Coca Cola Shoot

Hey everyone. So sorry I haven't updated this is such a long time. The truth is that I have been really busy with school and figuring things out here.

I have a lot of things I could talk about that have happened since my last post. I'll try to cover most of whats happened over the next few entries, but this one is going to focus on a Coca Cola commercial shoot I was on back in December.

I was on a set for two days straight. Two twelve hour shoots in two days, midnight to noon on Saturday and 6am to 6 pm the next day. Crazy stuff. Every year Coke has a commercial shooting competition for aspiring film students. You have to have enrolled in an advanced film course to take part, but beyond that anyone can pitch a commercial idea to the competition board. The ten best ideas are funded and shot and then the winner's commercial is screened nationwide on AMC theatre screens before the movies play. To give you some perspective on my film schools' domination of competitive film making, this was a national competition open to all film students across the country and 7 of the 10 finalists chosen by Coke this year were from USC.

It was an amazing shoot and we got some really great footage. I can't wait to show you the final product when it finishes up. During shooting, I had an experience with one of the duties that was delegated to me. I was the designated parking meter filler. The meter maids started writing tickets at 8am so my job was to wait until about 7:45, go find the cars and fill their meters up with time. I left the theatre with a pocket full of coins and a description of the cars and where they were in the vicinity of the theatre we were shooting in. The theatre was on the intersection of three major streets in West Hollywood: Sunset Blvd, Hollywood Blvd, and Hilhurst Ave. Each of which changed into a different street after crossing through the intersection: Sunset Blvd became Sunset Drive, Hollywood Blvd became Sunset Blvd, and Hilhurst Ave became Virgil Ave. Yeah, I was confused too. I was told the first car was parked two blocks away on Sunset Blvd but the owner of the car, Ari, didn't know which way it was outside the theatre. I saw Sunset Blvd and followed it north, not realizing that it became Hollywood Blvd as I went through the crosswalk. I kept getting confused and turned around by the confusing LA street signs and ended up doubling back to the theatre to follow the same wrong road up two blocks twice. Finally I gave up and tried to get to the other car before it got a ticket. By this time it was 8:10 AM. I followed Sunset Blvd which was Hollywood Blvd down four blocks and reach the other car described to me. It had a ticket. A $25 ticket. I grabbed this and ran back to the theatre to try and get to the other car before it got a ticket. I grabbed Ari from the set and told him we needed to get to his car before it got a ticket. It was then 8:20 and I was freaking out. This was literally the first true responsibility I had been given in the whole of the 8 hours of shooting we did, and I had already cost the set $25. Keep in mind the budget for the entire shoot was $7,500 and it was a student film. Meaning there was no budget outside what Coke gave us. We raced over to Sunset Blvd which was Sunset Drive and find Ari's car. A $50 ticket was on the windshield.

Now I have to give these tickets to our producer Tyler and explain to him why I couldn't find two cars parked within three blocks of the theatre. Originally I began to blame my friend Mallory who had gotten me on the set to begin with and gave me the parking meter job. I started to make excuses about how I didn't know the streets and she should have done it herself because she knew where the cars were. I started getting angry at the California state government for being so broke and needing these parking tickets to keep their deficit afloat. I started to get angry at Ari for explaining the position of his car badly and not feeding the meter himself. Then I began to realize where I was and what industry I was going into. I realized that this set was the most professional set I had worked on since coming to LA and that bigger and higher budget films would only be that much more complex and stressful. I realized that I had fucked up the situation myself by not being more resourceful and proactive about my responsibility. I realized that whatever the circumstances, the failure was on me. I started to get a little scared about what this would mean for my further involvement in the shoot, or in the industry at all. I figured these people would be very upset and probably not want to work with me again. Mallory would lose some credibility for vouching for me and probably not recommend me for further shoots. I thought about what would happen if I was on a major set and I screwed up with this proportion of fines. It would probably be the end of my professional relationship with everyone on that set.

I went to Tyler, our producer, and rather than blaming other people or explaining the excuses I told him straight up that I had screwed up and now we had $75 in parking fines. He was understandably angry and told me that my job for the rest of the shoot was to make sure those cars didn't go over their time. I had filled the meters with and hour and half of time when I finally found them, but within 40 minutes Tyler came up to me and told me it was time to be proactive and go fill them up again. I did and felt like a failure. I felt like I would never make it in this town because I couldn't even be resourceful enough to find two cars on the streets of LA. When I got back to the theatre I sat back down in my seat and Tyler came up to me. He said he wanted to talk to me in the lobby. We walked back through the theatre and I expected him to tell me that I shouldn't come back the next day or that I should take a bus home now or something. Instead he apologized to me. He said that he felt bad for getting upset with me and that everyone makes mistakes. He asked me to forgive him for the way he treated me. I was really surprised by this sensitivity and responded by apologizing myself. I told him that I should have been out there taking care of my responsibility and that I understood his frustration with the situation. We shook hands.

It was a really roundabout day. A lot of strange emotions creeped up on me and made me unsure of myself. But the universe came to me and told me that I was on the right path. That I would make mistakes along the way, but as long as I learned from them, I would be fine. The next day we found out that one of the tickets was for expired plates, not expired parking. The driver had to pay that one.