Have You Ever Been Tied Up?

Have you ever been tied up?  Not in the 50 Shades of Grey kinda way but in the fly me to the moon kinda way?

Maybe not, although… you may have felt the pinch of a climbing harness in your past.:)

I’ve been busy… but having fun!

I got a call from my mother the other day wondering if she had missed my last few blogs.  “The last one I read was in May?”  She questioned.

Yep, sad but true!  It was ‘Duct Tape‘… and it was May.

I’m so sorry!  (How very Canadian of me… but I am sorry!)

But I do have an excuse… how good it is, I don’t know… but it’s a good jumping off point for today’s blog.

D is for duct tape.

Click here are get some instruction on how to make a” Judy” of yourself with duct tape!

I love duct tape or as I have always called it “Gaffer’s tape”. I grew up in the film industry so we always had silver rolls of duct tape around the house that we used to close, hold or fix just about anything. I didn’t even know that it was called ‘duct tape’ until I went to buy some after I moved away from home.

“‘Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.”

Henry David Thoreau

I have made it! All the way to Easter that is!

Some years the first few months of work can be really, really slow, and some years they can be booming. This year pilot season in Vancouver was crazy busy… our local union was putting every available person to work just trying to get bodies to fill positions… regardless of experience.

What does that mean? Well, don’t get sick!   Sickness is not an option!!

Always Wear Clean Underwear: Golden Rules are Golden for a Reason!

During the Digital Days Conference that I attended in February at the Electronic Arts Campus in Burnaby, British Columbia, Claùde Parè was the opening speaker on the first day… and let me tell you; he helped start the conference off with a bang!

His talk was called, The Rules of Cinema: Rated ‘R’… and he was just amazing!

Now, as you may have gleaned in previous posts, I’m a big fan of Jessica Sitomer‘s seminars that she gives here in Vancouver each year.  She travels everywhere, so take a look and see if she is coming to talk in your area.  One of the things Jessica says when going for a job interview is, “When some one asks, ‘How do you feel you excel at your job?’, find a way to tell them by using a story about you doing your job.”  Draw the people in around you with more than just an, ‘Oh, I think I am great organizer’.  You could say, “On Tron I had the challenge of bringing multiple departments together each morning before the cast arrived to start the process of getting dressed.  The specialty costume took an hour or longer from start to finish to dress the cast and once on, they were a challenge to remove quickly. A Sound Assist was needed to wire the suit before we started testing of the lighting systems and a costume tech was needed to asst sound…”

This shouldn’t have happened…

This is way beyond costumes; this kind of incident can and has happened to someone in every department, and I would love to say that from this day forward it won’t happen again… but I can’t.

February 20th, 2014 a horrific accident happened on the set of the feature film “Midnight Rider” and a young camera assistant, Sarah Jones, was killed.

The same accident injured many other crew members, some very seriously.

If you are reading my blog and are trying to get into film, or are fairly new to the film and television industry, you may not yet have an understanding of all of the things that can and do happen in our workplaces.  We sometimes work in dangerous places, with dangerous set pieces.  We sometimes work in hazardous environments.  We lift heavy things and the ground is rarely even underfoot.  We work until we’re bone tired… then we drive home.

“Let’s talk about sex, baby, Let’s talk about you and me, Let’s talk about all the good things, And the bad things that may be, Let’s talk about sex….”

~ SALT ‘N’ PEPA

Shot from the opening credits of the TV series Masters of Sex

We costumers are some of the ‘lucky’ few that get to be on set during a sex scene.  Yep right on set, really, really close.  Some of you who have had the experience may know this already; it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be!

The fee for extra baggage…

We have just completed our first three weeks of shooting and now the holidays!  Yahoo!

But before I hurdle myself headlong into gingerbread and mulled-whatever mode, I wanted to get this blog out to you all in answer to a question from a friend and new costumer I received a few weeks ago.

The phone call went like, “Help!  I have to build a ‘truck kit’… what on earth do I put in it?!”  The language might have been a bit more saucy but she was under the gun.  You get the idea.

Walkie Talking Around

“Yeah, breaker one-nine, this here’s the Rubber Duck; you got a copy on me, Pigpen? C’mon.”

C. W. McCall, Convoy

There are quite a few film blogs on walkie-talkies.  So I why am I writing another?  Well, it was shown to me the other night by one of my day calls that we need to have just one more… one that maybe just us costumers are reading.

We don’t use trucker talk on the walkies.  But I do think it would be tons of fun to say:

“Breaker-Breaker, this here’s Costume Chick, you got your ears on Camera Dude?”

Logic is the beginning of wisdom…

“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.  I am so looking forward to the next step.”  Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek

Okay, I admit it; I love to watch Star Trek!   I don’t watch as often as I used to… work gets in the way a little.  I did go to the latest movie, “Into Darkness”, and called Michael Kaplan, the costume designer, and told him I loved it!  I saw it in 3D and the fabrics used in the costumes just popped!

Aside from the imaginative costumes that great sci-fi movies show, I love to go to movies like “Star Trek” and see what the filmmakers have imagined for future technology and gadgets.

I remember watching the original series and loving all the gadgets that were developed as props for the show… that now we are actually using today.  Like flip phones… oh those are so 20 years ago!