by Heather Plett | May 9, 2009 | Uncategorized
1. There is a lot of food available on a film set. A. LOT!
2. Imagine the number of people you’d expect to be on a film set. Double or triple it. It takes about 30 people to shoot a 90 second video.
3. Even though there are a lot of talented people on site (camera people, producers, wardrobe, make-up), only the actors are called “the talent” (even if they’re amateurs).
4. It takes about 10 hours to shoot a 90 second video.
5. If you start the shoot at 8:00 a.m., it can take until 4:00 p.m. before you shoot the first take.
6. If you’re the one paying the bills, everything will grind to a halt and start over again if you express even the slightest bit of dissatisfaction.
7. You could easily sneak onto a film set, pretend you belong there, and scam free food. Nobody knows who all the people are and why they’re there.
8. Even if there are 29 other people on site, there’s still some expertise I can bring that nobody else has.
9. You can make it look like people are anywhere if you shoot in front of a green screen. These people are actually standing in a field (or at least that’s what you’ll think when you see the finished product).
10. A seemingly minor problem (like a little irregularity on the rails that makes the camera wobble when it moves) can delay a shoot for about 4 hours.
11. If you ever have reason to be at a film shoot, be prepared for a whole lot of waiting. And when you’re finished with the waiting? Just wait a little longer.
12. Did I mention the food? Even after you’ve eaten the equivalent of 4 meals plus snacks, don’t be surprised if the caterer brings out freshly grilled sandwiches.
13. Everyone’s a specialist on site. There’s one guy whose only job is to run the playback when the director calls for it. I wonder what he tells his friends when they ask what he does for a living. “I’m the playback guy.”
14. If you get a chance to go for a walk to stretch your legs (while they’re fixing the rails), and you happen to find an
“artisan chocolatemaker” among the funky shops in
The Distillery and you buy some cashews tumbled in Costa Rican milk chocolate infused with Chai spice, your mouth will thank you again and again and you will dream about the flavour when you’re not eating them.
15. You can hang out with some really cool people when you’re killing time at a film shoot.
Note: for more photos of my very brief visit to Toronto, click here. I only had enough spare time for one quick walk down to the harbourfront.
by Heather Plett | May 8, 2009 | Uncategorized
Things I’ve had to do or cope with in the last week that are a little crazy-making:
1. A father-in-law ends up in the hospital and every piece of news is a little worse than the piece we’d heard before.
2. Juggling three kids in soccer means trying to get them to 2-4 games/practices each per week. With only one car.
2. A daughter gets injured on the soccer field and has to get checked out at the sports injury clinic.
3. The sports injury clinic takes way too long, so I have to rush out of a management team meeting to relieve Marcel on parenting duty. Daughter ends up in a leg brace.
4. A six a.m. flight means that I have to climb into a cab at 4:30 in the morning. Yawn.
5. A poor choice in bed and breakfasts in Toronto means that I have to lie awake listening to the owners in a lovers’ quarrel on either sides of a locked door for about an hour, when I’ve already been awake since 3:30 a.m.
6. The flight home the next day means that I climb out of the cab back at home at 12:00 a.m., after spending 11 hours at a film shoot. Plus the cab driver was rude and I was grouchy.
7. A major film shoot, that’s a bigger investment than any project I’ve managed since I started in this job, is resting on my shoulders and I have to make all of the decisions and be prepared to justify them to staff and board.
8. The house is a mess because of all the juggling of soccer schedules and hospital visits and travel and we have an exchange student showing up in less than a week.
Not that I’m complaining – I have a good life all-in-all. But sometimes I reflect on what Linda Duxbury calls the “sandwich generation” (those people in the middle years of their lives who are coping with both ailing parents and dependent children) and I get a little stressed about coping with it all.
Remember back in junior high English classes when you had to write a “so much depends upon…” poem like The Red Wheelbarrow? Well, my whole life feels like a “so much depends upon” poem.
So much depends upon… the stressed out soccer mom who’s also a manager who has to travel for her work in a non-profit organization.
by Heather Plett | May 4, 2009 | Uncategorized
We weren’t careful enough, talking in front of the children. We thought they’d heard it all before – that we weren’t really sharing new information. But what they hadn’t heard before was the worry that had started to creep into our voices. The possibility that this could be the beginning of worse things to come.
Marcel noticed Maddie first, sitting on the steps with her head bent. “Are you okay?” he asked. She said nothing. I sat down to hold her and realized the fear that she was beginning to carry along with the rest of us. She wept in my arms.
Her grandfather is sick. Marcel’s dad. There’s more wrong than we at first thought when he entered the hospital a week and a half ago. A lot of it is still unknown, but none of it looks good.
Throughout the evening, any time her Pépère was mentioned, the tears welled up in Maddie’s eyes. “I’m trying to think happy thoughts,” she said, but the tears said otherwise. The rest of us are feeling a little numb – a little unsure how to feel. Her seven-year-old honesty is expressing what the rest of us are holding a little closer to our chests. We knew his health had begun to deteriorate, we knew he just wasn’t himself lately… we thought we were prepared for anything. But how can you prepare for the unknown?
by Heather Plett | Apr 30, 2009 | Uncategorized
Sometimes the eye aches for the things you have seen.
You open a forgotten photo
And the physical pain of memory and longing washes over you
The indescribable green of the rice paddy
The heat of the tropical sun beating on your unaccustomed face
The kindness of strangers with sun-blocking umbrellas
The faraway sounds of villages celebrating Holi day
The laughing children covered in mud
The grinning farmer and his shy daughter in their potato field
The dancing grandma with the red sari
The boats lingering on the canal
The face of the young boy catching the lingering rays as the sun descends
It all comes back to you in that instant
by Heather Plett | Apr 28, 2009 | Uncategorized
Our dishwasher has been broken for a few weeks, and though there’s been a fair bit of grumbling at our house (have you SEEN how many dishes a family of five can produce?), there have also been a few blessings in disguise. For one thing, despite their protests, the girls are learning the fine art of washing dishes by hand. For another thing, as I learned with my own mother years ago, some great mother-daughter bonding can happen over a sink of dirty dishes.
My favourite blessing, though, has been the fact that spending more time over the sink means also spending more time at the kitchen window. There’s an unruly hedge just outside the window and it’s always been the gathering place of a myriad of birds. Until recently, however, I had no idea just how much variety there is in the types of birds that frequent our backyard.
Maddie spotted me gazing out the window one day, and she wanted to join the fun. Her and I have since become avid bird-watchers, digging out a bird book and trying to identify the species as they appear.
On Saturday morning, Maddie went out with a bowl full of bird seed and set up a bird restaurant on the old bench in front of the hedge. “It’s called Birdie Buffet!” she said.
For the rest of the weekend, she and I would periodically tiptoe to the window to see what birds had come to dine. She named the first one that appeared after she ducked back in the house “Bravery.” The others hovered in the hedge, waiting to make sure it was safe.
We managed to capture a few of them on film (or rather, the digital equivalent), but the most interesting ones (the blue jays, and the red-headed finch Maddied named “Finchie”) were also the most shy and they quickly disappeared when we showed up at the window.
The little grey wrens with the yellow beaks were the most bold and apparently the most hungry. Maddie had to replenish her buffet a couple of times, and she was convinced that they’d gained weight by the end of the weekend.
1. There is a lot of food available on a film set. A. LOT!
