In Which I am Employed As an Unconventional Model :)

Last night I was employed in a way I never expected to be: modeling! ;) Well, sort of. You see, our good friends the Tates, are making a documentary for the Parental Rights Amendment, (Daniel will be doing a full post on the project later) and Mr. George Escobar of Advent Film Group (Come What May) has generously lended the Tates some of his film-making equipment for a month or so! Exciting! So Daniel took Sarah and I over to the Tate's house, to figure out all the equipment with Grace, and Daniel (Who da' Gaffer? :) Tate. The lighting was the thing that took the longest. They set up key lighting, fill lighting, backlighting, and every other kind of lighting you could think of. I was employed as a model. My job was to sit in a rocking chair in the corner and look nice and pretty while they adjusted the lighting, took pictures of me, scruntinized the light upon my face, (all of them in a row staring at me!) and inspected me through the camera. It was interesting! Especially all the stressful handling of this expensive and borrowed equipment!!!! :) For instance, you can't handle the lightbulbs without gloves because they might explode from the oil on your hands, you must weight down the tripods so they don't tip over...etc. It was really neat, and alot of fun! And easy for me. Like I said, I had the life of it over there in my corner, simply turning my face different directions while they tilted the lamps to get rid of shadows....ahhhh... :D You know, I felt quite famous! Daniel T. was the sound man, and the gaffer, and held a boom mic toward me while my Daniel manned the camera, Sarah was employed as the clack-board lady. (I got to hold up the whitecard! :) and I was instructed to talk toward Grace. It is harder than you would imagine not to look at the camera while being interviewed! We were laughing at how many real names for jobs they have on set, and were trying to figure out what my job was! I think we decided on "lighting model", so as not to have to pay the actors to sit under such bright lights for so long! We wrapped it up around 10:30, and left. As we jumped into the car, Grace apologetically informed us that she just discovered a dimmer for the fill-light. We had it on full-blast as high as it could go right into my face! Oh well! It had a sunlight bulb in it, so maybe I'll just end up with a nice tan! ;) But really, seeing all that real movie-making stuff and knowing that it was what the "real people" use, was really really cool!!! :) I'm sure Daniel was in hog-heaven, since he is an aficianado of fim-making! :) -Rachel