Tag: Television

Poor Man’s Pile-Up

Poor Man's Pile-Up

One day, during the first season of the Aaron Spelling television series “Savannah“, we found ourselves faced with shooting a scene between the characters Dean (David Gail) and Lane (Robyn Lively). The scene was set at night and featured our two actors sitting in a parked pickup truck beside a moderately busy highway. The problem was, it was in the middle of the day and we were inside the old lumber warehouse that had been converted into our ersatz stage.

We were going to have to fake it.

To simulate a busy highway in the out-of-focus background, it was decided that we’d use a clumsy Continue reading Poor Man’s Pile-Up

Spinning, Flopping, Bucking & Sucking

Yes, the title of this post sounds exciting and dirty, but it is in fact a very accurate description of some special effect chairs that were built over at Scenario Custom Scenery a few years ago for a set of commercials for Badcock Furniture. I personally worked on the first chair shown in this video…. check it out and I’ll explain a bit more afterward:

Okay, in the first part of that video you saw a chair’s upholstery being sucked up into a vacuum cleaner, right? Well here’s how it worked…. Continue reading Spinning, Flopping, Bucking & Sucking

We Fly Real Fast

Richard and Carol LangDo any of you remember the mixture of giddy excitement and utter bafflement that swirled around the production of the “pre-pilot” for the Aaron Spelling series “Savannah” back in 1995? The production seemed to swing from silver spoon to shoestring with wild abandon. We were in high cotton during the swank wedding exteriors that we shot at the house of that Atlanta Barbecue sauce magnate (with the really hot redheaded trophy wife). And it wasn’t too bad when we shot at the clubhouse at Eagle’s Landing. But the day that we rolled into the as-yet-unfinished Delta terminal at Hartsfield International Airport? That was pure guerrilla filmmaking. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were really lucky to have Richard Lang directing.
Continue reading We Fly Real Fast

Lawless: The Accidental Robbery

Rober Scherer with a Camera on a Fake LegMost mornings, on my way into Atlanta, I hop off the Downtown Connector and drive northward on surface streets, enjoying the ever-changing views of town. Quite often I drive past locations from old movie projects and am reminded of those past events in vivid detail. Most recently I’ve been pondering the day we shot in front of the historic Ponce De Leon Apartments at the corner of Ponce and Peachtree. We were there for the pilot episode of “Lawless“. That was the first pilot of Lawless mind you, the one with a very, very medicated Daniel Baldwin… so very medicated was he that I have until recently remembered his outlandish behavior on set far better than the day that I almost robbed a convenience store by accident. But now I remember…
Continue reading Lawless: The Accidental Robbery

Digital Television

This one’s for my non-technical readers.

You may not be aware of this but television in the United States is going to be changing in a big way in the next few years: if you rely on over-the-air transmissions (rabbit ears) to receive television signals your television is going to stop working on or before February 17, 2009. The FCC is requiring that all full-power stations move to digital transmission by next year which means that unless your television is equipped to decode and process digital signals you may begin to experience the “blackout” before the 2009 deadline.

But, there’s no need to panic.

Continue reading Digital Television