D1s

As of Sunday, D1s were officially over. They were amazing! They were so much more fun and less stressful than I ever expected. I had a blast! 

To bring you up to speed, Key Grip wasn't that bad. My gaffer and I loaded everything into the truck in 27 minutes, which is basically record speed, and basically means we're amazing. There's something about wrapping the Grip truck that's just so exciting.

It's one of these huge trucks, and all of the lights, flags, bounces, gear, the dolly, and anything and everything else you need to make a movie goes on. 

Not the actors, though. Just the stuff.

Anyway, it usually takes 45 minutes to an hour to wrap the truck, and anytime I'm wrapping, I just get this rush of adrenaline. It's really the strangest thing, but I get really pumped up. So when we did this in 27 minutes, I was so excited.

We got the dolly up the ramp in, like, one push and from there on out, I was working in warp speed.

But moving on.

I finished out the D1 cycle doing production design on a science lab show, and it was very cool. We had this awesome Chemistry guy who came in and told us what would look normal. He also wrote all of these awesome equations and little virus pictures on the glass for us, brought in bright blue reagents and these crazy contraptions that spin around to mix up the fluid, and gave me a little cooler of dry ice to use. It was really amazing.

The day after that, I was script supervisor, which is the person who watches Video Village to see what the camera is filming, and keeps a record of how long the takes were, where the actors were looking, what the color looked like, how much of the script was covered, and more. 

I like the job, but it turns out I'm not so good at it. It was fun, though, and I think I could get better with practice. Not that I'll be getting any more of that any time soon.

Anyway, it's amazing to think that I worked on 14 movies. I can't wait until the screening in December. It's so crazy to think about what I know now, that I didn't know a few months, or even weeks, ago. 

I was looking at pictures from the set of Public Enemies when my mom and I went there in 2008. There's a picture of a guy carrying a huge light, and I wrote a caption on the photo, like, "A crazy, huge light!" And I looked at these photos the other day, and I totally knew what that light was. It was an HMI. And it's just nuts, because I've worked with those lights. I've set them up. I know what they do. 

It's an amazing feeling.

That happens when I see behind-the-scenes photos of movies filming now, too. I just feel so educated.

When I watch movies now, it's really funny, because I notice all of the dolly tracking shots. I notice lighting and eye lines and I wonder how many set-ups they filmed for that scene, and I count the number of set-ups and different angles in each scene. It's the craziest feeling. But I really do feel like I appreciate movies so much more now.

It takes so much work to film a 3 minute film, I can't imagine what it takes to film a feature! But I really, desperately want to know, and I really, desperately want to do it someday.

Monday we start post-production and editing, which I'm incredibly excited for. I've never edited anyone else's work before, so it's going to be very interesting. I think it's going to be challenging, but I think I'll love it. I'll have nothing else to do for a week than sit in a room with three massive monitors and edit a movie. 

What's better than that?