April Showers

...bring high water bills in May. Or so they say.

We're drenched. It's rained so damn much on this shoot, but tonight it was a downpour. The little tent area where makeup and sfx make their homes was literally flooded, an inch plus of standing water that simply could not be absorbed by the waterlogged ground. I'm happy I spent the $150 on new waterproof boots in March.

I'm beyond tired. I'd been trying to wean myself from the set, by slowly introducing two of my staff into the roles of on-set dresser and propmaster. Didn't work. The second unit used some of our props, and f'd up one of them -- without telling us. When it played back on A Unit, no one noticed that it was in the wrong configuration -- I didn't notice because I wasn't there, I was off set working on some web site props. The two folks on A Unit didn't notice because they didn't see what B Unit was shooting. Our script supervisor didn't notice, because she wasn't on B Unit -- no one was doing scripty for B Unit. Finally one of the grips (!) casually mentioned to me that the prop was wrong. I ran in, and sure enough, they'd done nine takes on three setups with the wrong prop. I told the director, who was furious. So now I need to be on set at all times -- I've taken over propmaster duties in addition to being Art Director and Production Designer.

Of course, this limits my ability to do any kind of swing work, and invariably I get dragged into set dressing too.

Today someone moved one of the props (a hero cell phone). I was pretty livid, but didn't say anything (other than griping in my blog). It took about an hour to find it, and the director was none too happy about that amount of time, as he wants the phone for himself when we wrap.

Tomorrow is going to be rough. The producers told us today to expect 16 hours of shooting, followed by a full company move. I generally arrive four hours before call, so it's looking like (another) 24 hour day for me. Ostensibly Tuesday is our off day, but I have five setups to have ready for Wednesday's call, so I might have to push on and prep those, followed by another 12 hours of shooting. I always thought when I became a department head my life would get easier, not harder...

Impressed some of the kids today by calculating how far off the lightning was (counting the time between the flash and the thunder). One insisted that light and sound travel at the same speed... and we wonder why the US is falling behind in science...