October 23, 2005
L.A. L.A. LAND
Los Angeles is vast.
I could live there. I love the dense sea of humanity.
The smell and the terrain reminded me a lot of my birthplace, Johannesburg, South Africa.
I just took a trip to L.A. with Mike Emmer, a guy I work for in the Film/Video business here in Jakson Hole.
The mission was to procure a 35mm movie camera for a decent price.
The week was a heavy learning experience.
Learning that an ARRI 35-3s' reflex shutter system may light leak at exposure times above 5 seconds due to a gap between the shutter blade and film plane as well as how to fix that problem was one of many questions answered.
That filled my run-on sentence quota for the day.
Seeing the Warner Brothers' kingdom was overwhelming, but getting to geek it with the camera techs and DPs from around the area was almost to much for this dork to handle. We almost bought a camera that was used to shoot Terminator 3. The Ahhnuld jokes were out of control as usual.
We traveled to every major camera house and rental shop in Hollywood and its' surroundings.
We needed a 35mm camera to do high-end timelapse as well as the possibility of being a second unit camera for feature films.
Mission accomplished. After a week negotiating insane traffic amongst five million bad drivers and about $15,000 later(the other guy paid for it) We left with an ARRI 35-3 2nd gen, Cooke 20-100 T3.1 zoom and some very expensive accessories.
Pic without lense.
There are screws on that camera that cost $120 a peice. Ridiculous. You want
German precision engineering. You pay for it.
I developed a taste for being around the upper echelon of Filmmaking. In fact it was really addicting. People so good and passionate about what they do. It stoked the fire of my smoldering ash motivation.
However, I'm not ready for the L.A. industry standard of looking forward with one eye and watching my back with the other.
God worked all things well as usual. I’m on His schedule. So easy to forget.
Ahi fish tacos at Mos Poquitos are the best.
Taco Bell will never be the same.
Not all L.A.liens are plastic, just those who want to be.
In closing my simplest impression of L.A. is this image. The old palm rising
above it all.
Yes, that is smog.
Posted by Tim at October 23, 2005 03:49 PMhey Tim! didn't know you were over at our stomping grounds. don't get many visits here. i recognize the people from the Toyota parking garage. glad you had the experience and returned alive.
Posted by: david at November 1, 2005 05:02 PMPlease note: Comments will not appear immediately. Your comment will appear upon approval by the blog's editor. We had to implement this to decrease the amount of spam that our site receives. Please forgive the inconvenience. We are looking into other, friendlier options.