L.A. Trip, Day 04:

Thursday was way easier than I thought it was going to be.  Sleep still hadn’t caught up with me yet and the time change was still mega weird.  I found myself accidentally calling Jon at midnight Eastern time, 9 pm local time and wondered why he was saying he needed to get in bed because he had an early morning planned.  If it weren’t for my Gatorade in the mornings, I would be mega sluggish.  I opted to stay out of the gym Thursday morning in favor of the “sleep an extra 30 minutes” route.  Our shoot was planned at the hotel we were staying in, so there was no need to rush or get worried about anything.

Unless, of course, our talent was a diva, was high maintenance and an overall hassle that ultimately worked against us during the shoot.  We chose to hit the iHop for breakfast as the hotel’s restaurant left a lot to be desired during breakfast.  Not sure if it was because Chris and I weren’t wearing suits or what, but for some reason they chose to ignore us completely on Wednesday, forcing me to eat off of the buffet, which wasn’t bad, but was a little bit of a bummer.  iHop rocked my socks as it’s known to do, especially when there are blueberry pancakes involved.  It just so happened that our light guy was already at our hotel before we were finished with breakfast, which, aside from the awesome blueberry pancakes, really set the tone for what would turn out to be an awesome day.

The day before, I worked on a on-the-fly teleprompter on the Macbook Pro, since such technology wasn’t planned but was requested by our talent.  We also made what we called a “hillbilly teleprompter,” printing the lines for the talent out on large sheets of paper, clipped to a custom sized piece of matte-board.  We were able to turn the set, an ugly hotel room, into a beautiful scene, perfectly balanced and warm.  I’ll have to say that we turned out an awesome looking product with the equipment and talent that we had.  Speaking of talent, our spokesperson knocked it out of the park for us.  For the record, she was not a diva, was not high maintenance and was not an overall hassle that ultimately worked against us during the shoot.  It went beautifully.

The shoot was over much quicker than we anticipated, freeing us up for a cool lunch at a sweet Irish-themed pub and allowed me to make the trek to HalloweenTown in Burbank, CA to check out this place I’ve always wanted to go to, but because of the location was forced to just witness from the website.  It was a beautiful experience, allowing me to check out a lot of props, makeup, jewelry, t-shirts, decor, art, books, movies and much, much more.  I spent quite a few bucks there, but I was able to load down with some pretty rad stuff for Erin and myself.  The night ended with some shrimp fried rice at a Thai restaurant in Agoura Hills that was preceded by some “veggie rolls” that I thought sounded good initially and ended up not being worth a dump.

Enjoy today’s haiku:

Tonight, I sat on
My very own toilet seat
Ahh, the little things…