Heed the Sign

For the past two months we’ve been working hard on Episode 8 of Life and Times, which has been filmed mainly outdoors in the very early morning hours.  No one in New York has a car (OK, one of us has a car…) but we’ve been mostly doing it all by bicycle, which means hauling about 75 lbs of camera equipment with us on the back of a tricycle with a flatbed attachment.  The night before a shoot, Pavol will pack up the equipment, and I try my best to rig it on the back with about 25 ft. of rope, hoping I don’t have to stop along the way to tie something tighter.

We get up at 3:30am (or — just last week: 2:30am) gulp a coffee, strap on the hazard lights and helmets, and set out to bike to our location, with many of the actors also traveling by bike to meet us.  This last Monday was the longest bike ride yet — 40 miles round trip to Floyd Bennet Field, an abandoned airstrip turned parkland near Breezy Point.  There were few streetlights and no moon.  So, we had a flashlight strapped to the handlebars and took caution not to run over the surprised rabbits who took off across the road in front of us.

It was our last morning shoot.  I’m a little sad about that.

Pavol and I will return to record some ambient sound in the next two weeks, but it will be just the two of us then.  I’m going to miss the mornings we had making this episode — the quiet in the city — bikes at dawn and the surprise of finding your friends waiting when you get there.

NTO at Floyd Bennett Field

Kelly on LIC scouting mission

Now back in New York again after our month in the country, Pavol and I are devoting our time to exploring our natural habitat here in New York, looking for locations to shoot the rest of Life and Times – Episode 8 with the company.  Our neighborhood is a maze of decommissioned factories (turned storage for Broadway?), but there’s a strange beauty — even after all that nature — to an industrial landscape.  Things like light, weather, time of day mean different shadows, different color, different feeling.  It’s a perverse pleasure after all this time on the road to explore your own backyard.  Even if the security guy at the cement factory chases you and your camera equipment away… we found a feral cat colony, a secret garden, decommissioned train tracks and weird smelling canals.

I apologize for all the photos with me in them.  Pavol was the one with the camera.  I am the one still learning how to ride my bike.

Down the Street at High Speed

Sunset over the city from Queens