The SolidLine Summer Intern: Why did I sign up for this? Week 5

As soon as I arrived at the office, Ed and I started to unload equipment to bring up to the office. We had a young actress, Whitney, coming in to the office to be our talent for a video. I’m pretty used to loading and unloading the truck by now, but I did have a unique experience while bringing equipment up to the building.

Instead of using the front door and the main elevators, we had to bring the equipment down the side of the building and up through the service elevator. Ok, that doesn’t sound too unique, but it gets better. As Ed and I got to the ramp up to the building, we had a tough time getting to the ramp. There is scaffolding on the side of the building for God knows what. (All I’ve heard about it is that there are workers drilling into the building.) They have little rooftops built so if anything falls, it will not hit anyone down below. Ed and I worked and worked to squeeze the fully loaded carts of equipment through this tight space to get to the ramp. We were pushing and turning and lifting over and over. It was very cramped. Ed decided to go to the front of the cart and pull while I was at the other and of the cart to push. We start to move everything up the ramp and I slip, almost falling back to the ground. Somehow I caught myself, but that wasn’t even the worst part of it. I look down to see what I slipped on, and there was some dog poop there looking up at me. I look at Ed and say, “Wow, who the heck walks their dog way back here in the alley?” Ed was quick to respond, telling me that there aren’t any dogs that come back here. I’m sure you can put two and two together…it wasn’t pretty.

Once we were inside, we got back to work. We set up a green screen and camera upstairs, and got to work fast. Once again, other than setting up the equipment, I handled some business on the slate, and I also took notes. I’m telling you, if someone were looking to hire a person to slate everything, I would be the man for the job.

Our talent worked out great. We finished the shoot with her fairly quickly, packed the equipment up, and then we were off to UIC Medical Center once again to finish shooting for the Transparent Health Project. Ed and I shipped off to UIC right away and got all the equipment into the hospital. We had asked Tim, one of the doctors working with us, where we should stage all the equipment. All of the hallways are pretty tight, and we didn’t want to leave our equipment in a place where it would be in the way. Tim found us a hallway that he thought wasn’t going to be used, so we staged everything there. Tim ran off to a meeting, and Ed and I waited for Michael and Greg to show up. While waiting, I think everyone in the hospital came through that hallway. And many people came through wondering what movie we were filming. As much as I wanted to tell them we were shooting some important scene for some big film, I didn’t. I still want to do that before the summer is over though…I will.

We initially set up for scenes in the operating room. This time, our entire crew was wearing scrubs. We were all able to make cameos as extras in the project, but I think Kromm had the best cameo. During a staged operating scene, Michael was in the background creeping through a tiny window. He really isn’t that easy to spot, but it gave me a good laugh to see him in the background.