The Art Department Blog is live
Yes we are live and we are working. This week we are on one of those crazy jobs. All over the city in eight or ten locations with a photographer. This is a really special shoot, because this is not a product shoot or a fashion shoot, this one is for ART. Something that is, of course, close to the heart. Tomasz Gudzowaty is a brilliant photographer you can view some of his work at:
http://www.gudzowaty.com/
He is the man we have all been waiting for this week. When the producers from “Syrup”,
http://www.SyrupNYC.com
the company that called me into this project, met me in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel on Wednesday, we were going to scout locations for this shoot. We talked about the six days and ten or so locations we were going to shoot and the nature of the shoot. The idea was to produce this shoot for Mr. Gudzowaty who would be shooting the English Parkour team. Now, I didn’t really know what this was called until now, even though I had seen this done on a couple car commercials and movies. It is a rapidly growing stunt sport of athletes that are training to jump, dive, climb, and propel themselves from point to point in spectacular moves. So, we were going to provide the equipment, sets and props that they needed for this shoot. What was crazy about all this was that they wanted to start shooting the next day… Oh yeah, we’re scouting locations today and we were going to provide a truck, crew, platforming, scaffolding, crash pads, and various other devices and gear starting the next day. My instinct was to bail, to decline gracefully and run the other way. I’m glad I didn’t, this has been a great job as crazy as it’s been. We ended up coordinating the following day and then waiting in the rain for two more days to start. Finally, we are going to shoot on the top of the Grand Hyatt Hotel just above Grand Central Station. It is a grey day to start with a very low ceiling of clouds like a fog hanging over the tops of the buildings. What a view it is though, right next door to the Chrysler building with it’s beautiful flying eagles on the corners of the building.
We can’t get up on the roof because the engineer didn’t get the notice that the shoot had been postponed from Saturday to Sunday. He thought we would be
View looking south
back on Monday. So we swing into action unloading the truck, loading the elevator, carrying the platforms and the goods down the hall and up the narrow flight of stairs to the roof and wait for the engineer to arrive. Of course the whole of this takes more than two hours and we are an hour behind schedule, but the photographer and the talent haven’t shown up yet and so at least no one is there breathing heavy and waiting for us to get this set up. We get it done, an eight foot by eight foot by four foot high cube with a flagpole in the corner. Just as we get it finished and into place the photo crew arrives and we tweak a couple things and they are shooting. These guys on the Parkour team are fearless, they are swinging on this flagpole extendening themselves out over the edge of the
Like a flag
building like flags flying in the wind. We shot for about two or three hours before the engineer of the building came up and took one look at what these guys were doing and came to us to tell us that the rig had to be moved away from the corner of the roof. That it wasn’t safe to have these guys swinging out over the edge of the roof like that. The photographer however couldn’t get the shot he wanted if we moved this away from the edge. We had built this to look like the corner of a roof and there was nothing out behind them. So, after about an hours wrangling with the producer, the engineer, the photographer and us about what was possible and what we could do… meanwhile, the photographer finished his shooting at the south end and wanted to move the rig to the north end, about a hundred yards away. Well, not an easy feat to protect the roofing, lift this 800 pound gorilla onto dollies, and roll it the football field to to the north end of the roof. We built a safety platform extending out beyond the edge of the roof with crash pads on them to give these guys a break in their fall if they were to lose their grip on the pole. The engineer supplied us with some plywood and lumber to build this and we were able to make the shot work for the photographer. By the end of the day – 12 and a half hours after we arrived – everyone was happy, we’d gotten the first day of shooting in and we were going to return to this location the next day when we would move this thing four more times from one end to the other. Ahh, what a life it is… Next weekend we shoot in Times Square with a cop that hates us. Come back and check in with us then. I’m sure we’ll have a few more stories to tell.