The Difference

On Thursday night I was driving home along Hollywood Blvd from the WeHo Stitch 'n' Bitch (hi!), musing about freelancing and my impending job in New York. I noticed something that will be familiar to crew on bigger shoots than I work on: a yellow corrugated plastic sign that said:

[name of show]
<-----------

That's how you know where to park, find crafty, etc. On the shows I work on, there aren't enough spare PA's to put up the signs, or enough money to make the signs. They call us and tell us to hang a left at the tree that looks like the Fun Fruits tree.

Then I noticed something else that will be familiar to those who work on more well-endowed shows than I: a Shotmaker! It's a big pickup truck with steel-pipe cages welded all over it. You can tie down a camera to any one of the cages and shoot a moving vehicle from the front, the side, or the rear. These guys were driving down the boulevard with three motorcycle cops in front, and they were shooting back at a black Hummer with two actors in the front. There were two HD cameras in the Shotmaker, with four guys paying attention to them.

Let me describe a strikingly similar moving shot I got last fall: The lead character was being chased down a nighttime street by his landlord. Perfect time to break out the Shotmaker. We had a Ford Windstar. We put up the hatch, the DP hung his legs out the back with the Arri SR3 in his lap, I scrunched in beside him, the gaffer scrunched in the other side with a cup light, and the director hung back over the middle seat. We waited for a break in traffic, pulled onto Manhattan Ave. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and shot until too many cars piled up behind us, or we saw cops.

I do want to work on shoots with big toys, with cranes instead of jibs and real pyrotechnics, but I would miss the good ol' just-bungee-it-to-the-skateboard, where's-the-duct-tape days. Power to the people, yo.