Re: More Good Things
I was nervous about agreeing to design this show...I mean, right away you have the almost insurmountable task of trying to find period-appropriate firearms (that will actually fire blanks!) for nine characters, from the 1860's to the 1980's (luckily, it's only one or two per era, and not all nine in the different eras together...) But it's a show that's intrigued me since I first heard about it, and friends of mine run the theater company producing it, so...I caved, and said yes.
Went home after the first production meeting and started looking for rental options, and the VERY first place I checked out had a couple of pages dedicated, specifically, to listing prop weapons for this same show! And they had options in stock (not great options, but better than I'd be likely to find anywhere else at the budget level I've been asked to work with!) So, feeling reassured, I pressed on. Started getting nervous about some other very specific stuff...like a 70's-vintage Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket or cans of Tab soda. First two places I went (after ransacking my own inventory, which got me surprisingly far) had almost everything I needed.
And, thanks to the freelance writing job I started last month, when I was looking at the gun-rental place and noticing that I really didn't like a couple of the options they had available, I was able to find a place that had some good alternatives for sale...at a price I could afford. So, I'm expanding my own 'arsenal' by two blank-firing pistols, which I'm renting to the production for the same price that it would have cost to rent the sadly-inadequate-options from the other place (which will add up to be about a third of the purchase price!)
Stuff like this is why I feel so certain that I'm where I should be, doing what I should do...too often, really ridiculously large problems just kind of seem to evaporate as I wade into them. Makes up for those other occasions when I feel like I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails and just scraping by. I keep thinking I want to start my own production company...or, rather production design studio. Stuff like this just gets me that much closer...I've had a lot of that happen over this winter.