I had the pleasure of being hired as the Gaffer on the web series "Surviving Therapy". This was a pretty fun but easy shoot. We shot it over 3 weekends in Orange County, CA. The camera's of choice were two Canon 7d's on Glidecams. The actors were all union with SAG.
For this shoot, I was originally hired as the Key Grip. But on the first day of shooting it was made very obvious that I was the most experienced person on set when it comes to lighting. As much as I tried to not step on any toes, I was constantly fixing mistakes and correcting the lighting choices of the Gaffer and DP. I was promoted to Gaffer as a result of them realizing I should have been hired as such from the beginning.
During this production, we came across a number of interesting situations. We had no scissor clips to rig lights off the drop ceilings in the office location we were shooting in. As a result, I had to keep rigging C-stands out of the ceiling and mounting lights out of the way of our shots. At one point, the original Gaffer locked the keys for the location in the storage closet, and I had to climb up through the drop ceiling into the other room to retrieve them and unlock the door. Being that I am 6'5 215lbs, this was quite the sight to see.
One of the scenes that we had to shoot took place in a strip club. It was brought to my attention that we were unsuccessful in securing a strip club location, so we had to shoot it in the office lobby and try to make it look like a club. Oddly enough, I think I accomplished this quite well. I realized that the Secretary's desk we had been shooting on had a marble looking top. So we put curtains up at the back of the desk hanging from the ceiling and on the front going to the floor. We lined the desk with red rope light as well. This effectively made it look like a stage. I then took out all of the ceiling tiles from the drop ceiling and put them back in vertically creating upward cubes above the stage which I then put red and blue lights in. I lit the back of the stage with purple light, and had Red light coming from the left and Blue light coming from the right. The contrasting colors turned out looking awesome on camera.
CREW:
The series was written and directed by Chapman Film School graduate D.J. Sadai. I was impressed with her skills and look forward to working with her again. She has a ton of potential and I am sure she will be very successful in her field of choice. She is a Jill-of-all-Trades and knows a lot about every step of the production process. Audio was recorded by the very skilled and talented Ben Adams of Second Street Sessions.
My cousin Scott Cordts joined me on the 3rd day of production as the Best Boy Grip. He did an awesome job and I look forward to working on many more productions with him.
ACTORS:
The lead actors for this project were Lindsay Warm and Natalie Miston. Supporting actors included Valerie Carr, David Weisenberg, Gabriel Oliva, and D.J. Sadai. Other actors include Delpaneau Wills, Forte Rodriquez, Claire Kirk, Patrick Censoplano, Michael William Thompson, and Adrian Gonzalez.
The shoot turned out very well and the cast/crew was awesome to work with. All in all, it was a fun and relaxing shoot.
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