Lowdown, a day in the life of

It occurs to me that I should talk more about my work attachment on Lowdown, while it’s still reasonably fresh in my mind. (To recap: I was working in the electrics department, and Lowdown is a comedy series for broadcast on ABC next year).

So. I’ll take you through a day of shooting. Sounds like a good idea.

The day starts at Unit base. Because shooting on location requires everything to be mobile, “Unit” is a massive truck.. the home base.. and every morning, tables chairs and shadecloth tent-things are constructed around this unit truck. Porta-loos are shipped in, as well as mobile trolleys with boiling water and tea/coffee. Hence wherever we are, the Unit facilities stay the same and the catering stays the same.
Anyway. We start at unit. Usual call time is around 7.45am, sometimes earlier. Everyone piles up their plates with breakfast items.. lots of breakfast. On my first day I foolishly had just a bowl of fruit.. and starvation descended upon me after a couple of hours. Working on a film shoot makes everyone quite ravenous, it seems.. So breakfast is extremely important. You’ve got around 15 minutes to configure your breakfast and then eat it.. then the 2nd AD announces it’s time to go and everyone rapidly mobilises. We head to location, usually somewhere nearby, and it’s chaos.. an organised, professional sort of chaos.
I generally stand by, with Chris (the best boy), waiting to unload equipment from the truck. Everything has to happen fast. No department wants to hold up the shoot, so setting up in the morning is especially hectic for all involved. Darryl, the gaffer, will decide on what lights we’re likely to need for each stage of the shoot, and these lights and all associated gear will be moved out of the truck to somewhere more readily accessible. We’ll take a magliner filled with lighting gear and wheel it onto location, plus a trolley of C-stands and whatever lights we need. Usually we need 1 or 2 ARRIsun 575s, the ARRIsun 12 (1.2kW), a 4-ft 4-bank kino kit on the magliner, a china ball, and possibly redheads. I never saw any dedos or tota lights on location, or in the lighting truck for that matter. There were also spacelights, household tungsten bulbs, coloured tungsten bulbs, household fluorescent tubes, 1k tungsten stage lights, 5k tungsten fresnels, a blondie… plenty of other lighting gear. But generally the Arri HMIs and Kino fluorescents were the most commonly used pieces of lighting gear.
In any case, there’s usually a lot of gear that needs to be mobilised. Lots of dashing back and forth between the truck and our on-location equipment-pile, dodging out of the way of video split kits, dollies, audio people, magliners, camera department, all of which are rapidly moving places.. and if you’re shooting in small, narrow corridors (which we often were), there’s a lot of traffic congestion. But you’ve got to move quickly, set everything up quickly so that other departments can get on with whatever they need to do. You’ve got to be conscientious.. simply standing in the wrong place can disrupt the entire process of setting up or planning a shot. So it’s a delicate balance between mobilising lots of gear quickly, without putting the gear at risk, and without getting in the way of any other department. Setting up for shooting on the 14th floor of an apartment building is the hardest, I’ve found. There’s no space to move, it’s all very claustrophobic and easy to piss people off. And you’ve got to load mountains of gear into elevators that want to close on you every five seconds.. you can jam the doors with a metal box for a while, but after a minute even the doors get pissed at you, gnashing against the metal box over and over again. “Please remove obstruction from the elevator”. *crunch*. “Please remove obstruction from the elevator. *crunch* You get the picture.

After all the gear is standing by, and we’ve run power lines to all necessary areas, and the lights are on stands, shot bagged, with lenses and ballasts, the insanity starts to subside. The gaffer fine tunes lights as necessary, while I evacuate the area, because usually there’s too much going on and I’m basically extra meat blocking the corridor. Which is true. So I’ll be standing by outside as the shooting commences. Sometimes I’ll be inside, and can peer in to see what’s going on.. but often you can’t. I may need to wait at the truck so that it can remain unlocked, and extra gear can be taken out as needed. (When we were shooting in St Kilda, I needed to stand by the truck for much of the day because of the threat of junkies getting into the truck.. I personally don’t know how easy it would be for a junkie to run off with an HMI light and flog it to random people.. or whether your average junkie realises how valuable HMI lights are.. but whatever)
And this is the part of the day where I crash.. the waiting game. You have to keep busy.. cleaning equipment boxes, sorting clamps and spigots.. anything to keep your mind occupied. Sitting down is always tempting, but often frowned upon, depending on the situation. If you can sit down while cleaning equipment, that’s going to be much better. Making instant vanilla chai tea is another way of staying occupied..
Then suddenly, there are things to be done. Apparently, they’ve finished the shot and it’s time for a new setup. New setups aren’t usually as hectic as the start of the day, because the lights are already out of the truck, but often HMIs need to be moved to different windows, readjusted, etc. And then you may need to readjust the frame of diffusion that goes in front of the 1.2K HMI.. (you often use the frame of diffusion and an ARRIsun 12 to simulate sunlight coming through a window, etc).
Suddenly the rush is over.. and you should make more tea. But you don’t, because you’re paranoid.. maybe someone will need.. a clamp, a spigot, a peg, something random.. and this does happen. ‘Standing by’ really does mean standing by, and you have to stay ready for anything while doing nothing. Sounds fairly paradoxical..

And yes.. this is how the day proceeds. Every new set up requires a burst of energy.. New locations require even more energy.. lots more mobilising and running power and avoiding the surrounding chaos.. but new locations and setups are great because they keep you wired through a long day. Nothing’s worse than nothing.
Towards the end of the day, as you approach the final scene, you can start to break down any unnecessary lighting equipment and get it back in the truck. And by the time the last scene finishes, you’ve got very little left to pack up, and everyone can go home sooner.. so that they can sleep, so that they can come back the next day.

I don’t know what it is, but I like it. On paper, my work placement sounds rather crap. But every day’s something different, it’s quite demanding, and you become part of a large production machine that is ultimately responsible for making a comedy series.. cool.

post more later.