This month’s Behind the Camera was shot for Ryan Bloecker, from "Two x Four", for the Chicago White Sox. Our studio was told of the shot, while my assistant and I were driving back from a week of location shooting in very cold upper Michigan. We were thrilled to return to Chicago because of a balmy warm front of 40º plus arriving. Rebecca, my agent/studio manager called as we were still on the road, traveing back to describing the "cold winter shot" we had to create in the soon to arrive warm weather. We needed to shoot the very next morning which was a Saturday. Chicago had already dug itself out of a good size snowfall, but we had to act fast, as it was going to melt soon and Ryan’s layout called for a freshly shoveled parking space.

I set the call time for 6:30(a) to avoid loosing any snow to rising temperatures. Now any Chicagoan knows that if they spend any time shoveling the snow from a parking space, it’s theirs, and only theirs! That’s Chicago style. Being a resident of Chicago for my entire life, I’ve seen some pretty bizarre looking configurations of lumber, chairs, scarecrows and signage laying claim to a space. Now...here comes the White Sox seat.

My location search plan come to fruition. I envisioned an empty parking space for our chair, framed by perfectly separated cars on either end, they still being covered with fresh snow. Ryan, my assistants and I proceeded to carefully sculpt, shovels of snow back into the completely clean space, much to the amazement and amusement of some early morning onlookers.

We shot with varying amounts of snow, as progressively more and more snow was added. Timing was everything. We beat the warm weather that day...and Chicago didn’t have another significant snowfall for the winter, once that particular snow melted. Check out the sound clip from Chicago Sports Radio 670AM giving us unsolicited praise by clicking on this link. Thank you, radio station. Thank you, Ryan. Oh, we also shoveled all the snow out from the space when we finished

Previous Next