Lights! Camera! Traction! (Part 2)

Sorry this post is appearing later in the day than our normal 5 a.m. publishing time, but (as I mentioned on Tuesday) I’ve been working! Not only have I been working, but I’ve been working 16-17 hour days on my feet. So, when I got home last night at 10:30 and realized I had to write a post, I decided that I would call an audible and hope to have a minute to write something today. I do and I am. I still want to do a good, long, funny/thought provoking post about the whole experience, but today is not the day.

Where as on Monday we were doing a cheesy, comedy shoot about the perfect lover, Tuesday and Wednesday saw me assisting with a shoot (with the same company) in Koreatown. This short was about the supposed, seedy underbelly of the honey industry. This shoot had it all… bee hookers, honey-dripping sex dens, drug dealers in bee suits… it was pretty wild…. though extremely gratifying. All the work I had done before this week to prep for these shoots totally paid off. There were several props that I had crafted that I was told wouldn’t be needed… and then they totally were and I looked like a genius. Plus, I did some cool stuff on the fly that read wonderfully on film. It is really cool to see a prop that you found at a yard sale for $1 become the perfect piece for a scene.

Here we see one of our actors doing an “anonymous” interview:

The whole gag is that they are discussing something super serious, yet dressed in ridiculous bee costumes. I supposed you probably guessed that. It’s kind of like a mash-up of The Wire and The Bee sketch from classic SNL. For another example of just how ludicrous this was, here is the set-up of a scene we did where bee prostitutes are pouring honey onto a “john”. I can only show the set-up because the actual scene reads a little pornographic in the photo I took.

The shoot was long and prop-heavy. There was a ton of set dressing to do and I’m also doing craft services, payroll, running on-the-spot errands, and assisting every department as needed. I also had to load and unload all of the above… so, you can see why I was a little reluctant to write last night.

Today, we’re shooting in Hollywood at a green screen facility… which is super cool. The shoot is a send-up of animal conditions on Noah’s Ark. It is just so cool to see everything it takes to make something like this happen. There are so many components and I am super impressed at how well this team of strangers has gelled into a unit. I’m going to miss these people after this week! But, I (hopefully) won’t be missing some of them for long as the Director of Photography approached me and asked if I would help her produce a music video!!! Work begets work after all! There may be a scheduling conflict, but I thought that was pretty cool. Here is a picture from the set: