When... does the hurting... stop?

So, yeah. Electricians and grips work hard. By the end of the Killing Ariel shoot, I was moving slower and slower each day. I think my body was starting to give out on me. I know for a fact that my immune system shut down, because I've been sick with a damn cold for a week now. After a few days of rest, I'm starting to recover, and it's time to start thinking about the future!

First, I wanna share a few more pics from Killing Ariel, just to show you, my faithful and beloved readers, what I've been up to. Shortly after my last blog post, we packed up and moved out to the San Bernadino mountains, in the vacinity of Silverwood Lake, to shoot some car scenes. To do this, we rented a professional car trailer rig, as can be seen in the following shots.

This is the car, a Porsche 912, sitting on the trailer. You can see our camera pointing through the driver side window, and two of our 1200 watt lights aimed to fill in the driver's face a bit. In the background on the left you can just barely see Silverwood Lake:

A different angle on the whole rig. The damn thing musta been 60 feet long all told; it was huge. You can't see the truck that's pulling it too clearly, but that's what the next shot is for:

This is the truck that pulls the whole thing, with our most essential crew members on board:

So yeah, the professionals have just a slightly more sophisticated way of doing these shots than we used on LoE, but I remain proud of our innovative solution nonetheless:

Later we were shooting a scene that occurs on the side of the road at night. We had the road blocked off by the police, so we just occupied the whole thing, which was nice. In order to light up such a big area, though, we had to break out the big gun: a 6,000 watt HMI PAR we rented just for the occasion. That sucker is DAMN BRIGHT, lemme tell ya. We bounced it off an 8 x 8 sheet of giffolyn, which is a nylon-reinforced plastic tarp. We suspended it on two of our tallest stands, called Mombo Combos. It worked remarkably well.

If it doesn't look very safe to you, well, it isn't. I don't have any pictures of this, but the next day we set up a very similar configuration, but this time the wind kicked up. A gust of wind caught that griffolyn like a sail and it pulled the two Mombo Combos down, right onto the 6k light. It was like one of those disasters you see on RealTV, where you just suddenly see this huge thing collapsing and people running around and shouting. The crash ended up breaking the globe in the 6k light, but we were able to cut power to it quickly. We had replacement globes, but the gaffer decided not to replace it because some of the internal components had been knocked around inside the light housing. So that ended up being our biggest semi-disaster of the whole shoot. Nobody was hurt or anything, by the way, but the sound mixer's car happened to be under the griffolyn when it came down, and he lost his radio antenna in the ensuing crash. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

Last Sunday, we set up for a bluescreen shot with the same car. I'd never done any bluescreen stuff before, so it was pretty educational. We had a huge 30' by 50' bluescreen that we had to hoist on three huge stands behind the car. We lit the screen itself with a bunch of KinoFlo lights, then lit the car itself normally:

The setup might look kinda messy, but it came out looking good on the monitor. At least, the background behind the actors seemed to be a solid, uninterrupted blue. I'm definately going to be interested in seeing how this looks when it's all composited together:

One last pic I wanna share, although it's not strictly movie-related. As I was heading home at 4 a.m. from our desert shoot in the mountains, I got onto highway 18, the Rim of the World highway, which heads down the face of the San Bernadino mountains into San Bernadino itself. As I got onto the road, I looked over and gasped in astonishment - the smog layer had vanished, and I was presented with an astonishing view of the city below! I had to take some pictures, if only to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy, and because it's such a rare event:

Anyway, we wrapped up production on Wednesday, so I'm officially out of a job again. The work schedule was so demanding that I haven't even cashed most of my paychecks yet, because I literally had no free time. We'd work 12 or 13 or 14 hours, I'd drive home at 4 or 5 in the morning, pass out, sleep 8-9 hours, wake up, drive back, and start working again. But now that I'm free (and slowly recovering) it's time to get on with some other things.

As far as Land of Entrapment goes, there's still a bit of editing I have to do before I turn it over to the sound guys. I'm thinking I can get most of that done in the next couple weeks, if I really put my mind to it. There's just a couple things I need to return to Abq to film, like a good establishing shot of Anodyne and the "pizza guy getting shot" bit, and then I'll be pretty close to calling the video side of things complete. Then we still gotta do sound, which is prolly gonna take awhile... I'm starting to doubt that we'll be done for Sept. like I was hoping. Might be more like a Christmas release, or something. Bleh. Anyway, we'll get it done sooner or later. Keep checking back here for updates!