They say don't talk about the production, but I never signed an NDA so they can't stop me from telling my side of the hardest shoot of my life. (Published 8/30/2023)
It began as a short 3-day shoot that I was invited to by a friend and colleague Quinn Gardner. They needed grips and they couldn't find many locals in Sacramento so he asked me if I would be nice enough to come work, and eat the bill for housing myself as a local. As it is, I've been in the filmmaking industry for 2 years as a professional filmmaker but with 7 years of unpaid student and amateur production work under my belt. So I'm an asset for any production I can work for and I wanted to strengthen our professional ties with Quinn, so I agreed so I could get paid while gaining valuable work experience in gaffing, which I've done before but on lower-budget films with lower budget lighting equipment.
Then just 4 days before the shoot, I was asked to come on for 10 days instead of three and I would only be hired if I could do the whole ten. Naturally, I had already committed to 3, even paid for an AirBnB already so I quickly changed my schedule around to make room for this larger paid project but to be clear, I had no real idea what I was agreeing to.
The first day of production was in the beautiful Wise Villa Winery which is closer to Beal AFB than Sacramento proper. On day one the heat reached 106 degrees and I knew from the start that this would not be "easy money". Working on the Grip & Electric (G&E) team we work the hardest of any department on almost every film set ever made as we have to lug around heavy, expensive equipment, nonstop and at a fast pace as we gaffers don't get callbacks if we're the bottleneck that limits a productions rate of filming.
To make matters worse near the end of day one and two of production (Same location) the production ran out of water later in the day! This isn't so much of a problem for most of the crew as they were about to wrap for the day, but both times it was G&E that was left with nearly two hours of tear-down work to do, still in the heat, yes it was hot even in the darkness of night, and especially without water. Though a producer of note, Nick "Swede" Westerlund, did us a huge solid and found us water before we finished, but we were still effectively without water for 2 - 3 hours.
Only halfway through day two some of the other grips were already talking about quitting as our team was severely overworked, understaffed, and dehydrated. One team member even had a bout with heat exhaustion, that required myself and my compatriot Tyler Wooten to pick up a lot of slack between two locations for nearly 4 hours! It was exhausting and our feet we getting murdered in effect.
Then at the start of day three the whole team, (including me) agreed that we needed our agreed upon 1/2 up-front check paid as there were rumors now spiraling that the production (Who I will not name, as these were only unsubstantiated rumors) was planning on not paying us the agreed upon wages and had a history of cheating crew! (I have no proof of this and I don't know who started these rumors but considering I was spending 1/4 of my pay just to pay my AirBnB, it was deeply concerning at the time.
To our pleasant surprise, there was no issue with this, it was already in our deal memo after all, so once this 1/2 was paid, we were all somewhat relieved, but the story is just getting started now. Some of the middle days of production had their own interesting hiccups, including my car getting broken into and losing my $3000+ DJI Mavic 3 Classic + fly more bundle + drone-designed backpack + my supplements bag (I lift). This still pains me today as I had not anticipated needing my own business equipment insurance yet and this loss made the entire excruciating 14-day shoot a total loss because the production refused to use their insurance on my behalf, which I can understand as I was planning on volunteering my superior quality drone when the time called for it, but by this time it was stolen.
Did you notice that? That's right, it didn't end up being a 10 day shoot either, It ran a total of 12 days with only one Sunday off, and the worst part of the story is yet to come!
The last 4 scheduled days of the production were in the massive Port of Sacramento sugar mill building. An epic location for any production with the right conditions but for us, in the wrong conditions, it was a literal nightmare location! For starters, the port had agreed to clean the mill for us days in advance, but that didn't happen and instead, we wasted the first 3 hours of our first day at the location watching them "clean" the mill which was really creating a lake of syrup! So for all of day one, we had to creatively avoid getting soaked in syrup and the scenes filmed had to avoid picking up the slushing sounds of shoes sticking to the sticky ground. You can see a clip I took of the scene from the start of this shoot here.
Here's a selfie I took around 3 pm, just 1 hour into day 2 at the Sugar Mill when I realized that I was going to be sweating bullets essentially all day every day for the next three days. An uncomfortable realization but one that I knew I would want to commemorate because of the intensity of the shoot for everyone but cast and crew but I might add G&E was constantly on call to do the heavy lifting, thus sweating the most by miles.
It wasn't all bad though, by 11 pm it usually cooled off enough to relax a bit and try to enjoy the experience more if you could forget how bad your feet hurt. You can see me doing that here when everyone was taking a break posing here in the appealing haze. I was sure to get some pictures for myself and others in the crew as the lighting was really something to remember.
The end of my story is more or less just a lesson I learned about G&E as a department. Perhaps mostly out of luck, I had never had such a hash experience gaffing before and according to the talented Zach Dalton and Chris Bond, I would be unlikely to have such an intense shoot for years to come as this was truly one for the books.
Let this be a lesson to all directors and producers though, don't kill your G&E team! They have needs too, like water, and they're what make your footage look amazing. They separate your footage from the chaff and help your work get eyes. I hope my struggle is a positive influence on filmmakers by helping them plan around heat waves, and supplying their staff with the bare essentials like water. Throughout this entire experience, I believe I remained as positive and optimistic as one could, even while my body began to ache I did my best to keep the team in good spirits regardless of the extreme conditions we found ourselves in.
In closing, I hope that this post serves as a noteworthy blog post worth sharing with family and friends about a difficult and memorable job in the Sacramento heatwave of 2023.