the start of my movie career. in my bra.
Aug. 3rd, 2013 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hummingbirdmadgirla week or two ago a friend contacted me about being in an indie film with her. she's not a hardcore performer either, and is pretty laid back and not at ALL into anything entertainment industry related (she's a lawyer) and I was like "yeah sure, just remind me about it and we'll see what happens". I figured it would be fun to light up and screw around. i asked if we should dress a certain way (no) and what the scene was (no idea) so i just wore what i'd been wearing all day (jeans and a tank top that had cojoined twin fetal skeletons on it - classy)
so yesterday was the "indie movie" shoot, and neither Ethan or I had plans and we were game for adventure and itching to burn so we figured it would be a good time. i think after living in boston and seeing so many "indie movie" shoots that consisted of students and a few digital cameras I assumed the shoot would be tiny, haphazard, and low key. so we drove into DTLA expecting to spend a couple hours shooting. my impression that this indie movie shoot must have had a budget of $10 was somewhat strengthened by the fact that -we- were the fire performers, as opposed to Fire Groove or any of the other professional fire troupes out here.
Obviously there are times where we apparently forget we live in Los Angeles.
we got down to the location around call time and were met with tables upon tables of craft services. like, seriously fancy buffet food, probably fancier than some weddings i've been to. that was the first sign that this movie was perhaps bigger than we thought it was going to be. there was a makeup tent with like, 5 makeup artists, costumes, embellishments for people's costumes, stiltwalkers, drag queens, the viking cast from those "what's in your wallet" commercials (seriously, they were in fact the same actors, i heard them talking about it), hipsters, hundreds of extras walking around looking like a gay pride parade had exploded in the parking lot. This made sense as we found out the scene we were shooting was in fact a gay pride parade. an extremely surreal gay pride parade at night. at this point I was really curious as to where we were going to be holding this parade since there were only mostly main roads around us, and the few side roads available were very tiny and wouldn't look at all believable. i also didn't see any floats or cars or anything that looked particularly parade like so i was pretty confused as to where our awesome parade was going to be.
i also realized that my aforementioned shirt was highly inappropriate compared to all the fabulousness around me. all love and light and rainbows and then me with cojoined twin skeleton shirt just seemed wrong. THANKFULLY i was wearing this pretty awesome yoga top/sports bra thing from the om collection that, while boob tastic, worked a lot better with the scene. while running around half dressed in public is really not my thing, it seemed more appropriate. plus skin is less flammable than anything you can wear so yay, bra it was. after that, i went over to make up to get all prettied up, still wondering where our awesome parade was going to take place.
there were 6 fire dancers and 1 fire breather in total so we broke down who was best at what (since we all worked with multiple tools) and were screwing around, unlit, in the backlot while the rest of the extras were taken to the set. we were going to be shot toward the end for safety reasons, since we didn't want to set anyone's costumes on fire or anything (since there were lots of people wearing feathers or other really flowy/flammable stuff.) so we had a fair amount of downtime to just hang out and play with our tools.
when we were finally brought over to our set, it turned out they had shut down wilshire boulevard, at night, on a friday for our shoot. that would be comparable to shutting down mass ave or something. the set was HUGE with giant floats everywhere, cameras everywhere, cameras attached to cameramen, on risers, this was very much not what any of us were expecting. they had those giant aerial balloon lamp things, some sort of gels that I guess did color correction, it was intense. Hundreds of people milling about, lots of spectators, so very very much not what I ever expected to be a part of.
Then we were up. The director was in LOVE with fire breathing, so Ethan and I stood behind the fire breather and rocked out with our hoops (on and off body) for about 5 minutes. Then the rest of the fire performers went up and repeated the scene. I guess due to safety concerns they couldn't have all 7 of us on set at once without moving the parade back about 10 feet and that was going to be a huge production so instead they just shot us in groups and eventually will edit the footage together. After we were done, we were kind of bummed out as I think we all wanted to do multiple takes, both to nail our form but also because we wanted to burn more. Initially they had us hang out for a while because they weren't sure if they would need us again, so we rebelled and had an impromptu burn in the parking lot behind the shoot. which really was totally warranted since we spent about 5 hours hanging out for 5 minutes of actual work.
it's funny because i am a total fire novice, (honestly i think about half of us were) but when you get a group of people together doing basic stuff with fire, it still manages to look pretty awesome, especially to people who have no experience with it. i've also noticed this when i've gotten to see conclave practice for burning man, there are a handful of people doing really amazing tech stuff and a ton of people doing pretty basic stuff, but it's enthralling just based on the sheer number of people, and i'm past the "fire is pretty solely for being fire" stage of things.
