Holy cow, how tired am I?
I flew out to Las Vegas last Wednesday, worked on a commercial shoot until Sunday morning, flew to Atlanta, dropped of the film at the lab, picked up the film from the lab the next morning at 4:30am, flew to New York, sat through the color correction (tiring, but very cool), flew back to Atlanta that night, woke up this morning, picked up my boss from the airport sat in on the video transfer session (from Digibeta to the hard drive), got everything ready for my boss to leave, drove my boss to the airport so he could catch a plane to Greece, came back sent out a demo reel and paid some bills and….
Why am I not asleep?
Vegas was weird. I didn’t like it. It is just a theme park for adults. Disney world with slots machines and strippers. Now that mental image is in my mind.
Shooting the commercial was busy but fun but hot. When I wasn’t running around doing random things, I was taking script notes. For every take I took wrote down the camera settings and timed the scene to make sure that all the scenes were going to fit into the :30 time limit. We shot six commercials in two days. That’s nuts man. They look awesome, though.
New York on the other hand was amazing. I took a cab from the airport to the film transfer company on 5th Ave. I came out of the Midtown tunnel and thought. Holy crap, is there a sky anymore? After sitting in on the color correction session (most commercials/movies/tv shows are color corrected, which means they are processed in a computer to make the colors, brightness, and contrast what the director/client wants. You want to make the inside of an open trunk brighter, but keep the rest of the image the same? No problem. You want to make the color of the pool water blue? Okay. You get the idea)
After the transfer session was done, I walked up to Central Park, took the subway to Grand Central, and then a cab back to the airport where I excitedly called people to tell them how much I loved NY. Unfortunately I was unable to carry my video camera to New York or get much video of Vegas, but you can check out photos here.