No pain no gain

Today I shot more second unit. First I had to get the At Turning's End poster printed. Last time I had it done at Winkflash. It looked beautiful, but I wanted to shoot today and I didn't want to wait a week so I had it done at Kinko's. Curiously, going to Kinko's was the least painful part of the process. I guess it's been a long time since I've been there. I handed them a USB drive, they opened up Photoshop and printed out the document. People nowadays don't realize that at one time, you would never get the colors you saw on your monitor. It was also a lot cheaper than Winkflash. The printout was great... except for a design problem. I realized that the important information should be in white, plus you can't really see black ink on brown. So I redid the poster and then printed again. You would think it would be easy to shoot a poster taped to a box but I had to root around the house searching for my Xacto to cut the poster out. Then I had to find a backing board (I ended up using the back of our $12 camera dolly). Then when I was framing I kept seeing this red thing reflected in the tape. It was a warning sign taped to the garage door. So I had to cover that with cardboard. Next—what genius at Sony decided that it would be a good idea to put the cassette mechanism under the tripod plate? Anyway, I finally got the shots done.

Next, the time clock. Of course it never occurred to me that time clocks are built so that you can't easily change the time. Duh! And of course I didn't have the key. And of course, even though you unscrew the back, the shell doesn't come off. So I now have it plugged in waiting for the time to change to 8 o' clock.

Then I had to shoot the typewriter typing. I forgot what it was like working with manual typewriters. The handle kept hitting the case because I closed it wrong. It took awhile to figure out how to set the margins. Then I had to type! It had to sit in an awkward position with one arm going through the legs of the tripod in order to get the shot I wanted. Fortunately I'm a pretty good typist (I used to be a secretary).

So my aversion for shooting second unit continues. Second unit directors may not have to deal with temperamental actors but they do have to deal with temperamental things which may be almost, but not quite as annoying.