hour day. In one of nature’s cruel jokes, just as we were leaving the temperature dropped and a nice refreshing cool(ish) breeze picked up.

Filed under: locations, Work, cars, driving, heat, hot, stunts, summer, sweat, weather, Work