so yeah, that was incredibly random and cool and huge and unexpected. i am very grateful for the opportunity though i am completely baffled at how people can do that as a job, the whole hurry up and wait thing is really dreary after a while. but then it was also incredibly fun when we weren't waiting, and it will be really interesting to see what the final product is like. just to give you an idea of what i didn't know i was getting myself into, this is the buzz the movie is already generating so that's something else all right.
so yesterday was the "indie movie" shoot, and neither Ethan or I had plans and we were game for adventure and itching to burn so we figured it would be a good time. i think after living in boston and seeing so many "indie movie" shoots that consisted of students and a few digital cameras I assumed the shoot would be tiny, haphazard, and low key. so we drove into DTLA expecting to spend a couple hours shooting. my impression that this indie movie shoot must have had a budget of $10 was somewhat strengthened by the fact that -we- were the fire performers, as opposed to Fire Groove or any of the other professional fire troupes out here.
Obviously there are times where we apparently forget we live in Los Angeles.
we got down to the location around call time and were met with tables upon tables of craft services. like, seriously fancy buffet food, probably fancier than some weddings i've been to. that was the first sign that this movie was perhaps bigger than we thought it was going to be. there was a makeup tent with like, 5 makeup artists, costumes, embellishments for people's costumes, stiltwalkers, drag queens, the viking cast from those "what's in your wallet" commercials (seriously, they were in fact the same actors, i heard them talking about it), hipsters, hundreds of extras walking around looking like a gay pride parade had exploded in the parking lot. This made sense as we found out the scene we were shooting was in fact a gay pride parade. an extremely surreal gay pride parade at night. at this point I was really curious as to where we were going to be holding this parade since there were only mostly main roads around us, and the few side roads available were very tiny and wouldn't look at all believable. i also didn't see any floats or cars or anything that looked particularly parade like so i was pretty confused as to where our awesome parade was going to be.
i also realized that my aforementioned shirt was highly inappropriate compared to all the fabulousness around me. all love and light and rainbows and then me with cojoined twin skeleton shirt just seemed wrong. THANKFULLY i was wearing this pretty awesome yoga top/sports bra thing from the om collection that, while boob tastic, worked a lot better with the scene. while running around half dressed in public is really not my thing, it seemed more appropriate. plus skin is less flammable than anything you can wear so yay, bra it was. after that, i went over to make up to get all prettied up, still wondering where our awesome parade was going to take place.
there were 6 fire dancers and 1 fire breather in total so we broke down who was best at what (since we all worked with multiple tools) and were screwing around, unlit, in the backlot while the rest of the extras were taken to the set. we were going to be shot toward the end for safety reasons, since we didn't want to set anyone's costumes on fire or anything (since there were lots of people wearing feathers or other really flowy/flammable stuff.) so we had a fair amount of downtime to just hang out and play with our tools.
when we were finally brought over to our set, it turned out they had shut down wilshire boulevard, at night, on a friday for our shoot. that would be comparable to shutting down mass ave or something. the set was HUGE with giant floats everywhere, cameras everywhere, cameras attached to cameramen, on risers, this was very much not what any of us were expecting. they had those giant aerial balloon lamp things, some sort of gels that I guess did color correction, it was intense. Hundreds of people milling about, lots of spectators, so very very much not what I ever expected to be a part of.
Then we were up. The director was in LOVE with fire breathing, so Ethan and I stood behind the fire breather and rocked out with our hoops (on and off body) for about 5 minutes. Then the rest of the fire performers went up and repeated the scene. I guess due to safety concerns they couldn't have all 7 of us on set at once without moving the parade back about 10 feet and that was going to be a huge production so instead they just shot us in groups and eventually will edit the footage together. After we were done, we were kind of bummed out as I think we all wanted to do multiple takes, both to nail our form but also because we wanted to burn more. Initially they had us hang out for a while because they weren't sure if they would need us again, so we rebelled and had an impromptu burn in the parking lot behind the shoot. which really was totally warranted since we spent about 5 hours hanging out for 5 minutes of actual work.
it's funny because i am a total fire novice, (honestly i think about half of us were) but when you get a group of people together doing basic stuff with fire, it still manages to look pretty awesome, especially to people who have no experience with it. i've also noticed this when i've gotten to see conclave practice for burning man, there are a handful of people doing really amazing tech stuff and a ton of people doing pretty basic stuff, but it's enthralling just based on the sheer number of people, and i'm past the "fire is pretty solely for being fire" stage of things.
so yeah, that was incredibly random and cool and huge and unexpected. i am very grateful for the opportunity though i am completely baffled at how people can do that as a job, the whole hurry up and wait thing is really dreary after a while. but then it was also incredibly fun when we weren't waiting, and it will be really interesting to see what the final product is like. just to give you an idea of what i didn't know i was getting myself into, this is the buzz the movie is already generating so that's something else all right.
