5 May 2021 Spray Paint Wednesday

[KathyB]

I have to spray paint some metal shelving things in addition to all the other stuff I've been painting, and it is a nice day with no wind today.

Happy Cinco de Mayo. Mexican food sounds really good right now.

[scenicdesign71]

For the final episode of this season, I've returned to the position of Camera Scenic (a job I also took on for the show's first episode, shot directly before the pandemic, so I guess that has a nice symmetry to it).

That's the position where, instead of spending regular 6am-4pm days on "prep crew" at the shop or at an upcoming filming location getting sets (including props and dressing) ready to be filmed, I actually travel with the shooting crew from set to set, lugging a cart full of every tool and material that might be needed in case the director or DP has a last-minute touchup request of any kind.  In practice, more often than not this means aging and dulling things that look too new or too shiny (in rare cases where the prep crew hasn't already done so), or camouflaging them entirely (ditto).

I liken it to that old adage about war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, when I'm called upon to do something at the last moment and everyone's waiting for it to be done before the camera can roll.  There haven't been any really stressful challenges so far (and hopefully won't be, on the final three weeks of the season, shooting almost entirely on by-now-familiar sets and locations, with what seems like a pretty humane and understanding, if exhausted, crew).

But it is surprisingly tiring, even not doing much. (The only real physical exertion tends to be pushing my small but astonishingly-heavy cart, sometimes uphill or on uneven terrain, several blocks back and forth between the box truck on which it travels and the central work zone of any given shooting location). Shoot-crew hours are crazy: often long, and all over the clock -- day, night, overnight.  This episode is set entirely at night, with a lot of exterior scenes, so 5pm-5am overnight shifts have become my new normal.  And our nights have been rainy lately, which means standing around in remote outer-borough streets and parks in full rain gear, coldish and wettish, for twelve hours every night.

Still, it's much better in early May than it was last February (2020) during the pilot episode, when temps regularly dipped into the 20s at night. And the hourly rate is a good bit higher than that of my normal prep-crew job, so I should be in a better position to take a little break when this season wraps a few weeks from now.