Long and Glorious, Part II

For hating cold this much, I sure can take it

Sunday started early. 9:00 AM early – which might not be early to most of you, but to this self-employed one-time software engineer, that’s an hour I’m familiar with only through perseverance and lingering chemical enhancements. The morning was building an entire new set for a bathroom scene; the afternoon was flying it about 10′ in the air, and the evening was entirely consumed by the shot you see above.

By the way, that’s me in the sacrificial pose

Or, well, for everyone else, that shot was an evening thing. I got started on it about midafternoon; putting the finishing touches on the rig, and then starting to mix that liquid – which started with figuring out just how best to do it.

Prior to “deployment”, as I might call it, I asked more experience professionals how to go about this, and the advice that turned out to be the most relevant is to have a recipe for your batch size – I started knowing the molecular ratio I wanted to get, but all precision went out the window when all I had to measure with were empty paint buckets. At that point, it was flying by the seat of my pants, having an idea of of to mix what I wanted, and then counted what I put in each time. Once I had a recipe, we kicked into gear, and raced against the clock.

Being “smart”, I think, is more about paying attention to the world around you than anything else.

So. The trough is filled, the liquid prepared. The lights are around where they need to be, and the musician is in costume. We’ve only got one shot at this – it’s not like we can clean that gunk off him in any reasonable amount of time.

Clearly, we need a body double.

Clearly, being just about the same height and build, I’m one of the candidates.

Clearly, having built the damn thing, if I’m not willing to use it, why should anyone else?

Goddamn but that stuff was cold.

Ah, as they say, a good deed never goes unpunished. Except, well, I got pretty truly rewarded in the admiration from the crew, as I lay there, patiently letting them figure out the lighting for the scene, shivering so hard my entire body was shaking, for an hour.

I get the impression that this was supposed to be “hard”, and that, if I were an on looker, it would seem as such. But really? It needed doing, and I was the one doing it, and it doesn’t get easier than that.