D’oh! I forgot to update this!
When Ann and I were in Chicago, I worked a lot of productions – mostly commercials (Turtle Wax, Coors, some kind of vodka, a mortgage company, a plethora of others). So this pic is from the pinnacle of my production work in Chicago, and also my last production before taking the job at Lake Pointe. I missed it when it was on TV (as I was living with crappy cable in a hotel room here in Texas), but it came out on DVD right afterwards… if I wanted to plop down $60 bucks for the 3 disc series. Finally Netflix got it in stock, so I rented the pertinent disc (disc 2).
I worked on the shoot for the recreation footage for the episode of 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America that covered President McKinley’s assassination. I’m listed as being a production assistant, but art department was short and I got assigned to them the whole time (since I knew several of the people pretty well they asked for me when they found out I was working the shoot). I got to build and or set dress nearly every set in the piece.
In fact, the assassin’s room (with the rustic walls and whatnot), was shot in an old attic full of junk and leaves. I was in charge of cleaning the whole thing out and then dressing the set on my own. In fact, I was pointed towards a truck full of furniture and props and told basically what needed to be in there. I went to work and after dressing the set I got called away to another set on the location before they shot it. Later I went over to strike the set and lo and behold… They didn’t change anything! They used my set exactly like I had set it up… it was very cool.
All of the world’s fair footage was shot at this community center that consisted of a couple of acres of parks and this old building. Before we left we had one shot we needed… a graveside shot of the assassin’s body being interred… Instead of asking permission from the people who run the community center, I was handed a shovel and told to find an out of the way place to dig said grave. I was told if there was any trouble to just call the producer and sit tight. So I found said place and dug a grave… turns out that a guy my size digging a grave in public and most people tend to avoid me, who would’ve thunk it? Anyway, they ran out with the camera set up, the props and the three actors in the scene, shot it (the shovel I dug the grave with, was used in the scene), and then everyone else went back inside to finish packing up. The producer handed me back the shovel, told me to fill it in and cover it up.
All in all it was a great gig. I had worked with the art department before, but I had a lot more responsibility on this shoot than any of the others. In fact, the head of the art department let me know that from now on, she’d be calling me to schedule me before the assistant producers did… which in the production world I worked in, meant I had just gotten a promotion.
04/02/2008 at 6:21 pm Permalink
DUDE! It’s past “tomorrow”!! Details! Details!