Penske, Uhaul, Penske, Uhaul, one after the other. This was not a good sign. The generator came in last. It was a beast (1200 amps). You can normally tell how hard the day is going to be by the size of the generator. This didn't bode well for us electrics. After production lined the trucks up behind the bar/restaurant the staff pointed to which ones were ours. Wait! No grip truck? No lift gate? Apparently their brand new truck broke down somewhere between us and the last crew leaving them no choice but to dump all of the gear into rentals on their day off. We were episode two of eight. This show just got a lot longer for the road warriors following it. Luckily we just had to get through the night.
We dug out the aisle quickly with no real attention paid to how it was all packed. This would come back to bite us on the ass later - later being 6AM. The self appointed best boy and I got to laying some cable. In my opinion he was the VIP of the night. He did the heavy work of arming us with juice for the condor and ground work for the second half of the day. I cabled the inside for the first set up and staid near the gaffer for any last minute tweaks.
We were up and shooting within two hours and the DP was pleased with the look. I took my first water break of the night and went outside to see how the key grip was handling the condor rig. As you can see below he had it all under control.
Three 6k space lights hanging ten feet out from the bucket. He dropped a vertical 8ft piece of speed rail down for each light to support the bottom in case the wind picked up. In the back behind one of the food trucks we hoisted up three source 4s for backlights. On the ground for frontal fill we rolled around two arri T5s with medium chimeras.
The rest of this set up was actually pretty intricate. It took two of our guys several hours to rig out the food trucks with kinos.
The greasy interior made it impossible to use tape. This type of delicate work always becomes tedious. Just when they finished up lighting all three trucks production came outside to shoot. LUNCH!
The hard work of the night was over. Now we just had to wait for them to finish so we could break it all down. Everyone from the show was great to work with and despite all of the challenges no one butted heads. 6AM came slowly, but it came. The door on the last truck rolled down, we turned in our time cards, shook hands and drove home. I know tomorrow I'm going to be sore, but I have the day off.
Go 49ers and all my friends working the NOLA super bowl!
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