Two weeks of this madness!

So there's about twenty of us in a three-story house right now. I'm upstairs sitting on one of the bedroom floors writing this as I babysit a camera worth well more than my life. One of the first rules of working with this sort of equipment is that the camera is treated like a two-week old infant, needing constant care and attention - meaning that no matter what's going on, I have to stick by the camera if my supervising AC (Aaron Smith) isn't around.

The past few days have been rough. On Thursday I drove the car to Chicago to Fletcher to pick up the camera equipment with three other guys. We arrived at Brian Walton's house around 1:30 in the morning and left seven hours later to pick everything up. On the way to get the rental truck that morning, we got a flat tire on the freeway (Peter was driving that morning, so my No Flat Tire record remains unsoiled...technically.) We pulled off to the side of the freeway, just short of the offramp. No more than fifteen minutes later, a tow truck showed up. Chicago has this awesome freeway system with trucks on patrol picking up anyone stranded for free. The guys towed us off the freeway where I changed out the flat for the spare in the trunk.

After we swapped the spare, we called Ryder telling them that we were *obviously* running late, they told us that they just rented out the last truck. Wonderful. Instead of running around with our heads cut off (and a flat tire) we drove on the spare another ten miles to Fletcher, which is on the outskirts of the downtown Chicago skyline. That city is gorgeous. Aaron and I stayed at Fletch to do camera prep, which typically takes all day, while Peter and Ricky went to find a truck, and then off to a couple other rental houses to pick up a dolly and some track and a remote camera head. While Aaron continued doing prep work, I drove the car to the local Firestone and got the spare fixed. Once Peter and Ricky showed up, we loaded up the truck with our equipment and then made plans to meet up at Dennys in Indiana (they had one more stop to make). We grabbed dinner at Dennys at 10pm or so, and then finished our 350 mile trek, lasting until about 2 in the morning.

Here I am, two days later. The first day of filming was yesterday. It was a little rough, but realistically speaking, we won't be at full speed until tomorrow or Tuesday. There's a big job ahead of us, and still some wrinkles need to be smoothed over. In the meantime, God is good - and the scenery makes up for the lack of potable tap water and no internet. More pictures are up on my Flickr account.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/captainwesker/