Mid-Shooting - A Murder of Crowes

Sound Stage 2 was supposed to be a haven of calm at this point in the shooting. However, following a rather rowdy inter-departmental egg hunt - totally out of season, but they'd had to do something to keep mutiny at bay - Vicki and her team were working busily on the desert dig set, trying to set it to rights before Lelah got in to inspect every inch to her own satisfaction.

Thankfully, a phone call to Olivia had guaranteed that Lelah wouldn't be free until at least 2 o'clock, giving the Art Department - all eight of them - a decent chance of setting everything to rights. Added to that were the hands lent to them by Adam Higgins' team, and Vicki had a good feeling about the end result of the day.

They were lucky enough in that most of the damage had been superficial; to the casual observer, the set looked more or less intact. It was built on three levels; ground, basement, and sub-basement, each one lovingly recreated from pictures of the first Egyptian archaeological digs.

The ground level had been the hardest to construct and keep to safety regs, requiring a lot of gerry-rigging to keep the faux-stone blocks from shifting, especially once they had been roughed up and painted over. The next level down had required more of the construction crew's time to build the ornate columns and niches set along a single passageway. This was still in need of a thick layer of sand to cover the boards that made up the floor.

And the sub-basement level - well, that was the one Vicki was most proud of. Between them, she and Adam had managed to scrounge up a true replica of a real pharoah's sarcophagus - the complete set, too - and with a little adjustment, it had been made to fit perfectly with Lelah's vision of the desert dig site. The Art Department had spent most of their time down there for three straight weeks, painstakingly hand-painting each and every one of the frescoes until Vicki reluctantly put a stop to their obssessive tendencies.

The ground level of the dig set was the only one that had been damaged in the inter-departmental games, and it was this level that Vicki was on her way to lend a hand in repairing. With an armful of prepared canvas, a pot of glue, and a pot of paint, she jumped down into the bottom of their constructed trench and let out a loud laugh at the wooden boom that echoed around the sound stage.

As she made her way over to one of the damaged sections, she unhooked her radio from her belt, speaking into it.

"Adam? It's Vicki, SS2."

There was a pause while she imagined he was locating his own radio. While she waited, she knelt down in front of the scarred section of faux-stone, examining it carefully. The radio crackled.

"Vicks? Adam here, what do you need?"

Bringing the radio to her mouth with a grin, she spoke into the mouthpiece. "Can you get some of your guys over here to sort out the acoustics on the dig set? One jump down, and not even our sound guys are going to be able to hide the fact that the whole thing is made of wood."

"Still booming? Right-o, darlin', rescue team on its way."

Laughing to herself, Vicki hooked the radio back on her hip and turned her attention to rescuing her own little portion of the set. With brutal care, she ripped the glued canvas from the wooden construction in front of her, laying it to one side in the hope that it might be salvageable, and ran her fingers over the pine blocks she had uncovered. None of them were damaged, which was a relief. Removing and reconstructing were never fun projects when your back was against the wall.

Setting to with her brush, Vicki slathered the pine in fresh glue and set about attaching the freshly prepared canvas to the wood, deliberately working wrinkles into the stiff cloth to approximate the roughened texture of stone that had been under attack from sand and the elements for centuries. That done, she pulled a photograph of the formerly completed set from her pocket, and with delicate attention, began to paint in the little details that would make it blend in with the rest of the set.

"Hey, not looking bad at all," a familiar voice spoke up from behind her, and she twisted, offering a grin to one of the many Scotts who made up the Production team. "Someone said something about booming stone?"

"Bounce up and down, you'll see what I mean," she told him with a grin. "That's your job. Aimee's having enough trouble staying on target as it is without the set breaking her focus."

Steel-toed boots certainly made a louder boom than Vicki's softer boots had done, but then, this Scott was a lot sturdier than she was anyway. He snorted with laughter at the thought of what this could do to the delicate Ms. Savage's creative process, and turned away, shouting instructions to the three guys he'd brought across with him from the design studio.

Leaning back, Vicki surveyed her work with a critical eye. Even though it would only be in short for less than a second or two, she refused to give anything but the very best quality, having heard time and again how a good set made the process easier for the actors. And the easier the actors found it, the better the performance.

"Hey, can someone throw me a mister?" she called, and almost immediately was clonked on the head with one by some obliging fellow nearby who chose to hide straight after throwing.

Grumbling to herself, Vicki sprayed her handiwork with a fine mist of glue, picking up a handful to sand from the floor on which she sat to blow it over her reconstructed stone block. Once, twice ... and her little part of the work effort was complete. Give it an hour to dry, and Lelah would never realise what had happened.

Give the whole set another two hours, and no one was ever going to admit to the director/owner/producer/spawn-of-Satan-on-a-bad-da y that anything had possibly gone wrong in the construction of this set. Ever.