The View From The Bottom, SolidLine Intern Blog Week 6

We started off the week in Aurora, Illinois.  Considering I live about 20 minutes away from there, it was nice to have such an easy commute to the soundstage that we were shooting at.  It was my first time on a soundstage and it was a really cool experience.  There were lights all over the place, the stage was sound proof and they had walls full of props.  On top of that the talent was very well prepared and had no trouble with all the technical car talk that their scripts included.  All together it was a really good shoot and it seems like the client was very happy.

After two days of shooting in Aurora we head straight from there off towards Massachusetts.  It was my first time in the truck since June and even though everyone made fun of me for my pajamas (see below), it was great to be back on the road.  The sixteen hour drive went by pretty fast and on Thursday night we met up with the Profit Point team for a meeting at an amazing Mass estate in the hills.  After a bit of discussion about the shoot, we had some fun.  Ed and I ended up playing badminton and having a really nice dinner in our hosts awesome back yard.

We had a good time and everything was going well until we started driving to the hotel for the night.  As we pulled up towards a bridge we noticed that there was a sign that said the bridge was only 13 feet tall.  Our truck is 13 feet 6 inches, so this created a problem.    After deliberating for a while, trying to figure out what to do, a police officer came up and informed us that the right side of the bridge was shorter than the left side.  He turned on his lights, stopped all the traffic, and allowed us to slowly drive the truck on the wrong side of the road.  I tried to film it, but it was really dark and it didn’t turn, so you will have to take my word for it that it was kind of a fiasco, but everything worked out fine.

The next morning we shot at The Publick House, an Inn that opened in 1771.  It was really cool to be in a building with so much history, but it meant that it didn’t have an elevator and we had to carry all the equipment up the stairs.  Not ideal, but we plowed through it and loaded into the ballroom where we were shooting. We interviewed all ten of the people who work at Profit Point in front of a white background we lit with a cool gradient and had them talk about their jobs and what makes the company special.  They all seemed to have a good time, and we did too, joking around but still getting everything we needed to get.