Vandals Stole My Shoot

I’ve worked on a lot of different types of shoots—sometimes they stick around in my memory, sometimes I only remember little details, or not much of anything. Then there are the shoots that I remember with visceral memories, like the twelve days I spent in New Orleans shooting Marvel Universe Live. I took this picture the first night I arrived, and when I look at it, a wave of every emotion and physical sensation I felt hits me again.

I remember getting off a plane, frustrated with a work-related thing that I’ve since forgotten the details of, greeted with a text from a sympathetic co-worker with a plan to get me out of the hotel room and full of good food. We ate extraordinary food at Cane and Table (because damn right I’m going to name check amazing restaurants when I can), and then wandered and found things like the little night market selling art in the photo above. It adjusted my brain, got me into a better place to rally myself, and prepped me for the almost two week stretch ahead of me. I thought.

The next days were tough—not because of the people I was with or because we didn’t get what we needed. In fact we captured amazing content. And the cast and crew, as usual, became enthusiastic partners with what we were trying to do. But the days were long. And hot. And it turns out that it’s difficult to find food in New Orleans after 9 or 10pm, which is when we were done. So each night we all turned into zombies, incapable of doing anything but grunting and griping at each other as we stumbled forward in search of food. Subsisting on caffeine and beignets was delicious, but not really brain food.

What we were shooting was fun; there’s nothing better than having the run of an arena with few creative restrictions, and a willing group of people who want to do everything again, once more, another time, just because they want to make the end product better. I’ve learned over the years that you can’t trust a performer to tell you how they’re really feeling if they think they can do a trick better than the last time. I’ve also learned they’re usually right, and usually it makes for amazing visuals.

But sometimes, on the last day of a shoot, when everything is going amazingly and people are firing on all cylinders, you’ll suddenly be asked “do you really need to keep shooting?” Because as it turns out, when vandals break into a power sub-station, steal so much copper piping that it makes running that sub-station dangerous, the officials who know what they’re talking about will make the decision to cut power to an entire section of the city, including the arena. That blackout will last hours longer than anticipated, and because you’re in New Orleans in the summer, the humidity will become so extreme that when the power does come back on the A/C can’t work hard enough, and the special effect fog won’t evaporate fast enough to make it safe for the motorcycles to do tricks or for the double ended fire wands to stay lit. And so you eventually have to say, no, it’s not worth it to keep going—we’ll work with what we got.

And that is how vandals stole my shoot.