You must log in or # to comment.
I worked at a Waffle House as a teenager, and ended up acting in an episode of some kind of show for MTV, called My Life As Liz.
By which I mean, there were a few actors and a camera crew camped out in a booth, and the director wanted me to bring them waffles, as a part of whatever scene they were filming. It was the middle of a random Tuesday, the place normally would’ve been dead, it was a nice change of pace.
I wasn’t paid or credited for this by MTV, just “being on TV was enough” according to the Waffle House’s franchise owner. The show’s production was also pretty low-budget, non-union; I only remember four or five people on the crew, plus three actors in the scene.
I ended up making dozens of waffles for these actors, who would only eat a couple bites per take, if anything. Some of the crew ate them on their lunch break, but the majority of the waffles were just thrown away after each take. To the production’s credit, they did pay for every single one. After about four hours, they’d apparently got all the shots they needed, packed everything up, and left.
Several years later, unrelated, AMC used a car I owned for a few episodes of Fear The Walking Dead. I was never on set for that though; their production company apparently had a “car wrangler” who reached out to me. They bought the car off of me, took it away, and when they’d wrapped the season’s shooting a few weeks later, they called me to offer first dibs to buy the car back, or else it would’ve been auctioned off.
When I got the car back, it was covered in fake dirt, the Landau top had been cut up to make the car appear in worse shape than it actually was, and there were several fake bullet holes in the bodywork from a gunfight scene. Although, in the take that made it to air, you never actually see those bullet holes on the car.
Worked for a tv animation studio for a couple years. It was awesome.
It’s been a few years, but I remember Interacting with movie fans is great, but working with movie talent and their reps is a nightmare. Their egos are enormous and fragile all at the same time, and often get in the way of efficient production. Producers can be hit or miss, some very famous ones are really quite lovely, while others that you’d recognize the name but not the face would try to get fired anyone who innocently made friendly small talk or made eye contact. Voice actors will drink you under the table. Everything is high pressure and stressful. Money will always come before art, and everyone is risk-averse. Editors do not get the respect they deserve, and can single handedly turn the director/producers shit production into a masterpiece. Everything in Hollywood is a lie: sets, the talent, everyone’s relationships, the funding, the story, verbal promises, but the production schedules are immutable truth that can never be altered.
Fascinating. Thank you. I have no doubt about the editing alright.
Films are essentially re written in the edit, missing lines will be recorded with adr and delivered off screen. Lines delivered on screen can be re-acted with changed meaning in adr.
I worked on movies for 3 years. It is quite different from any other job I have worked. 12 hour shifts are the standard.
Every show I worked on, there was breakfast half an hour before call. 6 hours after call was lunch, 1 hour after the last crew member got their plate lunch ended. If the show was not wrapped for the day 6 hours after lunch ended the show had to provide 2nd meal, or pay penalties to the crew.
There was always a lot of hurry up and wait.
Seeing the way a movie was filmed was always interesting. Entire scenes that in the Final Cut is two or more actors on screen was only one at a time during filming.
Everything I worked on, except one project, was very low budget. There was a lot of the same crew between projects.
Oh yeah the food can be great and the quality is a definite litmus test for how the rest of the shoot will run.
I work in VFX, but spend enough time on set. What do you want to know?
I suppose I have this romanticised idea of it. I love watching movies, like it’s my go to wind down so it was more of a general question.
VFX sounds cool. Do you enjoy it?
Yeah I love it, every project is a learning experience and they run from 3 months up to a couple of years. So you get this project to project cadence to your life that I like. If you are on early, you get to spend the time to invest in engineering things right to save you all time throughout the show. As you near delivery, you’re doing the sketchy fixes that are just enough to get you over the line.
My attitude is that It’s all about getting the best result on the screen for the money and time you have available, and treating people in a way that they want to work with you again.
Spot on. Thanks for the insight.
If you are on early, you get to spend the time to invest in engineering things right to save you all time throughout the show. As you near delivery, you’re doing the sketchy fixes that are just enough to get you over the line.
