Mojave Desert, California

February 7, 2023 • Place

For years, I’ve driven by movie sets in Victoria, my curiosity piqued by the cube vans, camera gear and unshaven people milling about. This past weekend that curiosity was sated as I sat in with a professional crew from LA shooting a commercial for ArDrive.

Our location was incredible, a rustic ranch about 90 minutes outside of LA on the edge of the Mojave desert. Tumbleweed littered the yard and Joshua trees were visible down the street.

It was fascinating to watch the crew at work, though it was often like watching a government construction job – one person working while 11 people stood around. We’d all wait while makeup would be reapplied between takes. Or a plane would fly overhead and the audio engineer would pause filming until it passed. But when we got on a roll, scenes could come together very quickly.

This made me realize something of the uniqueness of this creative medium. Many art forms like painting, writing, or sculpting require a high degree of solitude. But filmmaking takes a community. There’s an immense amount of quiet work in advance – scriptwriting, memorizing lines, picking costumes, planning scenes, scouting locations. Then on the day of the shoot, all of that planning is unleashed through a dozen or more people making something bigger than the sum of their parts. It’s not unlike the progression from songwriting alone on the couch to performing that song on a big stage with the sound turned up to 11. But filmmaking offers even more collaboration and creative potential.

I left the day in the desert with a new appreciation for the work of acting – the ability to reproduce the same emotion and dialogue take after take. Not easy. And not well paid. We had over one hundred actors apply for the two roles in our commercial and they received far less than many others on the set.

Film industry jargon was also bewildering at first. The director would shout “M.O.S.!”, which meant that the next scene had no sound so we could continue our chatter. I also learned that a PA was not a public address system but a Production Assistant. We had several of PAs on set, offering snacks to the crew, or adjusting the Flag or the Silk – large rectangular screens that filter sunlight (see image below).

All in all, it was a blast to sit on a canvas chair under the desert sun, offer occasional input to the director, and watch what was once only in my head take shape before my eyes.

I can’t wait until the next shoot.