Red Car

Today was the long anticipated first day for me as an intern at Red Car Productions. It was a long day from the start but very exciting. I got up extra early so that I could walk the 30 minutes it takes to get to E Illinois street and the River East building where the Chicago Red Car Offices are. I got to Red Car a little bit early and that was a good thing since I got a bit lost in the River East building. I met the other intern, Chris, and all day I found myself running around northern Chicago. Food runs, coffee runs, deliveries...everything. I am beat. The people at Red Car are incredibly kind and their attitudes are anything but pompous. Tomorrow is my second day and with all the buzz that I was subject to my first day of work I expect tomorrow to be no different.

After work I caught the El up north and bought an old bike off Gunnar since my Huffy is a POS. Hopefully the bike will help make my errand running a bit quicker at Red Car. I only wish that I could someday work at a place like Red Car. I'd go into details about the building and the Offices but I'm tired as hell. I'll provide a detailed analysis of those and more subjects tomorrow...if I can muster the strength. Goodnight!

Fatal Feline II

So over the past two days I've been working hard at a little project for my future filming endeavors. My big bro and my sister in law have stopped into town this week and so I got my big brother to help me out with building a PVC pipe camera dolly. The finished product is pretty nice. We did some research online and came up with a hybrid design for the dolly and the track. I'm quite impressed with the end product. It all comes apart and can be stored in a bag and hefted around. even the track has been cut into 5' pieces. For the wheels my little brother Andrew gave me the wheels from his old skateboards. here's some picthahs -

Dave cutting angle irons to mount the wheels onto

Mounting the wheels

All the pieces of the dolly

The dolly on the track - Perfect fit!

we used doorstoppers fot the tripod legs to rest on.
later we're going to add eye holes to the PVC so we can fasten the tripod down securely with rope or bungie cords.

Perfect!

Each 5' track piece has a male and female connector end. This makes for easy assembly and makes the track portable.

Beautiful!

The next day right after our new years celebration with fireworks and confetti I got my brother and cat together to make a short film so I could test out my dolly. I don't own a professional camera, or tripod but I was able to slap something decent together. I used my dad's old Kalimar 960 tripod (not a fluid head) and my Casio Exilim digital camera to make my short which I've titled: Fatal Feline II. There isn't a Fatal Feline I but that's all part of the fun of it. It's a sort of Dramatic/thriller/horror/comedy that I think anyone, who owns a pesky cat, can find something to laugh about in it. Check it out on Youtube!

Fatal Feline II