This sounds a lot like software projects. I’m sure it applies to a lot of areas.
Yeah the artists are on a sliding scale from, ‘can barely use a desktop and email’ to those that write shaders and simulation code in assembly or vulcan for the gpu. We have a lot of software engineers to make artist tools or pipeline tools.
From the people I’ve known who have, it sounds like organised chaos. Many moving parts, lots going on, and it all has to be highly scheduled or the chaos wins and nothing works
Sounds like it has a lot in common with software development…
I worked in local television news broadcasting almost 20 years ago, but I doubt local TV is what you’re asking about.
That sounds pretty cool. How was it?
It was pretty good, but it was kind of annoying to work in production, the more technical side of news production, and feel like I was more of an investigative newshound than my colleagues who were actual journalists with degrees to back it. At least twice in my five years of working there I brought stories to the newsroom that were breaking stories, and they wouldn’t cover one because it was “outside of our coverage area” (still photos of said story were top story on wired.com for a week after), and another because “they hadn’t seen it on the AP newswire yet” even though they had all the evidence in front of them from court documents (a month later, after someone else broke the story and it came down on AP newswire, we finally ran it). Local newsies literally don’t know how to break a story anymore, they only know how to read the AP Newswire and wait to be told what to report.
Other than that I loved the technical side of it. I started as a studio cameraman, and then got trained to edit and run chyron during broadcast (a chyron is what produces the text that pops up under talking heads’ names like the news anchors, the reporters, and people we interview), and then trained to be a technical director. When I went through my second layoff, I was supposed to be trained to direct.
Things I miss: The size and shape of a TV studio. The gaggle of weirdos who work in places like these. The constant backtalk over headset where the production crew would crack jokes at the expense of the news crew behind the scenes. Making graphics for news stories. Being able to tell myself that browsing the news on reddit all day in 2007 was important to my job even though that was a lie. Live shots, especially for big events where half the news team would be on site for a good portion of the day, the county fair was always fun. The hum of all the electronics in the production control room. The walls of monitors. The specialized SGI workstations that the weather team used. The hours, working the afternoon, then a two hour lunch break before the late shows because otherwise we’d be being paid for ten hour shifts with not much to do for two hours. I was young back then, so I liked getting off late in the evening, going out with friends after, and being able to sleep in because work didn’t start again until the afternoon. I miss B-roll. I miss feeling like part of a community since it was in a smaller market/smaller city because of the sheer number of people you end up meeting. I miss being privy to the behind the scenes of the major news network our station was affiliated with, and seeing how much our media leapt to believe anything and everything our government told them without question in the wake of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror.
Anyway yeah, I miss it but after the second layoff it was clear local TV was dying and the stations I had started out at no longer existed, consolidated into nearby stations to save money and extend the broadcast area. So now news is hardly “local” anymore, when the news station you get at home is broadcast from a city that’s over 200 miles away. They usually have a little studio in a strip mall with one or two employees in the cities that used to have full news studios and a few times a week they do “cut-ins” for the local city to focus on a single news story from outside the city its broadcasting from to pretend like they’re still doing coverage for the whole area. I remember having arguments with managers about how we needed to be prioritizing the internet because we were losing ad-revenue to it so we needed to prioritize an internet-first or at least internet-equal approach. Netflix started streaming in 2007, it was a reasonable thing to be considering with the way the winds were blowing. Yet in 2009 you had the CEO of Disney-ABC proudly saying she would nail a TV to her college-bound daughter’s dorm room wall if she had to when her daughter told her she would just watch TV on her laptop. The industry refused to move forward until market forces pushed them to do so. Don’t even get me started on my thoughts on how few people access and use broadcast television and radio anymore and if they really want these services to survive they really need to push them online and give up more of the broadcast spectrum to either be saved to have some air waves that aren’t “noisy” even if we can’t hear it.
Ive done background work. Its easy but tedius at times. Exciting but boring at times. Overall a great thing to do when you are between jobs but not exactly commonly available.
