Twenty-one days later and we're back. How's it going? How's it been? You still living at your mother-in-law's house too with your wife, two kids, and a dog while your house is still being renovated? You still living through a raging pandemic with little to no federal (or Oklahoma state) leadership while also trying to keep your personal and mental health in check plus keep that professional life together?
Being in house renovation mode is something I'd not recommend for mere mortals. We're going to have a fancy looking bathroom and some freshly painted rooms once all this nonsense is over, but damn... No one needs that Covid Badge of Honor. Seems we'd be more likely to get Oklahoma to vote for a democrat before this house gets finished.
Oh, and Q3 taxes (corporate and personal) were due to my CPA. All kidding aside, those incredibly qualified heroes out in Long Island are rockstars who I can't say enough nice things about.
It's seemingly impossible to get things done professionally considering everything else requiring immediate attention. In the process of trying to get this post written, I'm on FaceTime and the phone helping my wife pick out bathroom lights and drawer pulls while she's also trying to keep our two house fires from burning down both Lowe's and The Home Depot. That and working with one of the general contractors – who may or may not have Covid – on problems needing to be fixed due to their subcontractors – who may or may not have Covid.
It's only Monday morning and I've not even finished my first coffee.
This has been Anne and my life during Covid. We're ready for this infected and feverish train to stop so we can get off. Thanks to recent news, I'm 90-95% sure there's light at the end of the tunnel, but fully aware there's still quite a bit of tunnel left.
Seeing as how there's been certainly a reason (or two or ten) I've been on radio silence the last three weeks, I figured it's time to check in before getting back to my actual responsibilities. Work has been crazy busy and keeping me on my toes. Two days had me on a film set and wearing a still photog hat, then on to a commercial trying out my AC legs, and then back to tempering my one-man-band calluses running camera and audio while also gaffing, DIT'ing, and managing a remote setup for shoot here in the Oklahoma City area. We might as well add PA to my list of professional credits on this project considering the Airbnb they rented and had me responsible for plus a surprisingly grueling FedEx run to ship out the project hard drive.
Kinda nerding out a bit on some gear from this project: the whole remote director thing worked better than I'd expected. That and this iPad slate I'd found was super helpful in this specific situation over my tried and true traditional dry eraser number.
The director was on lockdown in London and would be conducting the interviews via Zoom. I'd taken care of that nonsense on other remote shoots, but this director also wanted the camera picture with timecode. It took a bit of Googling and YouTube research to figure out a workable solution, but I was able to land on using a Blackmagic Ultrastudio 3G Recorder. The little gray box converted my camera's SDI or HDMI signal to Thunderbolt 3 so my laptop could accept the signal. There's some kind of software issue not allowing audio to be included via SDI and HDMI, but we were still able to use the laptop's mic. That whole setup worked like a charm through the interview portion seeing as how we were planted in one spot, but being tethered to my laptop during b-roll was a hot mess. That'd have been a great time for a wireless signal via Teradek, but turns out those cost money we didn't have in the production budget.
The free DigiSlate iPad app was perfect for what we were doing. We ended up going through a dozen or so different topics and each needed specific slate information. WAY easier to type in what I needed instead of forcing an editor I'll never meet to try and decipher my hieroglyphics. I wasn't in a spot needing timecode to match up exactly with my camera and audio, so I can't speak to that, but I'll for sure being using this iPad app again.