Light ‘em Up

I was on a shoot. The room I was work­ing in was not square to the build­ing it was in. It was like a set built inside the larger build­ing, white walls that went up, but with no ceil­ing. It would be a breeze to light; I was just going to bounce a cou­ple lights off the larger build­ings’ ceil­ing from the left and the right. I had plenty of room, and all the lights I needed.

The shoot went off with­out a hitch. I just needed to clean up. I had a ton of gear out. I had my three tripods. One was light weight. It was fast to set up, worked well, and was reli­able. I have a heavy-weight tri­pod for those shots when steadi­ness really counts. And I had a high-hat for extreme low angle shots. All had to go back to my car.

I had a cou­ple large boxes of lights. Usu­ally I just shoot with two or three open faced lights. Today I had used two boxes of three lekos each. Big, pow­er­ful and bright. I had them all packed back into their boxes.

As I started to get things ready to trans­port, I sud­denly had helpers. A few of them, and they brought hand trucks. I saw Paul push­ing out a cart with my light kits on them, some­one else had my tripods, some­one else had rounded up the mics… my work looked to be done.

I went out to my car, and every­thing was loaded in, but not well. I had to re-organize every­thing to get the back door to shut. The tripods and cam­era under­neath, the light kits on top. Perfect.

Inter­mis­sion.

We were in LA; Ken, Leslie, Lisa and I. I knew it was doing to be a long day, so I had a bit to eat before we set out. Unfor­tu­nately, I ate too soon. We were headed to South Beach, which had some great restau­rants. And when we got there, that was a our first stop– a burger joint.

One of the first things I noticed about South Beach was it’s inap­pro­pri­ate name; it was well inland. In fact, it was just south and west of down­town. Ken said it was a name cho­sen to boost tourism; hav­ing “beach” in your name was a valu­able asset when hunt­ing tourists.

We set­tled into a burger joint, and I was very bummed I had already eaten. Leslie told me they had a burger licensed from Dis­ney­land that was an exact copy of the theme parks famous “Deluxe Burger”. As I thought about it, there was not much dif­fer­ence between this burger place’s reg­u­lar offer­ing and Disneyland’s deluxe. They both piled on the sea­son­ing salts. So the copy of the Dis­ney­land sta­ple made per­fect sense to me.

We went out­side, and the sun was out. It was a beau­ti­ful day. South Beach had won­der­ful, broad boule­vards, with large grassy cen­ter strips. We were walk­ing one of the strips, and notic­ing the sprin­klers. South Beach was try­ing the new metal sprin­klers. From what we could tell, they were not work­ing out too well. All the heads seem to be rusted shut. Leslie poked at one and started laugh­ing as the whole head came right off.

“What good is this gonna do,” she said, hold­ing up the sev­ered top. “With no top, they are just going to gush water, not water the grass.” We all started pok­ing the metal heads; they all crum­bled and came right off.

There was a greens­man work­ing the strip, too. We could see he was not too happy with the metal sprin­klers; they are to install a sec­ond set of plas­tic water­ing devices in par­al­lel to the metal ones. The plas­tic ones were quite large. He had one dug out that he was test­ing. The body of the sprin­kler had to be two feet tall and eight inched wide; it was massive.

To get a look at how it was work­ing, he took a rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing saw and cut into it. As half fell away, we could see the insides were full of salt.

We walked fur­ther up the road, and we came to a street I remem­bered well; there was a small movie stu­dio Ken and I some­times came to here. I asked Ken what the name of the stu­dio was. He pointed up. Behind the short street there were a series of sky­scrap­ers. There were six or eight, and they wrapped around the top of the street like the Plaza caps the end of Fre­mont Street in Vegas. Each of the build­ings had its name in neon, strangely also like the Plaza. Ken pointed to one, the “Car­rac”, and said that was the new par­ent com­pany of the studio.

As we walked up the street and looked into the very small back lot, we could see some tem­po­rary cor­rals set up, and two horses penned in them. I told Tori that they must be shoot­ing a West­ern. We saw the typ­i­cal shop areas, prop stor­age areas and greeneries.

Tori asked me what they made at this stu­dio. I said that they did a lot of The Mup­pets movie here– not “The Mup­pet Movie”, but the one after that; I for­got the name. I remem­bered that they shot part of Bat­man here. We watched part of it, and I pointed out a cou­ple shots I knew had been done here.

There was an exte­rior shot of the Bat­mo­bile com­ing around a cor­ner and stop­ping– that was hot over there on the back lot. And then Bruce Wayne’s office was shot on the stage. We looked at the set on the video. It was a dark set, with a messy desk and a lot of hand-written sticky notes all over.

We went on the stage, and they were set­ting up for a cur­rent movie. The set was a rehash of the Bruce Wayne office, down to the same sticky notes. No, some­one there said, they are not the same yel­low notes. We made new one up for this show, so the notes made sense to the story.

I looked at the yel­low notes up close. They appeared to be hand-written, but they were not. They were slide-on let­ters. The same let­ter set was used in Bat­man– that is why they looked so similar.

I woke up.